Hands On: Ten time-saving tips for editing images

There are better things to do than spend all your time sitting in front of a PC, particularly if you enjoy taking photographs or video - like getting out and taking photographs or video.

But with so many photos or footage, it's easy to become overwhelmed by the task of editing the torrent of digital imagery you are busy creating, so here are 10 ideas that might save you a few hours.

They work for me and, if you make a start now, you might save enough time to ‘Turn off computer’ for a few hours and make the most of the summer while it lasts.

1. Quick clip selection in Ulead Videostudio
One of the most time-consuming video-editing tasks is clip selection – deciding what gems to keep from the hours of footage on your tapes.

One approach is to capture everything, then edit out what you don’t want. This is better than sitting there watching the whole thing in real time, but Ulead Videostudio 9 ’s Quick Scan feature is like capturing in Fast Forward mode.

Quick Scan is the first step in Videostudio’s DV to DVD Wizard, which quickly runs through capture, editing and authoring, so you’ll be ready to watch your holiday movies before you’ve even unpacked.

2. Batch resizing in Adobe Photoshop
Whether you want to send them as an email attachment or upload to a photo-sharing service, it’s probably a good idea to downsample digital pictures first.

Since I’ve become a Flickr addict I’ve made a habit of downsizing all pictures to 800pixels wide (or tall) before uploading, in order to stretch my 20MB free account monthly upload limit as far as possible.

The difficult part of automatic image resizing lies in determining whether photos are landscape or portrait format. Using image size to reduce the width to 800pixels works fine for landscape photos, but portrait format ones will be 1,200pixels on the longest side.

The answer is to ignore image size and resize your photos using Fit Image in Photoshop , which you’ll find on the automate sub-menu of the File menu.

Fit Image allows you to specify a maximum for both the width and height pixel values. If you set both of these to, for example, 800, landscape images come out 800pixels wide, and portrait ones 800pixels tall.

3. Fast-track DVDs in Premiere Elements
Like Ulead Videostudio, Adobe Premiere Elements 2 users also have a fast track to DVD. In the capture panel, select the ‘More’ menu and make sure Scene Selection and Capture to Timeline are both selected.

Premiere Elements creates a new clip for each scene and places it on the timeline. Delete the clips you don’t want – the gaps are automatically deleted – then click the DVD button.

When Elements asks if you want to automatically create DVD scene markers, click yes. Now all you need to do is choose a template and burn your disc.

4. Rate pics in Adobe Photoshop Elements 4
The Photoshop Elements Organizer offers any number of ways for you to display and search for photos.

Display the timeline (Ctrl & L) and you can go to any date, or you can search for photos of your mum and dad in Brighton using tags.

But if you’re looking for a particular photo and can’t remember when you took it, and if you’ve never bothered adding tags, you have a problem that’s going to grow along with your digital photo library.

If you can’t bear the thought of going back through every digital photo you ever took and adding keyword tags, just give them a rating. This is easy to do and the time it takes will more than make up for the hours saved searching.

Display a folder of images in the Organizer’s Photo Browser and select the first thumbnail. Press Ctrl &1 to Ctrl &5 to give it a rating from one to five stars.

Then press the right arrow key to select the next image, rate it, and carry on through the whole folder.

Providing you’re quite decisive, it’ll only take a minute or two to do a folder. I’m not a terrible photographer, but 90 per cent of the pictures I take don’t score above two stars.

Given that it’s unlikely anything I’m looking for won’t be in that mediocre batch, by rating photos when I download them from a card I can eliminate them when I’m looking for something.

5. Quickly add transitions in Windows Movie Maker
In Microsoft Windows Movie Maker you can add transitions easily enough by dragging them from the contents pane and dropping them on the transition cells between two clips in the storyboard.

But if there are a lot of clips in your movie, this is a slow and tedious process.

The quick way to do it is to choose Select All from the Edit menu (or press Ctrl & A), then right-click the transition you want in the contents pane and choose Add to Storyboard. The selected transition will be added between every clip.