Adobe Photoshop Elements Learn & Support.One moment, please

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This is where you have access to all the Elements editing features. Quick Fix. For many Elements beginners, Quick Fix Figure ends up being their main workspace. Chapter 4 gives you all the details on using Quick Fix. Guided Edit. It provides step-by-step walkthroughs of popular projects such as cropping photos and removing blemishes from them. It also hosts some fun special effects and workflows for more advanced users see Special Effects in Guided Edit. Use the Full, Quick, and Guided tabs near the top right of the Elements window to switch modes.

To get rid of the lock and free up your image for Organizer projects, go back to the Editor and close the photo there. The Quick Fix window. When you first open the Editor, you may be dismayed at how cluttered it looks. You can leave everything the way it is if you like a cozy area with everything at hand. Or, if you want a Zen-like empty workspace with nothing visible but your photo, you can move, hide, and turn off almost everything.

Figure shows two different views of the same workspace. To do that, just press the Tab key; to bring everything back into view, press Tab again. Two different ways of working with the same images, panels, and tools.

You can use any arrangement that suits you. Top: The panels in the standard Elements arrangement, with the images in the regular tabbed view page Bottom: This image shows how you can customize your panels. Here, the Project bin has been combined with other floating panels and the whole group is collapsed to icons. The images here are in floating windows page If you have a small monitor, you may find it wastes too much desktop acreage, and in Elements you need all the working room you can get.

The downside of this technique is that you lose the ability to switch from Full to Quick to Guided Edit if you do this.

To get those navigation buttons back, you have to go back to the Window menu and turn the Panel bin on again. You can also combine panels, as shown in Figure ; this works with both panels in the bin and freestanding panels. Top: A full-sized panel. Bottom left: A panel collapsed by double-clicking where the cursor is.

Bottom right: The same panel collapsed to an icon by double-clicking the very top of it where the cursor is here. Double-click the top bar again to expand it. Top: Here, the Histogram panel is being pulled into, and combined with, the Layers panel.

You can also make a vertical panel group—where one panel appears above another—by letting go when you see a blue line at the bottom of the of the host panel, instead of an outline all the way around it as shown here.

To remove a panel from a group, simply drag it out of the group. If you want to return everything to how it looked when you first launched Elements, click Reset Panels not visible here at the top of your screen. When you launch Elements for the first time, the Panel bin contains three panels: Layers, Content, and Effects. In addition to combining panels as shown in Figure , you can also collapse any group of panels into icons as shown in Figure To use an iconized panel, click its icon and it jumps out to the side of the group, full size.

To shrink it back to an icon, click its icon again. You can combine panels in the bin by dragging their icons onto each other. Then those panels open as a combined group, like the panels in Figure Clicking one of the icons in the group collapses the opened, grouped panels back to icons. You can also separate combined panels in icon view by dragging the icons away from each other.

In the Editor, the long narrow photo tray at the bottom of your screen is called the Project bin Figure It shows you what photos you have open, but it also does a lot more than that. The bin has two drop-down menus:. Here you see the bin three ways: as it normally appears top , as a floating panel bottom left , and collapsed to an icon bottom right. Show Open Files. If you send a bunch of photos over from the Organizer at once, you may think something went awry because no photo appears on your desktop or in the Project bin.

If you regularly keep lots of photos open and you have an iPad, check out the Adobe Nav app, which lets you sort through open photos in Elements, see info about your photos, and switch tools without using your mouse.

You can read more about Nav at www. Bin Actions. You can also use this menu to reset the style source images you use in the Style Match feature, explained on Merging Styles. The Project bin is useful, but if you have a small monitor, you may prefer to use the space it takes up for your editing work. The Project bin behaves just like any of the other panels, so you can drag it loose from the bottom of the screen and combine it with the other panels.

You can even collapse it to an icon or drag it into the Panel bin. If you combine it with other panels, the combined panel may be a little wider than it would be without the Project bin, although you can still collapse the combined group to icons. Older versions of Elements used floating windows, where each image appears in a separate window that you could drag around. Many people switch back and forth between floating and tabbed windows as they work, depending on which is most convenient.

All the things you can do with image windows—including how to switch between tabbed view and floating windows—are explained on Image Views. Because your view may vary, most of the illustrations in this book show only the image itself and the tool in use, without a window frame or tab boundary around it.

