Table of contents for Teach Yourself Photoshop Elements 2 in Teach Yourself Photoshop Elements

I n the days of analogue film cameras we were limited to shooting batches of 24 or 36 photos, depending on the size of our film roll. All the photos tended to get printed and many would end up in easy-to-access photo albums. In these digital days we have the problem of managing our ever-growing collection of digital photos, especially now that phones shoot high-quality shots. By default, digital photos that are imported to our computers tend to get stored chronologically in the Pictures directory. This means we can spend too much time scrolling through folders and sub-folders in search of a particular shot, especially if we're unsure when it was captured. Photoshop Elements' Organizer offers a host of tools to help you find favourite photos with ease, and even…

O n the previous two pages we looked at the various photo-fixing tools in the Expert mode's Toolbox and Tool Options. You can also edit a photo by combining various tools with the drop-down commands in the main menu bar at the top of the workspace. For example, you could use the Lasso tool to draw a selection marquee around a tree. You could then go to the Edit section of the main menu bar and click to open its options. By choosing the Copy option, you would copy the pixels within the selection marquee into your PC's clipboard. You could then choose Edit>Paste to create a duplicate of the selected pixels on a new layer. This technique is very similar to copying and pasting words in a word-processing package,…

It's likely that most of your photos will require a few post-production tweaks in Photoshop Elements to look their best, much as a traditional roll of film requires processing in a darkroom to get the most from the negatives. There are many reasons your shots may not turn out quite the way you hoped. Cameras struggle to reveal detail in contrasting lighting conditions, so some areas in a scene will be over- or underexposed. Cameras also struggle to balance the colour temperatures produced by different lighting conditions, so your shots may suffer from warm orange or cold blue colour casts. You may not have composed our shots in the right way, or failed to spot a distracting object at the edge of the frame. Photoshop Elements is packed with image-editing…

In the first two chapters we showed how to import photos from hard drive folders and memory cards into the Photoshop Elements Organizer. We touched on ways to start organising your images, such as placing them into themed albums. An even quicker way to sort out the gems from the duds is to assign star ratings to your photos as soon as you've imported them. You can then use the Ratings filter to make the Elements Organizer display high-rated shots, or shots that fall between a certain range. Here, we'll show you how to rate your favourite shots quickly, and demonstrate how the Ratings filter separates the wheat from the chaff. If you haven't already done so, you can copy our supplied project files into a folder on your computer's…

Over the previous pages we demonstrated how to tag photos according to who is in them (Add People) or where they were captured (Add Places). These tags enable you to search for shots by browsing through the pictures in the People or Places panels. You can also type a person's name into the Search field at the top right of the Organizer's workspace and reveal all photos tagged with that name. By placing a shot in an Album you also add a tag to it. The Organizer automatically attaches the People, Place and Album tags to a shot's metadata. This metadata also describes properties such as when the shot was taken, the camera model used and so on. When you share a photo via email, any tags will remain attached,…

On the previous pages we demonstrated how a histogram displays the range of tones (or levels) in an image. We then used the Auto Levels command to remap the washed-out shadows of an overexposed image to the darkest level of 0. This created a shot with a healthier spread of shadows, midtones and highlights. Sometimes the Auto Levels command won't produce the desired results. You may want to see more midtone detail or create dramatic black shadows, for example. Here's how to manually make tonal adjustments using the shadow, midtone and highlight controlling sliders in the Levels dialog. You'll then be able to take total control over tones. 1 Open the Levels command If you followed the steps on the previous spread, press Cmd/Ctrl+Z to undo the effects of the…

Selections allow us to isolate parts of our images, making it easier to target, adjust or cut out those areas. When working with photographs, these areas are usually quite complex, so attempting to select them with basic selection tools such as the Lasso would take ages. This is where Element's advanced selection tools ­ Quick Selection and the Magic Wand ­ show their worth. They work by making selections based on similarities in colour and tone, so they excel at selecting large areas such as skies in just a few clicks. Here we'll show you how to adjust the Magic Wand so that it will select a sky without selecting similar coloured or toned pixels in other parts of the image. You`ll then be able to make a selective tonal…

The trouble with regular selection tools is that they act like a switch. Pixels are either selected or they're not, and this produces unnatural transitions and edge effects. What you need is a subtler, more intelligent tool to automatically identify the areas you want to keep and separate them from an unwanted background, while creating a smooth and natural-looking boundary around even the most complex and finely-divided details. That's what the Refine Selection Brush is designed to do. It was introduced with Elements 13 but it's been enhanced in Elements 14 and it's a useful alternative to the Refine Edge dialog. The Refine Selection Brush tool is designed to improve a selection you've already made ­ it's not designed for making selections from scratch. In our example, we've started off…

