• Bytes: a summer byte
  Take your digital camera on vacation — and create a cool collage with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements.
• Bits: traveling with technology
  Taking your digital camera with you? Read some great tips.

Step two:
Be sure to take plenty of pictures of rocks, skies, brick patterns, historic buildings, flowers, animals or whatever images relate to your teaching specialty. Create file folders on your hard drive and begin to place your summer shots into your selected category folders. These folders will become an excellent image library for your classroom in the fall. From these files you can also select images for your collage.

Step three: Open up Photoshop Elements. Create a new file like the one on the right. The following example uses a background color of 55% gray. Tip: You have to change the background swatch color at the bottom of the Toolbox before you open a new document.

Step four: Open up one of your travel digital images.				Step five: Now you will use the Magnetic Lasso Tool . Select the Magnetic Lasso Tool from the Toolbox. Check the Options Bar at the top of the Work Area for more Magnetic Lasso selections. Position the Magnetic Lasso on the subject you would like to cut out. Click around your subject until it is enclosed. Press Enter. Your subject should now be enclosed by moving dashes.

Step six: Next, select the Move Tool from the Toolbox. Place the Move Tool on the subject you have cut out with the Magnetic Lasso Tool. Now drag this image onto your gray background. Use the Move Tool to resize and position your image.

Step seven: Open another image and follow Bits 5-7. Continue adding as many images to your collage as you like.

Step eight: All that is left is to fine tune your collage. Use the Move Tool to create a bounding box around an image you would like to reposition. Choose Layer on the Menu Bar and select Arrange. Doing this will allow you to send images behind or in front of one another. Arrange them however you like. You can achieve a cool effect by changing the opacity of different images. Opacity refers to the range of transparency of an image. Some images are opaque (100% opacity) or not transparent at all. If you want to see through an image lower its opacity on the Layers palette. Change the contrast or brightness of an image by going to Menu > Enhance > Adjust Brightness/Contrast What a wonderful image for a story starter! We are sure you can come up with many more classroom uses. Have a great summer!

Bit two: Security at the Airport
It’s common knowledge that security at the airport has greatly increased. Make sure your laptop is available for inspection by airline security personnel. Pack your camera and laptop so you can easily produce them if requested. Laptops are always required to be taken out of the bag and run through the x-ray machine separately as a standard procedure at all US airports.

Bit three: Get Organized
Organizing the directories on your computer is an absolute necessity. Before you start saving files all over your hard drive, take the time to think about a logical way of saving them. Make sure to use easily understandable and recognizable filenames. Organization will absolutely save you time and anguish in the long run when you can quickly find the files you need and retrieve your data.

Bit four: Save Often
Make sure you are constantly saving your important files. Save your data in multiple places and backup regularly. The idea behind this is that you will always have your data in case of extreme circumstances such as theft (in the case of a laptop) or hard drive failure (for this reason, saving to two different spots on the same hard drive is NOT protecting your data). CD writers are very cheap, take the time to burn a copy of your data at least once a week.

Bit five: Panoramic Pictures
Photoshop Elements has a great new feature called Photomerge. You can find this option by choosing Menu>File>Create Photomerge. Photomerge allows you to piece together photos to capture large groups of people, architecture, scenery or anything else that would be impossible to shoot in just one photo frame. The main thing to remember is to stand at the same distance from your subject each time you take a picture. For example, take a shot and then just turn slightly and take another shot. Each frame should contain some part of the previous frame (this will help create a reference when you merge them together with Photoshop Elements). You will continue to do this until your entire subject has been captured. You can make great panoramic pictures, all the way to 360 degrees! Eventually you may be able to produce a “live” pan. Adobe suggests pictures should overlap 15-40% for Photomerge to look seamless. For now, just take groups of shots that you might want to Photomerge and we’ll show you step-by-step how to use this feature in an up coming column.