Elements gives you an amazing array of tools to use when working on your photos. You get almost two dozen primary tools to help select, paint on, and otherwise manipulate images, and some of the tools have as many as six subtools hiding beneath them see Figure Right-clicking or holding the mouse button down when you click the icon reveals the hidden subtools.

The long, skinny strip on the left side of the Full Edit window shown back in Figure on page 24 is the Tools panel. It stays perfectly organized so you can always find what you want without ever having to tidy it up. To activate a tool, click its icon. Each tool comes with its own collection of options, as shown in Figure As the box on Doubling Up explains, you may have either a single- or double-columned Tools panel.

You probably have a bunch of Allen wrenches in your garage that you only use every year or so. The mighty Tools panel. For grouped tools, the icon you see is the one for the last tool in the group you used. This Tools panel has two columns; the box on page 33 explains how to switch from one column to two. To activate the tool, just press the appropriate key. If the tool you want is part of a group, all the tools in that group have the same keyboard shortcut, so just keep pressing that key to cycle through the group until you get to the tool you want.

Your monitor determines whether you start with one or two columns in your Tools panel. If your screen is large enough, Elements starts you off with a single column; if not, you get two. If you had a single-row panel when you clicked, it changes to a nice, compact double-column panel with extra-large color squares see Figure You can reverse this by clicking the arrows again. If you want to hide it temporarily, press the Tab key and it disappears along with your other panels; press Tab again to bring them back.

You can deactivate it by clicking a different tool. When you open the Editor, Elements activates the tool you were using the last time you closed the program. Wherever Adobe found a stray corner in Elements, they stuck some help into it. Here are a few of the ways you can summon assistance if you need it:.

Help menu. You can click blue-text tooltips for more information about whatever your cursor is hovering over. Dialog box links. Most dialog boxes have a few words of bright blue text somewhere in them. That text is actually a link to Elements Help. It walks you through a variety of popular editing tasks, like cropping, sharpening, correcting colors, and removing blemishes.

Guided Edit is really easy to use:. Guided Edit gives you step-by-step help with basic photo editing. Just use the tools that appear in the right-hand panel once you choose an activity, like the ones shown here. If you already have an image open, it appears in the Guided Edit window automatically. If you have several photos in the Project bin, then you can switch images by double-clicking the thumbnail of the one you want to work on.

Your options are grouped into major categories like Basic Edits and Lens Effects, with a variety of specific projects under each heading. If several steps are involved, then Elements shows you only the buttons and sliders you need to use for the current step, and then switches to a new set of choices for the next step as you go along.

If you want to start over, click Reset. If you change your mind about the whole project, click Cancel. If there are more steps, then you may see another set of instructions. If you click one, up pops the Adobe Elements Inspiration Browser, a mini-program that lets you watch tutorials, as you can see in Figure You need a Photoshop. The Inspiration Browser offers a wealth of tutorials on many different Elements-related topics. Some are videos, and others are in PDF format.

The first time you start the Inspiration Browser, you may see a license agreement for yet another program: Adobe AIR, which lets other programs show you content stored online without you having to launch a web browser and navigate to a website. Adobe AIR got installed automatically along with Elements. The tutorials are all in either PDF or video format. Some are by well-known Elements gurus, but anyone can submit a tutorial for the Inspiration Browser.

You can also click one of the column headings to see the available tutorials arranged by title, author, difficulty, date posted, category, type video or PDF , or the average star rating people have given it. The Inspiration Browser is a great resource and may well give you most of the Elements help you need beyond this book.

Elements has a couple of really wonderful features to help you avoid making permanent mistakes: the Undo command and the Undo History panel. No matter where you are in Elements, you can almost always change your mind about what you just did. These keyboard shortcuts are great for toggling changes on and off while you decide whether you want to keep them. You can only go back sequentially.

You can also hop to a given spot in the list by clicking the place where you want to go instead of using the slider. Slide the pointer down to redo your work. Just drag the slider up and watch your changes disappear one by one as you go.