In the previous chapter we looked at how selection tools enable you to isolate parts of a picture so you can adjust colours and tones in the selected areas. Some tools (such as the Magic Wand tool) select similar pixels throughout the image. Others, such as the Quick Selection tool, enable you to select a subject as you paint over it. The Quick Selection tool is smart enough to recognise the difference between an object and its background, which makes it more effective for certain selection challenges (such as removing a person from a scene). In the Enhance section of the Toolbox you'll find a tool that can speed up your image retouching by combining the intelligence of the Quick Selection tool with the power of layers and blend modes…

When shooting popular landmarks such as St Paul's Cathedral in London, seen here, you're faced with the challenge of getting a clean photograph that's not partially obscured by passing tourists. You could try getting up early and heading to the location before the crowds start to throng, but that plan isn't always practical ­ especially if you fancy a lie in. Thanks to Photoshop Elements' Photomerge Scene Cleaner feature, you can create a people-free landmark shot with a little preparation on location and some postproduction retouching. By photographing several versions of the same scene over a short period of time, you should be able to capture a series of images in which sections of the landmark aren't obscured by people. You can then combine the clear sections of each photograph…

Camera shake is one of the biggest bugbears for photographers. It happens when the camera moves during the exposure, so it's closely tied to shutter speed. The slower the shutter speed, the greater the danger of shake. It's also related to the focal length of your lens ­ telephoto lenses magnify any shake to make it appear a whole lot worse.. You need to watch out for camera shake when you're shooting indoors or in low light, because this is when the camera will have to use a slower shutter speed. Normally, you'd counteract this by increasing the camera's ISO setting to force the shutter speed back up again, and that's what we should have done here. Instead, we used a low ISO which gave a shutter speed of just…

For more exciting skies in landscape images, you can fit a graduated neutral density (ND) filter over the camera's lens. This makes a dull sky look more dramatic as it becomes gradually darker towards the top of the frame. These camera-mounted filters can be effective, but you're stuck with the look that they produce. If the filter-produced gradient is in the wrong place then there's not much you can do to alter it. By replicating the graduated ND effect in Photoshop Elements, you can darken the sky's tones with complete control. We'll show you how to edit the mask of a Levels adjustment layer with the Gradient tool so that the darker tones get lighter towards the horizon. By editing a mask you can alter the strength and location of…

Once you've opened the image you want to work on in Quick mode, select the Effects tab at the bottom of the tools sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. The top item in Elements 14 is the Smart Looks category, and if you hover the mouse over this you'll see a disclosure arrow to the right ­ click this, and you'll see a selection of variations for that effect. All you have to do now is click on the one you like most and the effect is applied ­ there's nothing else for you to do! Adobe says that Elements automatically analyses the photo and generates five different image effects to suit it. This means you should get some genuine and interesting variations for each image ­…

If you're ever in need of inspiration for a Photoshop project, do a quick search for the latest film posters. They are often at the cutting edge of Photoshop design, merging photography with type, graphics and special effects. In this tutorial we'll show you how to get started with your own posters. As well as learning how to position images and words for a striking design, we'll also show you how to turn people into larger-than-life CGI-like characters with the Liquify filter. What's more, you'll learn how to use Layer Styles to give your type impact, and we'll even show you how to make a quick digital snowstorm. With these techniques you could make your own spoof posters with friends and family in the leading roles, complete with your own…

This surreal effect may look intricate and complicated, but merely by making use of the graphics and backgrounds that come with Elements, it's something that anybody can do, and on any portrait they like. We're using a simple graphic called Brass Leaves, which you'll find within the hundreds of graphics, frames and effects that come with Elements, in this tutorial. However, if you prefer, you could always use one of the other graphics. By duplicating and reshaping the leaves in different ways you can build up an entire bush. Once that's been done, all you have to do is duplicate the cut-out face we've provided and `clip' it to each layer, before applying a Drop Shadow Layer Style and changing the colours. To round things off, drop in a suitably…

On the previous pages we explored the Quick editing mode's Textures panel. This creative new tool provides us with a quick way to mix photos and textures together, but it only has a few textures to play with. As a result these preset textures are likely to pop up in lots of people's work. To make your textured images look more unique, capture your own textured surfaces such as pealing paintwork or crumbling brickwork. You can then use Photoshop Elements' Layers panel and its wide collection of blending modes to creatively combine your `found' textures with photographs of people or places to enhance them artistically. 1 Open the source images Open ty_elements15.jpg and ty_elements30.jpg. The shot of pealing paint has a lower resolution than our high-quality studio shot, so we'll…

