photoshop elements tips

7/28/2019 PHOTOSHOP Elements Tips

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Elements Tips & Tricks

Learn Adobe Photoshop Elements in a Day70

3. Elements allows you to adjust Levels instead of just

brightness.

Any image editing program allows you to adjust brightness, but

Adobe Photoshop Elements offers more precise ways to adjustand improve the tonal quality of the image. Youve just worked

with the Shadows/Highlights tool to bring out more visible

detail in an image, but there is also the Levels adjustment. This

can adjust the contrast in the middle range of grays in an image

without dramatically altering the shadows and highlights. Using

a combination of theShadows/Highlights andLevels tools

gives you the most precise control for adjusting the tonal values

of your images.

The three sliders in the Levels diagram adjust the darkest, lightest and mid-tone pixels in the

image. Generally speaking, you drag the shadows and highlights triangles under the Input graph

slightly towards the center (to the edges of the mountain) to improve the levels.

4. Sharpen by Unsharpening

Almost any scanned image can benefit from a bit of sharpening. Sharpening cleans up the boundaries

between colors to make things appear in sharper focus. Surprisingly, sharpening is best done in

Elements and Photoshop using the UnsharpMaskfilter. Beware, a little bit of sharpening goes a long

way.

Here are general guidelines that work well on most images. Choose

Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. In the dialog box set theAmountto between 50% and 150%, set the

Radius to between 1 and 2 and set the Thresholdto between 3 and 20 (the higherthe Threshold

number, the lessintense the effect is).

Here's a magic formula which works well for many images:

Amount85% Radius1 pixel Threshold4 levels

For pictures of people try:

Amount150% Radius1 pixel Threshold10 levels

Click thePreview box in the dialog box off and on to see the effect. TheSharpen setting in the Quick

Fixmode also applies the Unsharp Mask.


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Learn Adobe Photoshop Elements in a Day 71

Original With Unsharpen Mask

5. Turn down the Noise

When your shooting in a low light situation or at a high ISO its common to get pictures that look

grainy or pixilated. This is called noise in the world of digital

photography. The better the digital camera the less noise youll have

to deal with. Camera phones and PDAs often take noisy images.

No program can remove all of the noise but Elements does a

pretty good job. Select Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise. The default

settings often work well, but if you need a bit more power try

dragging theReduce Color Noise slider up to 25% or so.

6. Come closer no really closer!

Zoom way in to do detail work (such as cleaning up red-eye). Get

used to coming way in to work on your image, right to the pixel

level. In Elements, you can do this via the Navigatorpalette, the

Zoom tool, or using Control + and Control - as keyboard

shortcuts (Command + and - for the Mac). Holding down the

Spacebarlets you scroll around in the image.


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7. Give yourself credit

Create a credit file with the copyright symbol, your

name, and date on a transparent background. You can

quickly superimpose this on images you might distribute.Now your work will be automatically protected by copyright. You could also scan your signature.

You can create the copyright symbol in most Windows programs (but not Elements) by pressing Alt-

control-c; on the Mac use Option-c. In Elements you can type inAltand 0169. If you would like to

display your copyright info right over a picture, select the layer your text is on and apply the Clear

Emboss effect to it.

You can also embed or inspect copyright information into a files metadata by selecting

File>File Info and entering in data in the Copyright Status and Copyright Notice boxes.

8. When it comes to file formats, stay the course.

Don't save your image in a different file format (other than

PSD) until you have finished editing it. Each time you

compress a JPEG image you lose detail. Repeatedly doing this

really degrades your image. Also, when you save your images

in other formats, you usually combine (flatten) the layers, thus

losing the ability to edit on separate layers.

9. Lose the color.

It used to be that some art galleries would only display black

and white photos because they seemed more like art. While I

wouldnt take it that far, black and white or duotone images

can be striking.

To make a picture look antique, you can convert it to black

and white (Image>Mode>Grayscale) . Another effectivedevice is to use duotone effects such as sepia tone or blue and

white.Enhance>Adjust Color>Remove Colorand then select

Enhance>Adjust Color>Color Variations. After using either

method, you could use Filter>Noise>Add Noise to make the

image look old and grainy.