Be careful, though: You can back up only as many steps as Elements is set to remember. If Elements runs slowly on your machine, then reducing the number of history states it remembers try 20 may speed things up a bit. Always, always, always make a copy of your image and work on that instead. Name the duplicate and then click OK in the dialog box. Find the original image and click its Close button the X or the red dot.

Choose Photoshop. Saving Your Work has more about saving. Auto Smart Fix is the quickest, easiest way to improve the quality of your photos. Top left: The original, unedited picture. Chapter 8 covers topics unique to people who use digital cameras, like Raw conversion and batch-processing photos. Chapter 10 shows you how to convert color photos to black and white, and how to tint and colorize black-and-white photos. Part Four. This part covers the fun stuff: painting on photos and drawing shapes Chapter 12 , using filters and effects to create more artistic looks Chapter 13 , and adding text to images Chapter Part Five.

Part Six. You can get hundreds of plug-ins and additional styles, brushes, and other nifty tools to customize your copy of Elements and increase its abilities; the Internet and your local bookstore are chock full of additional info. Chapter 19 offers a look at some of these resources, as well as information about using a graphics tablet with Elements, and suggests some places to turn after you finish this book.

Part Seven. Appendix A helps you get your copy of Elements up and running, and suggests what to do if it starts misbehaving. So what do you need to read first? Read all of Chapter 1. If you want to organize your photos, then read about the Organizer also in Chapter 2. If you want to use the Organizer to label and keep track of them, then read Chapter 2. Chapter 3 explains how to adjust your view of photos in the Editor. Chapter 4 shows you how to use the Quick Fix window to easily edit and correct photos.

Chapter 16 covers printing, both at home and from online services. Chapter 17 explains how to email photos, and Chapter 18 teaches you how to post photos at Photoshop. You can come back and pick up the rest of the info in the book as you get more comfortable with Elements and want to explore more of the wonderful things you can do with it.

This book assumes that you know how to perform basic activities on your computer like clicking and double-clicking your mouse buttons and dragging objects onscreen.

To right-click means to press the right mouse button once, which calls up a menu of special features. To double-click means to press the left button twice, quickly, without moving the mouse between clicks. Most onscreen selection buttons are pretty obvious, but you may not be familiar with radio buttons : To choose an option, click the little empty circle next to it.

But if you have a one-button mouse, you can Control-click instead—that means to press the Control key on your keyboard and then press your mouse button once. Figure 1. Mac file paths are shown using the same arrows.

Otherwise, all the different versions are specified. Figure I-2 explains. Figure 2. In Mac OS X Lion, Apple has made it a little harder to find your Library folders.

After that, you can always find the Library folder by just clicking the name of your hard drive in the list on the left side of a Finder window. The other Library folder you may need is the one for your user account, which is a hidden file in Lion. To make it visible, in the Finder, open the Go menu and then press the Option key. You can also communicate with the Missing Manual team and tell us what you love or hate about the book.

Head over to www. Go to www. If you register this book at oreilly. Registering takes only a few clicks. Got questions? Need more information? Fancy yourself a book reviewer? On our Feedback page, you can get expert answers to questions that come to you while reading, share your thoughts on this Missing Manual, and find groups for folks who share your interest in Elements.

To have your say, go to www. Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that lets you easily search over 7, technology and creative reference books and videos to find the answers you need quickly.

With a subscription, you can read any page and watch any video from our library online. Read books on your cellphone and mobile devices. Copy and paste code samples, organize your favorites, download chapters, bookmark key sections, create notes, print out pages, and benefit from tons of other time-saving features.

Skip to main content. Start your free trial. Note For now, you have to be in the United States to use Photoshop. Why Photoshop Elements? What You Can Do with Elements Combine photos into a panorama or montage. Repair and restore old and damaged photos. Organize your photos and assign keywords to them so you can search by subject or name.

Add text to images and turn them into things like greeting cards and flyers. Create digital artwork from scratch, even without a photo to work from. Create and edit graphics for websites. Elements vs. The Key to Learning Elements. About This Book. Note This book periodically recommends other books, covering topics too specialized or tangential for a manual about Elements. A Note About Operating Systems. About the Outline. For Newcomers to Elements.

The Very Basics. About the Online Resources. Missing CD. Get it now.