Photoshop Elements' Quick, Guided and Expert editing modes are designed to help you edit JPEG images. JPEGs are files that have been processed in a camera to change their colour and tones according to various preset shooting modes (such as Landscape). By saving a photo as a JPEG your camera creates a small file that won't take up too much space on your memory card (or PC's hard drive). However, the downside of the JPEG format is that it's compressed. Much of the information about the colour and tone in a photo is lost. All that remains is a shorthand description of the scene. If you want to restore missing highlight or colour detail to a JPEG you may end up revealing compression artefacts. A clear summer sky in a…

On the previous pages we demonstrated how to remove a warm colour cast from our raw starting image (ty_elements29.dng) to create more natural-looking skin tones. It's worth working through that lesson first because it feeds directly into this one. When you adjust the colour balance of an image using tools such as the White Balance tool, you can alter its exposure, which is why it makes sense to remove colour casts before overcoming any exposurerelated problems that the shot already suffers from. It can be a challenge to capture a shot with detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights, especially when shooting a high-contrast scene. You may end up with over-exposed (or clipped) areas that feature no texture or detail (such as the sun-lit leaves in this image). We'll show…

W hen you're shooting a landscape with a handheld camera, it can be a challenge to get the horizon looking perfectly straight. This can result in a slightly tilted horizon (which can be as annoying as seeing a skewed picture frame hanging on a wall). If you're shooting with a tripod, but on a soft surface such as a sandy beach, then you may not notice the tilted horizon until you look at the image in the Camera Raw editor. In this walkthrough we'll show you how to straighten an image to counteract tilted horizons and crop it to improve composition. Cropping and straightening are part of the same operation, because you'll need to crop off edges created when rotating an image to lose its tilt. When you use the…

In the second part of our series on using lens filters we're going to show you how you can boost washed-out skies with the aid of a graduated neutral density filter, or ND grad for short. When you shoot landscapes, scenes will often have a greater contrast range than the camera can record. Typically, if you meter for the foreground, a bright sky will be overexposed, while if you meter for the sky, the darker foreground will be under-exposed, and this is where a graduated neutral density filter comes in handy. These filters gradate from transparent neutral grey to clear, and by positioning the dark part of the filter over the brightest part of the scene ­ usually the sky ­ you can reduce the amount of light reaching the…

C omposition can often be the most challenging aspect of taking a photograph, and in portrait photography we need to think hard about where to position the subject, how much `breathing space' we should leave around her, what should be in focus and so on. However, there's more potential for pushing the boundaries of how we frame portraits than with other subjects. The most striking images are often those that break the rules, so in this project we're going to be looking at how you can capture a more abstract style of portrait that goes against some of the conventions of composition, by coming in really close for maximum impact. You'll need a friend or family member who can model for you. Look for distinguishing features that you can accentuate,…

W hen you launch Photoshop Elements by clicking its icon you're presented with a welcome screen. One half of the screen gives you the option to jump to the Organizer, where you can import and organise your shots. The other half launches the Photo Editor. Don't worry too much about which option you choose, because you can switch between the Photo Editor and the Organizer by clicking the appropriate icon. As its name suggests, the Photo Editor is designed to help you fix common picture problems. Its tone-tweaking tools enable you to restore more detail to under- or overexposed shots. Its colour-correction tools allow you to counteract colour casts caused by incorrect camera White Balance settings. You can also tackle lens-related problems such as vignetted or curved edges. The Photo…

1 Import your photos Launch Photoshop Elements and click the Organizer section of the welcome screen. The Photoshop Elements Organizer will open. Go to the main menu bar and choose File>Get Photos and Videos. You can then choose an option such as From Files and Folders. Browse to the folder of photos that you want to import. Tick Get Photos From Subfolder, then click Get Media. This will import the selected photos into the Photoshop Elements Organizer. 2 Organise your shots The imported photos will be displayed in chronological order in a grid of thumbnails. To make specific images easier to find in the future, hold down Cmd/Ctrl and select their thumbnails. Click the green + icon in the Local Albums section to create a new album containing the selected…

On the previous page we demonstrated how to find favourite files more easily by adding star ratings and then filtering the results. This is a fairly general way to organise your shots. You can organise your photos in a more specific way by tagging images according to who is in each picture. This is a particularly handy feature because many of your photos are likely to feature friends and family members. To help you tag people in your images, Elements is capable of searching through its library of images and presenting you with any people pictures that it can find. You can then tell the software who each face belongs to, and it will create an appropriate people tag for that particular person. You can then sort your people tags…

