Kevin,
You seem to have a couple queries … first opening in Elements once you have resaved them. Do you mean when you double click on them? … if so it is just the way it is set up.
If they are just in a folder, open the folder and single click on any image then do Apple>I … the information will come up and part way down there is a box that says open with. You can then change the program used to open images. You can also tell it to always open in that way .. so no need to change them all individually 🙂
Your second query about burning to a disk and then the firm you are using to print not being able to recognise them has me beat, but I don’t tend to use that system. I do know that several other Mac users on this forum do so hopefully one of them will be along soon.
Wendy
I tried reassigning the files to open with IPhoto, but for some reason it will not read the Adobe Photoshop JPEG files.
I’ve tried a couple of things for you and I think I understand what your problem is, at least as far as the opening of your files is concerned.
Saving a JPG in PE and then importing it into iPhoto works fine (also dragging and dropping into iPhoto. Note, "importing" — use the File -> Import… menu item to do this.
However, you can’t actually open a photo in iPhoto, so reassigning iPhoto as the application to open a photo doesn’t make a lot of sense — iPhoto is first and foremost a cataloguing application, after all, so when you "import" a photo, all you are really doing is creating a pointer to it (that’s how I look at it).
If you save your modified images to a separate folder, then you will have to import that folder into iPhoto (same way as for individual files, just select a folder) in order to catalogue its contents and have them available in that application.
(You can edit the photos directly with PE from within iPhoto by setting PE as the Double-click: Opens photo with… application…" in iPhoto’s "General" preferences, by the way.)
As for the inability of a photoprocessing computer to read the pics, I guess this is one of those machines that accept various media and allow you to print photos, after perhaps performing some editing. Logically, they should be capable of reading JPG files, but I’ve never tried the things, so don’t know how they work in practice. Try saving the photos using the Save for Web…" option — this should remove the resource information that might be confusing the machine.
Kevin,
I make no claim to understanding what is going on, but I do have two observations:
1) I think I speak for most of us on this forum when I say we only have the images in JPEG format on the first download from the camera and when we are going to export the image and it must be in JPEG format. Since JPEG is a lossy format, every time it is open and closed information is lost. PSD or TIFF (both non-lossy) are preferable for working in PSE 2 and then closing so image degradation does not occur during opening and closing. Is there a reason you are keeping the images as JPEGs?
2) If I understand your work path, the images are handled differently over and above the PSE 2 manipulation. The iPhoto images are directly transferred to external media then read in the photo processor. The PSE 2 images are transferred to a non-iPhoto file after PSE 2 then to the external media. If you handle them both the same way except for the PSE 2 do you get the same result? Do you get the same result with a printer connected to your computer or a friend’s computer? If this is a problem isolated to the processor you are using, we may not know enough about that processor to help.
Its an interesting problem. Please keep us informed.
Carl
Looks like this may be the solution to the problem. Follows somewhat along the lines of what David suggested. This is an excerpt from Jim Heid’s Mac Digital site.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Posted 11:11 AM
Tips for Using iPhoto with External Image Editors
As I discuss in The Macintosh iLife, iPhoto teams up nicely with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. If you never use iPhoto’s built-in editing features, you can use iPhoto’s Preferences command to automatically open an image in one these programs when you double-click it for editing. Or, if you divide your editing time between iPhoto and Photoshop, just do what I do: When you want to edit a photo in Photoshop, simply drag its iPhoto thumbnail image to the Photoshop icon in your dock.
When you finish editing an image in an external editor, iPhoto is supposed to update its version of the photo to match your edits. But for some wacky reason, this doesn’t always happen: iPhoto may continue to display the old version of the photo.
There’s a fix for this problem, but it’s a little bit convoluted. Here’s what to do:
1. After you’ve edited and saved the photo in Photoshop, return to iPhoto. Be sure the photo is still selected, then click iPhoto’s Edit button.
2. Use one of iPhoto’s editing tools to make some change to the photo. For example, use the Crop tool to do some cropping. Don’t worry about doing a great job — you’ll be undoing your work in the next step.
3. After making a change to the photo, choose Undo from iPhoto’s Edit menu.
4. Switch to iPhoto’s Organize mode by clicking the Organize button. Presto! The thumbnail should now reflect the edits you made in Photoshop.
As this Apple Knowledge Base article shows, this problem has been around since iPhoto 1.0. Here’s hoping Apple fixes it in a future version.
Kevin – that last post is really useful. While I don’t have problems with other applications opening or printing the jpegs I edit in Elements from iphoto, I have had problems with thumbnails not updating in iphoto 2 and in a couple of cases thumbnails corrupting so that they only appear as highly pixellated mages whatever size I chose (the actual image is OK in slide shows, it’s just the thumbnail not updating). This appears to solve the problem.
Carl – with iphoto it’s almost impossible to work in anything other than jpeg. You have to do silly work arounds like renaming psd files with a jpeg extension to get iphoto to recognise them as the same image. The saving grace of iphoto is that it always backs up the original jpeg so that if you want to do subsequent edits it is very easy just to revert to the original image and reedit that, rather than editing a already saved and edited jpeg (which I agree is a very bad move)
David – actually in iphoto (unlike many photo catalogueing programs) iphoto truly does import the original file – it doesn’t just create an alias it copies the imported file into its own directory. which is why iphoto libraries are so big… But other than that minor quibble, you are correct in what you say, I think.
Yes, sorry, iPhoto does make a copy of the original file. I meant something different (hence the "that’s how I look at it"): firstly, the thumbnail is not a reflection of the original file at all times (otherwise iPhoto would have to rebuild the thumbnails each time it was opened, if I understand its workings correctly — this explains the need to edit and undo, as described above by Kevin,; also, iPhoto does not then deal with the original, but with its own copy, hidden in its own file structure and a source of confusion for many.
When I found this in the first version, I looked around for what I considered to be a more elegant solution and found iView Media (and iView MediaPro), a cataloguing application that offers a number of advantages over iPhoto in the way it identifies images, its cataloguing options and its exporting options. It won’t suit everyone, especially those who use the album and slide-show with music options of iPhoto and its integration with other i-apps, but it might be worth looking at for its efficiency.
Carl
Correct me if I am wrong, it is my understanding that opening and closing a Jpeg does not alter the quality of the file – only when a change is made to that file does the quality suffer. If I use SAVE AS to rename an edited file, my original remains intact?
Regards
Cliff