 
 

 

1. Finding Your Way Around Elements – Photoshop Elements The Missing Manual [Book]

 

You can cut and paste text into OneNote. Why I do that? That way I can really learn it. With one note I can put bold, add notes, Stars for what is important, a blue star fot procesure things to practice later. I can also create a link to a another oneNOte page. I also have a OnteNOte page for the shortcut keys. I do photography and I use it with Lightroom. So the 2 together make it really do nice things. You love to take pictures, get Photoshop Elements, it\’s a must.

That is really importat to know. Why I choosed that book, it\’s because all the others are incompleted. Even the User manual that come with the software is badly written. This book as it all. It\’s a bit borring at time to read, but anyway. Eventually I will reach the end, I do a little everyday or when I can. It also save me ALOT of time. Because I am addicted to help forums. And people are not expert there, it\’s just random people trying to help, sorta or showing they know something.

It\’s nothing compare to this book. This book is full and complete. If you prefer vudeo tutorials. Lynda and other youtube are great, but not excellent. What that book is not: it teach you how to use the software, but it does not teach you the next step. How to ex: make your picture look nice and everything. Let\’s say it teach you how to drive, after reading it you need to know where you want to drive to.

That is where all those youtube and lynda and most other book are for, because they are incomplete, but sometime they teach you how to get a specific result about something. Probably a good example is when you learn to read, that book teach you how to read and write. But then you need to go in a library and star reading and practicing what you learned. Probably the best step after this book is to google Photoshop element magazin. Because it will show you how to use what you learned in this book to make awesome things.

The companion materials to this book are online \”the missing CD\” , and include links to sample images used for demonstrations in the book, and to other online resources to assist with PSE mastery. The author and creative team both have links to their own websites and email addresses listed in the introduction. You will also see that I have responded directly to other reviewers\’ comments.

This indicates strong ownership and a high level of accessibility. In addition, the author readily –and correctly– points out that many high quality step-by-step guides to most things you might want to do are readily found on popular video sites. Two things to note before diving into this book and your PSE 10 experience: the appendix to the book is found at the rear, and addresses installation issues. This wpould be better placed at the front and combined with the \”what\’s new\” portion, since install issues are the first pitfall area that users could encounter.

Finally, sometimes the book gushes just a bit about the overall capabilities of PSE \”while it\’s doing wonderful things to your picture These are minor points, and in no way diminish from the overall usefulness of this must have reference for users of PSE Each book is remarkable and without these books to accommpany any software; my job would be so much more difficult.

Please be good to yourself–before you purchase software known to be difficult make sure that a missing manual book exists. If the book does not exist; while I do not presume to impose my opoinions upon anyone; I would seek out software with not dissimilar subject matter that had an accommodating missing manual book. I repeat that I would never buy software were it not supported by a \”Missing Manual\” series book.

Like any complicated program I have tried to use, Photoshop Elements 10 is difficult to learn on your own so I purchased \”Photoshop Elements 10 the missing manual\” from Amazon to help me along.

And it does help but if you think you can open the book and have it lead you by the hand one, two, three, you will be disappointed. The book is just as complicated and labyrinthine as Photoshop itself.

I sit with Elements 10 up and running on my computer and and the missing manual open and go back and forth between the two, sometimes trying to understand the program by reading the book and sometimes reading the program to understand the book. To be fair, for the same reasons many of us find new and complicated computer programs daunting, it may be impossible to write a book so as to present the program in the way many of us have learned to think and use logic.

The author is articulate and interesting and I do recommend \”Photoshop Elements 10 the missing manual\” for the same reason I recommend Photoshop itself but with the same proviso, don\’t expect to open either and easily begin to understand and use Photoshop Elements So far this is a good start for someone who wants to jump in with both feet and run.

I am still searching for very basic answers that should be revealed in the first few pages but I have yet to find out how to delete the duplicate copies of the same photos. When I first installed Photoshop Elements on my iMac, it triplicated or quadrupled many of my photos and I have spent hours wading through this stupid program.

I really wish I had not spent so much money on a program that has given me so much grief! This is an excellent, thorough explanation of all the features in Elements However, give yourself the time to go through it slowly and completely. Elements takes time to learn and this book is based on that premise.