When you click on the Organizer's Media panel it displays your most recently shot photos at the top of the workspace, so you need to scroll down to find older photos. You can click the Sort By drop-down menu and get the oldest shots to appear at the top if you prefer. You can tag shots according to the place that they were captured or the people that they feature, but most of us are still likely to browse through our pictures according to when they were shot. To help us do this more effectively, the Organizer provides us with a time-based Events tab. Elements knows when a shot has been snapped by reading that information in its metadata. This metadata can provide various ways to speed up your photo-organising…

One of the most effective ways to improve images straight out of the camera is to enhance the colour and tones. This might be because the colours recorded by your camera look slightly wrong, or it could be that you want to apply a visual effect. When we look at a scene with the naked eye, we tend to perceive the correct colours in most lighting conditions. A camera, however, needs help to capture a subject's true colours. This is because different light sources have a different colour temperature. To your camera, daylight has a blue tint, while indoor light sources such as tungsten bulbs have an orange tint. Cameras try to avoid capturing tints by using Auto White Balance (AWB). But sometimes the AWB function doesn't work effectively, so…

Y ou can change the mood of a shot by adjusting its colours and tones in a variety of creative ways. For example, by replacing the original colours of a photo with a wash of sepia, you can mimic vintage printing techniques and give a modern photo a vintage vibe. This is a great way of enhancing wedding snaps. A blue tint and clipped black shadows will add a mysterious and menacing mood to the same shot. Photoshop Elements is packed full of tools and commands that enable you to quickly and easily change the mood of a photo by creatively tweaking its colours and tones, as you'll see in the tutorial below. 1 Add a tint Open ty_elements09.jpg. Choose Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation. By ticking the Colorize box in the…

Many photo-fixing tasks involve making selections. You may need to select a specific region such as a bland sky so that you can replace it with something more exciting, or simply adjust the sky's over-exposed tones without altering the correctly exposed landscape. Alternatively, you may want to select a person from one shot and composite them into another to produce more creative results. As you've seen from this chapter, the Toolbox compartments are crammed full of selection tools, from the primitive Lasso to the more intelligent Quick Selection tool. All of these tools produce a selection marquee ­ a line of animated dashes that defines the shape of the selected area. After making a selection you may find that the marquee doesn't include the entire subject, and it may also…

Element's Photomerge Compose command provides a guided walkthrough that explains each stage of the photo-merging process. To begin with, we use Quick Selection to isolate the object we want to extract from its original background. Once the selection is done, the command places the object on another layer, allowing you to position it exactly where you'd like. It also offers a feature to Auto Match the tones, but don't bother using it. Apart from the fact that it doesn't do a very good job of matching tones, it also pixellates your cut-out image and severely lowers the quality. Luckily, colour matching is easily done once Photomerge Compose is complete, and other tools such as Levels offer greater control anyhow. Once the images are combined, it can help to add an…

Unlike Photoshop where you can convert your image to black and white using an adjustment layer or the Grayscale tab in Camera Raw, Photoshop Elements doesn't have these options. The biggest benefit of using an adjustment layer is that you can individually tweak the colours in the image, giving you far more control over the final outcome. Adjustment layers are also a useful non-destructive editing technique that you can return to later on, and keep adjusting. The basic way to convert your image to black and white in Elements is to go to Enhance>Convert to Black and White. This is a good feature, but you're limited in what you can do. For starters the feature only works by applying the effect to a layer (not an adjustment layer), and in…

Before they have a photograph taken, the subject of a portrait shoot will want to look her best. This may involve brushing her hair and applying make-up to create the appearance of healthier looking features. Despite the personal grooming, the end photographic result may be disappointing. Your model could be having a bad skin day and be unable to successfully conceal a spot, for example. A decent lens and flash lighting can reveal every skin pore, which may not be particularly flattering for your subject's complexion. Professional photographers can place filters over the camera's lens to add a healthy glow to the subject's skin and give it a smoother, more flattering appearance. We can produce similar results using a range of tools and commands in Photoshop Elements. The Guided editing…

On the previous pages we demonstrated how to enhance a sky by gradually darkening the tones and saturating the colours towards the top of the frame. That technique works well if there are lots of colours and tones to work with, but if the sky of your photograph is simply a mass of overcast clouds then it will be too bland and featureless to enhance using a gradated adjustment layer. If an object such as a tall tree overlaps the sky in the top of the frame then the gradient layer will darken this also, which would spoil the image. A cloudy sky can add mood and drama to a photo if it has enough variety and texture. However, when shooting landscapes, you may end up with blown-out skies that…

