Portrait Photo Album not available in v10

Question

I'm beginning to wish I had not bought this software.  I want to create a portrait orientated photo album but only landscape and square options are available. SQUARE?  Who the heck would print a square album?
From searching the forum on this subject I see folks wanting this 6 years ago so Adobe have no intention of adding a portrait option to Photo Album.  Add this to the no 'sort by name' in Organizer and I wonder how Elements 10 gets the ratings it does.
Very disillusioned.
John

Answer 1

John,
One of the big advantages of PSE over many competitors is that you can take advantage of layers and layer masks. That's even a big plus over Lightroom, and the reason why many LR users also use Elements as a pixel editor after the main edits have been made in LR.
Creating a book is creating composite pages including various images and texts and finally providing the resulting pages in a format compatible with your printing provider or your home printer.
A photo book is not very different to any other illustrated book made by layout softwares such as Quark Express, InDesign or Scribus : the main accent is on the photos, less on the text. It is very common to provide either jpegs or pdfs to your provider.
Most of the providers I am working with in France call for jpegs. I am also very happy with viovio in the States, they can take either jpegs or pdfs. You'll also find a lot of info about making books and a variety of templates for layouts. What you'll notice is that most providers on the Web offer a wide choice of templates to create pleasant layouts. What you can do with the 'create' option in PSE cal also be done with most other suppliers. And you can create your own layouts with the normal 'full edit' view in PSE rather than the 'create' assistant.
Here are common steps when I am creating a book:
- writing a kind of scenario to have an idea of the different parts of the book and its number of pages
- using the Organizer to select the files, tagging, rating and finally creating one or several albums to help creating the pages
- searching files to create 'backgrounds' on which pictures and text will be superimposed. In this phase I may use gradients, textures, shapes...
- Composing pages is made by adding each picture or text element as individual layers, which you can resize and move at any time. You may use a variety of templates for this, but I prefer more freedom in the way I compose the page.
- Using layer styles like drop shadows for different layers, adding text effects (bevels...)
- saving each page as psd to keep all layers until the job is finished
- Depending on your provider's requirements, upload all your jpeg pages, or upload a multipage pdf.