If you try to learn everything at once, you will be frustrated. Familiarize yourself completely with the first five chapters of the book. Once you are comfortable with these features, then the chapters on layers, masks, and retouching will not be as daunting. If you have a Mac, you also have the option to create your account while installing Elements, as well as doing that here. When you launch this version, you go straight to the Editor Editing Your Photos.

Figure What you see in the right part of the window changes occasionally, so it may not exactly match this image. The bottom of the screen has links for signing into your Photoshop. If you do that, this screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, the box on page 18 tells you how to permanently say goodbye to this screen. The Welcome screen is a launchpad that lets you choose which part of Elements you want to use:.

Organize button. This starts the Organizer, which lets you store and organize your image files. Edit button. Click this for the Editor, which lets you modify your images. But in some ways, they function as two separate programs. Whichever method you use, your photo s appear in the Editor so you can work on them. One helpful thing to keep in mind is that Adobe built Elements around the assumption that most people work on their photos in the following way: First, you bring photos into the Organizer to sort and keep track of them.

The Welcome screen can also serve as your connecting point for signing onto Photoshop. The box below explains how to get rid of the Welcome Screen. This displays a pop-up window where you can choose to have the Editor or the Organizer start from now on instead of the Welcome Screen.

Just choose the program you want from the list that appears. If you change your mind later on about how you want Elements to open, at the top right of either the Editor or the Organizer, just click the little house icon to bring back the Welcome Screen, then head back to the Settings menu described above and make your change.

The Organizer catalogs and keeps track of your photos, and you automatically come back to it for many activities that involve sharing photos, like emailing them Emailing Photos or creating an online gallery of them Online Albums. In some previous versions of Elements it was called the Photo Browser , so you may hear that term, too. The Media Browser is your main Organizer workspace. Click the Create tab in the upper right and you can start all kinds of new projects with your photos, or click the Share tab for ways to let other people view your images.

Click the arrow to the right of the Fix tab circled for a menu that gives you a choice of going to Full Edit, Quick Fix, or Guided Edit. The Fix tab gives you access to some quick fixes right in the Organizer. The Organizer also gives you another way to look at your photos, Date view, which is explained in Chapter 2. Its job is to pull photos from your camera or other storage device into the Organizer. After the Downloader does its thing, you end up in the Organizer.

In Windows, the Downloader appears as one of your options in the Windows dialog box that you see when you connect a device. If you want to use the Downloader, then just choose it from the list. You can read more about the Downloader in Chapter 2. If you plan to use the Organizer to catalog photos and assign keywords to them, then reading the section on the Downloader The Photo Downloader can help you avoid hair-pulling moments. Windows automatically creates a shortcut to Elements on your desktop when you install the program.

If you need help installing Elements, turn to Appendix A. You can also go to the Start menu, and then click the Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 icon. Adobe also gives you easy access to its Photoshop. With a Photoshop. Create your own website. You can make beautiful online albums that display your photos in elaborate slideshows—all accessible via your own personal Photoshop. They can even download your photos or order prints, if you choose to let them see Sharing a New Album. Automatically back up and sync your photos.

You can set Elements to sync the photos from your computer to storage space on Photoshop. See Online Syncing and Backups for more about how to use this feature. Access your photos from other computers. Download extra goodies. The Content panel Photo Stamps displays thumbnails for additional backgrounds, frames, graphics, and so on, that you can download from Photoshop.

Get lots of great free advice. Call up the Photoshop Inspiration Browser The Inspiration Browser , and you can choose from a whole range of helpful tutorials for all sorts of Elements tasks and projects. Mac file paths are shown using the same arrows. Otherwise, all the different versions are specified. Figure I-2 explains. Figure 2. In Mac OS X Lion, Apple has made it a little harder to find your Library folders.

After that, you can always find the Library folder by just clicking the name of your hard drive in the list on the left side of a Finder window. The other Library folder you may need is the one for your user account, which is a hidden file in Lion.

To make it visible, in the Finder, open the Go menu and then press the Option key. You can also communicate with the Missing Manual team and tell us what you love or hate about the book.

Head over to www. Go to www. If you register this book at oreilly. Registering takes only a few clicks. Got questions?