Retro effects are very much in vogue at the moment. It seems that, with modern cameras offering us crystal-clear picture quality, the appeal of analogue imperfections have gone through the roof. Those little errors can make pictures seem so much more individual. There are lots of ways to give your images an aged look in Photoshop Elements, and while it takes a little longer than it does with instant smartphone apps, the results are far more unique. In this tutorial we'll show you how to rough up a brand new image by adding a grubby border and dirty texture. We'll also mimic the effects of a light leak by adding orange colouring, giving the impression that light has seeped through the gaps in a cheap camera body to fog the…

Some Photoshop `special effects' can look a little generic, particularly if, like filters, they're simply slapped on top of an image. One way to make effects stand out from the crowd is to have them interact with the figures or objects in your image, like these fantastic glowing lines. Curved lines aren't the easiest of shapes to make. Unfortunately, Photoshop Elements lacks the Pen tool found in its bigger brother Photoshop CC, so to get the curling, tapered line we'll need to use a combination of tools and filters, then to make the line glow we'll add a Layer Style effect. For simplicity, we'll make the lines against a plain background. Once we have a couple of different lines, we can begin adding them to the portrait. We won't need…

Sometimes the weather can be a photographer's perfect ally, creating beautiful light or dramatic skies. However, at other times you can arrive at a scene only to find the atmosphere isn't quite what you wanted. There's no substitute for capturing real-life weather in all its glory, but if you haven't got the time to wait for the perfect combination of light and clouds, it's possible to change the atmosphere of a scene using Photoshop Elements. In the starting image, the bright sunny day doesn't really suit the mood of the stark Welsh castle and barren foreground, so we've blown in a few misty swirls of cloud and cooled down the colours. This is easier than it looks. Using a combination of the Clouds filter and the Smudge and Brush tools,…

Guided mode is one of the strongest features in Photoshop Elements because it guides you, step by step, through some of the tools you'll need to master in order to progress from a beginner to an image-editing expert. It fills the gap between novice and expert, and as you learn to create the different Guided image projects, you'll pick up key image-editing skills in a friendly, painless environment.. In Elements 14, though, Adobe redesigned the interface for the Guided mode. But although it looks very different at first, as soon as you've selected the Guided process you want to use, it reverts to the `old' layout, with your image displayed in the main window and a set of simple step by step processed displayed and explained in a panel on…

Back in the days of film cameras, we'd need to send our negatives off to be developed and then wait a while for them to be processed, printed and then posted back for us to enjoy. We'd then be able to share our holiday adventures with family and friends by passing the physical prints around. Thanks to digital cameras and camera phones we're shooting thousands more images than we did back in the days of analogue film. As a result we're less likely to share our photos as physical prints. Fortunately, Photoshop Elements provides a one-stop shop when it comes to organising, editing and sharing your images. The Share tab reflects the fact that in these digital days we're much more likely to share our photos electronically, via social networking…

When shooting with a traditional analogue camera, you could use film with different ISO speeds to help you capture more detail in low-light conditions. The faster (higher) the film's ISO speed, the more sensitive it would be to available light. A fast film enabled you to avoid using slow shutter speeds in low light, so you could capture detail without the need for a tripod. However, fast ISO speed film would add grain to your negatives. The higher the ISO speed, the grainer the shots would be. Digital cameras recreate the traditional ISO film speed effect to enable you to capture more detail in low light. As with film, high ISO settings (such as 1600) are more sensitive to light, but they will add more picture noise to your digital…

WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/pmz60video Shooting RAW files rather than JPEGs means you capture the image in its unprocessed state, so that instead of leaving the camera to carry out the processing you do the processing yourself later in Adobe Camera Raw. But the initial results can sometimes look a little flat and disappointing. This is because when Adobe Camera Raw opens the image it ignores any picture styles used by the camera applies a generic conversion profile with quite subdued colours and contrast. The solution lies in the Camera Calibration tab in the tools panel. If you check its drop-down Camera Profile menu you often find it displays a list of the camera's own picture styles. You won't see this for every camera model, but it's becoming more and more common.…

Capturing successful landscapes with a great tonal range can be challenging. In tricky lighting conditions your camera simply can't record all the shadow and highlight detail the naked eye can see in a single exposure. A popular solution is to take several exposures using a tripod, then combine them at the processing stage to create an HDR (high dynamic range) image. However, this technique can be time-consuming and HDR software has a tendency to `overcook' images ­ and we've all been guilty of leaving our tripods at home! So we're going to show you a simpler technique to make the whole process quicker. The secret is to process the same image twice to create two exposures that we can then combine in Photoshop using a combination of layers and layer…