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10. The secret to cool text effects in Photoshop and Elements

Elements keeps text on a separate layer, which

allows you to edit the text, but does not allow youto apply filters or any other effects to the text.

There's a way around this. Select all or a portion

of the text layer with any selection tool. Choose

Layer>Simplify Layer. You will no longer be able

to edit the text, but you can apply filters to it. Give

it a try! If you forget this, Elements will usually

remind you of this when you try to apply a filter to

text. Simplifying a layer also makes it a bitmap so

that the font does not have to be installed on

another computer for it to display correctly.

11. Another way to select irregularly-shaped areas.

Selecting objects with thin or irregular edges can be tricky. PhotoshopsMagnetic Lasso tool can

help some, but here's another approach. Select the area around the object (using the Magic Wandtool

or other selection tool) and then chooseSelect>Inverse to select the object.

12. Fixing a background.

There are at least three good ways to edit the background (perhaps to cover up lines or other

distractions). Sample the background color by using theEyedroppertool then select a soft-edged

brush and paint over the unwanted portions. Or, you can use theHealing Brush orClone Stamp tools

to reproduce one part of the background over the offending area. But, here's my favorite: make a

patch. Select a good portion of the background with the Rectangle Selection tool. UseEdit>Copy and

Edit>Paste to reproduce this area and then drag it into place. You may need to paste several times to

cover up the area. You can use theSmudge tool to soften any hard edges.


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13. Make your own textures.

Scan in fabrics or other objects with patterns on them to use as textures for backgrounds. To create

textures digitally, use theBlur, Noise, Pixelate, or other filters to create abstract textures. Save yourtextures in a folder and use them to fill in backgrounds for buttons or other elements.

To give your image the appearance that its printed on some textured material you can use the

Texturizer command. Select Filter>Texture>Texturizerand experiment with the settings.

14. Be ready to Edit>Undo.

As soon as you make a mistake, select Edit>Undo. If you do

another command and then want to change an earlier move,

use the Undo History palette to go back one step at a time. You

can useEdit>Revert to Savedto go to the last saved version of

the file. Save your work immediately before you make a

radical change to your image and also just before you print.

Sometimes you won't be able to undo a mistake and sometimes

the computer might freeze. Elements does not have an

automatic backup feature.


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15. Save to your hard drive.

Digital pictures are big files. If you run out of room on a disk in the middle of a save you can lose

your work. Don't take chances. Save to your hard drive, and then copy the file to a Zip disk, CD-R,USB drive or other removable storage system.

16. More RAM = happy camper.

Image editing programs are memory hogs. In Photoshop you actually have three copies of each file

open while you are working on it - one for saving, one for "undo-ing," and one for previews. If you

have plenty of memory, you won't run into those nasty "out of memory" error messages. And, having

lots of memory speeds up the operation of your software. Elements needs at least 256 MB of RAM to

run efficiently, but really wants 512 MB or more.

17. Warp factor five -- speeding up filters.

When you're trying out a filter or a new technique, select just a portion of the image to try it on. This

will greatly speed up the processing of the effect. When you've figured it out, undo the filter and then

try it on the whole image or you can use the Filter Gallery feature to get quick previews.

18. Use filters conservatively.

Although you may be tempted to use all kinds of wild effects in your image editing, it soon gets tiring

for the viewer and can get in the way of the message. Most of the time, just use subtle effects, set the

values low in your filter settings and don't apply too many filters.

19. Nudge a selection.

In Elements, once you've made a selection and have the move tool selected, you can move the

selection a few pixels at a time using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Try it.


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20. Use the Hand tool to scroll through an image.

Instead of scrolling around your image with the scroll bars or arrow keys,

press the spacebar on the keyboard, and then hold the mouse button down.

You can now drag your image around in the window.

21. Use How To Topics.

Elements helps beginners by providing guided how to recipes. But

even experienced users can benefit by using them. They include

several techniques that can't be easily done anywhere else in the

program (such as creating a Web animation) or they can automate a

complicated process (such as restoring a faded photo). At other times

though, it will be faster and more flexible to do the technique via the

menus. With experience, you'll learn when to use each approach.

