PSE 15 and clipart

susana78076793 wrote: I have never worked with clipart. I have purchased PSE 15 and would like to learn. Where do I find tutorials for dummies??? {Moved to the Photoshop Elements Forum}

Good answers already to better understand cliparts and the tools to work with them.

Nancy OShea is right:

While I have Illustrator with my Creative Cloud plan, I sometimes use Inkscape over AI. Different tools for different tasks

Which requires to describe two different purposes:

- creating cliparts yourself (forget Elements for that. I don't use Illustrator, but I agree with the choice of Inkscape which is also a good companion to Elements).

- using cliparts in your creations, which is mainly when doing scrapbooking. You'll find a lot of resources in forums, tutorials or books  dedicated to scrapbooking.

It may be useful to state that Photoshop CC is also a pixel editor but it has more tools to work with vectors. It has a pen tools, it can use paths and AI (Illustrator) files among others.

Since we are dealing with Elements 15,let's see how it handles vectors.

- It can no longer import the AI or EPS vector formats. As mentioned by R_Kelly​, the pdf format is now the recommended format to store a clipart library for Elements. Unfortunately, Adobe dropped the support of pdf files in the PSE15 organizer.

- The two vector tool families in Elements are shapes and character fonts. It's possible to create vector art with only those tools; I would recommend the affordable add-on Elements+ which adds a number of vector tools from Photoshop (no pen tool...)

- Like Photoshop, Elements can have vector layers like shapes and text. They can be saved in psd or tiff format. Combining and editing shapes and text can be a lot of fun even without the full range of vector tools.

- Elements can output 'Photoshop pdf' format. It's a kind of package with a pdf file and a psd one... Let's say you have created a scrapbook or a book page with all kinds of layers. The Photoshop pdf format will be recognized by common pdf browsers. It will open in Elements just like a psd file with all layers. The penalty is the big file size. To save into the common and much smaller pdf format, the usual solution is to 'print' to a pdf printer (eg Microsoft Print to pdf) instead of 'saving'. If you are using Elements (or Photoshop) you can open any other pdf formats, but the import stage will transform the original vectors into bitmap (pixels).

Yes, that's too many details for your query, but that may help you a little later .

Just to add if you do open vector clipart in photoshop elements 15 it has to be in the pdf file format.

Adobe removed the ability to open eps and ai files into photoshop elements several versions ago.

Good quality clip art (drawings, cartoon characters, etc...) are most often developed in vector graphics apps like Illustrator to preserve sharpness and detail.    If you're serious about doing clip art, use a vector graphics app, don't use Photoshop Elements.  PSE is more suited for working with photographs and raster images (bitmaps).

Below is a fairly comprehensive video intro to Illustrator's Pen tool and some other finer points.

Convert a drawing into vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator - YouTube

Nancy

Google can help you find some there are some on youtube Adobe site.  There are also paid sites like Lynda.com

https://www.google.com/search?num=50&newwindow=1&q=PSE+15+tutorials+for+the+beginner&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwio0dG63_TRA…

Photoshop Elements beginners - YouTube

This is also the Photoshop Froum there is also Photoshop Elements