Low-key portraits make the most of dark tones and shadows to create drama and atmosphere. Unlike high-key photography, which requires plenty of natural or artificial light, a low-key shoot requires very little. The backdrop needs to be mostly hidden in the shadows, while particular features on the subject are illuminated to make them stand out. This means that when you're shooting low-key portraits you don't need much in the way of lighting kit ­ a single flashgun mounted off-camera will be adequate. Some D-SLRs, such as the 60D, 600D and 7D, have an Integrated Speedlite Transmitter, which enables you to fire a compatible external flash via the camera's pop-up flash. If your camera doesn't have this feature you'll need a wireless flash trigger, which is mounted on your camera's hotshoe.…

Canon eoS 650D Canon eF 70-300mm f/4-5.6L iS uSM Aperture f/7.1 Shutter speed 1/800 sec Alex says "I visited the East Fortune Airshow in East Lothian in July to try out my new Canon EF 70-300 f/4-5.6L IS USM lens, its zoom range extended by my crop-factor 650D. I'd re-read the Masterclass on photographing aircraft from the September 2012 issue of PhotoPlus for some tips, and it was a really enjoyable day. However, it was hard work trying to keep up with the fast jets. I was a little envious of the photographers who had more advanced cameras with faster burst rates ­ it seemed to me that more frames per second and lots of luck were the keys to capturing the perfect shot! I was also a bit disappointed…

T raditional film photographers could use a host of darkroom tools to develop their negatives into prints. Some of these tools enabled them to change contrast. By placing a piece of card over part of the print they could selectively lighten (dodge) tones in that part of the photo. By cutting holes in card they could mask most of an already exposed image and let more light hit certain areas to darken (burn) details. Photoshop Elements is your digital darkroom, with its own collection of photo-fixing tools. Indeed, many of the tools in Elements share the names of their analogue predecessors, such as the Dodge and Burn tools. Most of the tools can be found in the Toolbox, located at the left of the Expert Editor's workspace. These tools enable…

Modern memory cards (such as a 16GB SD card) can store a huge number of photos, especially if you tend to shoot in JPEG format. This means that hundreds of your precious pictures may only exist on a small piece of plastic that's very easy to misplace. To protect your irreplaceable pictures you should import them from the memory card into the safety of the Photoshop Elements Organizer as soon as you return from a shoot. In the following walkthrough we'll show you how to set up the Organizer's Photo Downloader to copy your shots into folders on your PC and display them in the Organizer. You can launch the Photo Downloader from the File menu, and it can also import pictures from files and folders already on your hard…

Most people would probably prefer to spend more time taking photographs than editing them. For this reason Photoshop Elements' editing modes are crammed full of menu commands that are designed to automatically enhance your shots with the minimum of time and effort on your part. The automatic enhancement commands are designed to overcome common photo problems with a few clicks. For example, some shots will be over- or under-exposed, or simply suffer from flat contrast. Photoshop Elements can quickly analyse the tones (or `levels') in a shot and then attempt to adjust them to create a healthier spread of shadows, midtones and highlights. You're also likely to encounter problems with colour. You may have used an inappropriate Picture Style setting in your camera, resulting in drab, desaturated colours. Your camera's…

After travelling abroad it used to be traditional practice to print your holiday snaps and store them in an album. Indeed, you can create holiday albums in the Elements Organizer with ease, and browse through them at your leisure. The Organizer's Places panel provides you with a fun alternative way to see your pictures according to where they were shot. When you shoot a snap on your smart phone, the software records the location of the shot using GPS (the satellite-based global positioning system). Then, when you import them into the Elements 14 Organizer, it can show you their location in the Places panel. You can see a map and flagged locations, and you can click to see any photos shot there. This is a useful new function in Photoshop…

In chapter 2 we showed how Photoshop Elements' automatic enhancement commands enable you to fix exposure problems with a click. Commands such as Auto Levels work their tone-tweaking magic by reading and adjusting a photograph's histogram. A histogram is an undulating graph that shows the spread and strength of the shadows, midtones and highlights in a particular shot (much like a medical chart can tell a doctor about the health of a patient). The histogram of a correctly exposed photo will display a graph that spreads from the far left (where the shadows are represented) to the far right (where the highlights are represented). The concept of histograms may sound a bit daunting, but they're the key to overcoming exposure-related problems. We explain how to read histograms below, and then…