22. Lighten up.

Pictures tend to darken a little when printed, so you might want to adjust your image's brightness so itlooks a little too light on screen. Try some test prints to experiment with this.

23. Record your settings.

As you work with your image editing software, write down some of the settings that you successfully

use for altering or adjusting your images. Then you can reuse these values with other images to

achieve consistent results. In Photoshop, but not Elements, you can save many of your settings (such

as for brightness and contrast) and re-load them in later.

24. Increase saturation for brighter brights.

We've gotten used to really pumped-up colors from traditional photo processing. If you like this kind

of color, you can increase the saturation in your images for brighter colors; choose Enhance>Adjust

Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation to make this adjustment. For more natural or muted colors, decreasesaturation.


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25. A trick for instant frames.

Elements has a neat little trick for

putting a border around your

image; you can even choose whatcolor frame you want. First, select

the entire image (Control A or

Command A), then choose

Edit>Stroke (Outline) Selection.

Choose a color and width for your

border. ClickOK. Easy!

A drop shadow makes your photo

look like it's floating on a canvas.

It's really easy to add one in

Elements. Display theEffects

palette. Choose Frames from the drop down menu. Drag theDropShadow effect on to your image and watch the magic happen. You can undo that effect and

experiment with some other frames.

26. Removing dust and scratches is not perfect.

You've probably heard the hype

that digital imaging can

automatically get rid of

scratches and imperfections in apicture. Well, in Elements that

comes at a cost. The remove

dust and scratches filter (Filters>Noise>Dust/Scratches ) works by

blurring the bad pixels in with the good ones next to them, but in

the process it makes the whole image a bit blurry. So, to do this

correctly, first select a rectangular area just around the defect, and

then use the filter. You'll want to set the Radius and Threshold

values pretty low so as not to affect too many neighboring pixels.

You can also try using the Healing Brush for this type of fix.


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28. For a sharper foreground, blur the background.

The human eye plays all kinds of tricks on the brain. Technically, no image-editing program can

restore focus to an out of focus picture. But it can create the illusion of sharper focus. You've

probably already used theSharpen filter, but here's a slight refinement. Select the background andapply a slight blur. A blurry background makes the foreground objects appear to be in sharper focus.

29. Power Methods of Copying and Pasting

Lets say you find an image on the Web and want to borrow it and modify it in Elements. How do

you proceed? There are several methods. The most common one is to right-clickon the image in your

web browser (Mac= Control-click) and then save the file. Now you can use File>Open within

Elements to edit it. Another way is to right-clickon the image and copy the image. Then in Elements

choose File>New File>From Clipboard. Images that you get from the web are often low resolution,so you will usually will not be able to make them larger or print them out well.

By the way if you want to use your Elements images in PowerPoint, Word, on the Web or in

other programs, its best to resize them in Elements rather than in the other programs. This is for two

reasons. First, Elements has a very sophisticated method for resizing. Second, just making the image

smaller in those other programs will not decrease their file size, whereas doing it in Elements will.

If all else fails theres another way to capture anything on your computer screen into

Elements, take a screen shot. To do this in Windows, just get whatever you want to capture displayed

on the screen and press the Print Screen key on your keyboard (Print Scrn). Switch to Elements and

select the good old File>New File>From Clipboardcommand. On a Macintosh you hold down

Command-Option-3 on the keyboard. This will make a PDF file on your desktop. Just use File>Openin Elements to then open that file. Once you are in Elements you will want to crop the image to get

rid of the extraneous stuff.

You might recall that in the tutorial we got fancy with the Paste Into command. You use this to fill

one area of an image with what youve copied from another. We filled the letters in the word book

with the actual picture of books, but you could also do this to fill an area with a texture. Simply select

an area in the first image and chooseEdit>Copy. Switch to the second image and select the area you

want filled and then chooseEdit>Paste Into.

The Elements tutorial, the tips in this chapter and the questions and answers in the previous chapter

should have given you a pretty good grounding in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Now you need

practice and experimentation to sharpen your skills.

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