Need more information? Fancy yourself a book reviewer? On our Feedback page, you can get expert answers to questions that come to you while reading, share your thoughts on this Missing Manual, and find groups for folks who share your interest in Elements. To have your say, go to www. Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that lets you easily search over 7, technology and creative reference books and videos to find the answers you need quickly.

With a subscription, you can read any page and watch any video from our library online. Read books on your cellphone and mobile devices. Copy and paste code samples, organize your favorites, download chapters, bookmark key sections, create notes, print out pages, and benefit from tons of other time-saving features. Skip to main content. Start your free trial. Note For now, you have to be in the United States to use Photoshop.

Why Photoshop Elements? What You Can Do with Elements If you had a single-row panel when you clicked, it changes to a nice, compact double-column panel with extra-large color squares see Figure You can reverse this by clicking the arrows again. If you want to hide it temporarily, press the Tab key and it disappears along with your other panels; press Tab again to bring them back. You can deactivate it by clicking a different tool. When you open the Editor, Elements activates the tool you were using the last time you closed the program.

Wherever Adobe found a stray corner in Elements, they stuck some help into it. Here are a few of the ways you can summon assistance if you need it:.

Help menu. You can click blue-text tooltips for more information about whatever your cursor is hovering over. Dialog box links. Most dialog boxes have a few words of bright blue text somewhere in them. That text is actually a link to Elements Help. It walks you through a variety of popular editing tasks, like cropping, sharpening, correcting colors, and removing blemishes.

Guided Edit is really easy to use:. Guided Edit gives you step-by-step help with basic photo editing. Just use the tools that appear in the right-hand panel once you choose an activity, like the ones shown here. If you already have an image open, it appears in the Guided Edit window automatically. If you have several photos in the Project bin, then you can switch images by double-clicking the thumbnail of the one you want to work on. Your options are grouped into major categories like Basic Edits and Lens Effects, with a variety of specific projects under each heading.

If several steps are involved, then Elements shows you only the buttons and sliders you need to use for the current step, and then switches to a new set of choices for the next step as you go along.

If you want to start over, click Reset. If you change your mind about the whole project, click Cancel. If there are more steps, then you may see another set of instructions. If you click one, up pops the Adobe Elements Inspiration Browser, a mini-program that lets you watch tutorials, as you can see in Figure You need a Photoshop. The Inspiration Browser offers a wealth of tutorials on many different Elements-related topics. Some are videos, and others are in PDF format.

The first time you start the Inspiration Browser, you may see a license agreement for yet another program: Adobe AIR, which lets other programs show you content stored online without you having to launch a web browser and navigate to a website. Adobe AIR got installed automatically along with Elements. The tutorials are all in either PDF or video format. Some are by well-known Elements gurus, but anyone can submit a tutorial for the Inspiration Browser.

You can also click one of the column headings to see the available tutorials arranged by title, author, difficulty, date posted, category, type video or PDF , or the average star rating people have given it. The Inspiration Browser is a great resource and may well give you most of the Elements help you need beyond this book. Elements has a couple of really wonderful features to help you avoid making permanent mistakes: the Undo command and the Undo History panel.

No matter where you are in Elements, you can almost always change your mind about what you just did. These keyboard shortcuts are great for toggling changes on and off while you decide whether you want to keep them. You can only go back sequentially. You can also hop to a given spot in the list by clicking the place where you want to go instead of using the slider.

Slide the pointer down to redo your work. Just drag the slider up and watch your changes disappear one by one as you go. Be careful, though: You can back up only as many steps as Elements is set to remember. If Elements runs slowly on your machine, then reducing the number of history states it remembers try 20 may speed things up a bit. Always, always, always make a copy of your image and work on that instead.

Name the duplicate and then click OK in the dialog box. Find the original image and click its Close button the X or the red dot. Choose Photoshop. Saving Your Work has more about saving. Auto Smart Fix is the quickest, easiest way to improve the quality of your photos.

Top left: The original, unedited picture.

 
 

Welcome to the Photoshop Elements User Guide – Buy it with

 
 
Image with colored lines or to outline the edges of High-contrast images appear as if in silhouette, a grayscale image with white lines. To get rid of the lock and free up your image for Organizer projects, go back to the Editor and close the photo there. You can use any arrangement that suits you. Having Elements is like having a darkroom on your computer. You need a Photoshop. With a Photoshop.