Most of the tools and menu commands in Photoshop Elements change the colours and tones in the entire image, or enable you to copy and paste every pixel, for example. However, you may want to perform more selective adjustments on particular areas, and this calls for the services of the Marquee tools. A marquee is a straight or curved line made up of animated black and white dashes (which are often referred to as `marching ants'). Think of a marquee as a fence that isolates the pixels within it from the rest of the image. You can copy the selected pixels or change their colour or tone, without altering pixels that fall outside the selection marquee. The Elliptical and Rectangular Marquee tools share a compartment in the Select section of…

One of the great things about digital imaging is the ability it gives you to combine several images. Master a few simple compositing skills and you can transport subjects to distant destinations or build a group photo from several people who've never met. But to make a composite look convincing you need accurate cutouts. When cutting out people, the most problematic part is usually the hair, where the background often shows through the gaps. Luckily, there are a couple of Photoshop tools that can do much of the work for you. Introduced in Elements 11, Refine Edge is the most powerful tool for making cutouts that Adobe has ever produced. It's not a selection tool, but a command that enables you to improve an existing selection by, as the name…

Photoshop Elements' image-adjusting tools and commands are great for overcoming camerarelated problems, which is just as well, because most photos will benefit from a little postproduction tweaking to improve colour and tone. Unlike the human eye, the camera isn't adept at dealing with highcontrast scenes. For example, when shooting a landscape, your camera may struggle to get a balanced exposure due to the contrast between the bright sky and the ground. Its auto metering mode may set the aperture and shutter speed to capture detail in the darker ground, but this will cause the highlights in the sky to over-expose and lose detail. If the camera tries to capture bright sky detail, it can turn the landscape into an under-exposed silhouette. Elements' main menu has a handy Enhance section that…

Elements 13 has three new guided edits that allow you to make all, or part of your image black and white. They're called `B&W Colour Pop', `Black and White Selection' and `Black and White', and they're found within the Guided mode under the Photo Effects panel. The first option, B&W Colour Pop, enables you to leave part of an image colour while the rest is changed to black and white. It's ideal if you have a block of colour in your image that you want to preserve, such as the little boy's T-shirt here. However, it only lets you preserve a single colour. If you want to `pop' more than one colour in the image, then the Black and White Selection edit is the better choice. It enables you to…

When we take a photo, we may not realise that the camera was rotated at a slight angle until we look at the image on the computer screen. A rotated camera causes horizons to tilt. As you can see in the starting image, the horizon rises from left to right at a slight angle. Tilted horizons aren't so noticeable if you're shooting a landscape with rolling hills, but in the case of a seascape, any tilt on the horizon will stand out. You could try capturing straight horizons by mounting the camera on a tripod, but this is time-consuming and still no guarantee that the shot will be tilt free, especially if the tripod is resting on an uneven surface such as a pebble beach. Fortunately, Photoshop Elements enables you…

Y You often get distant haze in landscape shots. It happens when there's dust or moisture in the air, and increases with distance. It's sometimes called `aerial perspective' and can be a useful creative effect, but much of the time it's an annoyance because the spectacular backdrop we thought we were going to get comes out looking unexpectedly flat. Which is where the new Remove Haze option in Elements 14 comes in. It's designed to restore contrast and colour to distant hazy views, but without affecting objects in the foreground. It's billed as a tool for enhancing landscapes, since this is where you're most likely to notice the effects of haze on contrast, but we're using it here to restore detail to a weak and hazy sky. 1 Where to…

For the majority of this book we've looked at how to use Photoshop Elements to enhance the colours and tones of photos, enabling you to produce natural colours and a healthy range of tones that feature detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights. Our earlier chapters focused on overcoming common problems such as colour casts, incorrect exposure settings and poor composition. In this chapter we'll have a bit more fun by applying a host of creative effects to our photos. Thanks to Photoshop Elements' filters you can stylise the colours and tones of a photograph to produce a wide range of creative looks, from pencil sketches to oil paintings. To help you find suitable creative effects, the Filter menu groups filters in folders such as Artistic and Brush Strokes. In…

We may think of watercolour painting as strictly for hobbyists and landscape enthusiasts with bags of hand-to-eye coordination, but before photography came along, watercolours were used for all kinds of practical tasks. The portability and relative speed of the painting made it useful for recording eyewitness likenesses, new specimens and even battle scenes. Watercolours are created with water-soluble pigment paints. These run into one another to create a mix of colours and shapes. The effect is fairly easy to recreate in Photoshop Elements using Camera Raw, filters and some simple brushwork. We'll start with a novel use for Camera Raw's noise reduction controls to give our starting image a smooth, smudgy finish. Then we can use the Glowing Edges filter to add a faint pencil sketch effect. To give it…

In this chapter we've looked at ways to produce more creative images by applying filters to photographs. This enables us to produce a wide range of looks, from sketches and paintings to in-camera effects such as zoom bursts. You can also change the mood and look of a photo by mixing it with a texture. This combination of photo and texture can create a grungy poster look, or a stylised album cover effect. You can combine photographs of textures (such as peeling paint) with your shots in a host of creative ways, courtesy of a layer blending mode. We'll look at these in more detail overleaf, but we'll kick off by showing you quick ways to add creative textures. 1 Go to the Quick editing mode Open ty_elements15.jpg. The bland…

One way to make your photographs stand out from the crowd is to add a decorative border to them. This makes a shot look special. If you click the fx icon at the bottom of the Expert editing mode workspace, you can then click the Effects panel. This panel's drop-down menu gives you the option to choose Frame effects. This enables you to apply one of three frame effects to your shot by dragging and dropping. Photoshop Elements also has a Frames panel in the Quick editing mode workspace. Here you can scroll through artistic borders and decorative frames and then apply them to your picture with a few clicks. We'll show you how to access the new Frames in Photoshop Elements, and then describe how to paint your own…

Elements 13 introduced a new tool that makes it very easy to create Facebook cover layouts, simplifying the process of resizing images and fitting them into specific layouts. These can then be uploaded to your Facebook page with a couple of clicks. There are a range of themes to choose from, with options to add more or fewer images as well as graphics and type. Here we'll show you how to create your own custom cover. If you want to make a layout like the one shown here then you'll need two images. Other themes will require more or fewer. We'll start by adding our images to the `Clean' theme, then go on to add words to the design. And just for fun, we'll create a simple clipping mask by…

To a camera, daylight is blue and indoor light is orange. When shooting in various lighting conditions a camera's Auto White balance (AWB) setting attempts to get white details in the scene looking white. If the camera balances the whites correctly then the resulting photograph will be tint-free and display the true colours of the scene. However, sometimes a photo will still look too cold or too warm (as is the case in the starting file for this tutorial). In chapter 4 we demonstrated how to correct colour casts in compressed JPEG files. This can involve using an eyedropper to sample areas that should be a neutral white. If the sampled white is tinted blue then the eyedropper will warm it up to make the white look white. This will…

Once you've followed the steps on the previous pages to correct the colours of a raw file and improve its contrast, you can move on to sharpening. It can be a challenge to get your raw shots looking sharp for a variety of reasons. For starters, many digital cameras have a built-in filter that gently blurs the image to avoid producing moiré patterns in busy textures. This low-pass filter can also soften important details such as facial features and create a photo that lacks impact. If you shoot with a wide aperture such as f/2.8 then key details may blur due to the resulting shallow depth of field, especially if your subject is close-up. What looks nice and sharp on the camera's small LCD screen may turn out to look…

Those photographers who dislike high dynamic range (HDR) imaging complain of gaudy colours, haloed edges and overcooked tones. But by using HDR for black-and-white photography, you don't need to worry about unnatural colours, so you can concentrate on processing your images to take advantage of the increased dynamic range. The ability to tease out detail, enhance texture, and control the play of light and shade are all things that can lead to more punchy black-and-white images. If you're new to HDR and wondering how it works, it's very easy. You simply take several frames of the same scene while varying the exposure to record extra detail in the highlights and shadows. It's particularly useful for high-contrast scenes like the iconic Orbit sculpture in London's Olympic Park, where we shot our…

Water drops are an excellent subject to shoot with a macro setup, and they look particularly attractive on flowers. For this photo shoot we visited the National Botanic Garden of Wales. It was a dry day, so in order to create the `raindrops' we supplied our own water, using a fine mist spray bottle. This is a handy piece of kit to have for a macro shoot, because water droplets add a touch of sparkle to just about any subject, from insects and spiders' webs to abstract still-life subjects. The secret to capturing successful shots like this is to find the right flower. The yellow-orange stamens against the blue petals of our subject created a striking effect. It also helps to shoot on a calm day with no breeze, to…

Photo Critique 01 The image is nicely composed, and the all-important eye is perfectly sharp 02 The shot is well-exposed to capture detail from the dark eye to the highlights 03 The background object in the bottom-right of the frame is a little bit distracting Canon eoS 7D Canon eF 100mm f/2.8L iS uSM Macro Aperture f/14 Shutter speed 1/160 sec Paul says "I recently won a day-long photography workshop with Wild Arena at Knowsley Safari Park, near Liverpool. Canon made a range of equipment available for the winners to try, including the EOS 6D, 5D and 1D X. The morning was spent driving around the park using telephoto lenses, and I got to try out the EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Extender 1.4x and EF 500mm f/4L IS USM.…