As you know, the Editor has three modes: Guided Edit, Quick Fix, and Full Edit. If you’re feeling frisky and ready to really get your hands dirty, you’ll want to take the time to work on your photos in Full Edit mode. This is where you have the most control over what you do and how much of it you do. On the other hand, when you want to do the work yourself, but you want a little hand-holding, Guided Edit is for you. You’ll use the same tools and commands as you would in Full Edit mode, but you won’t have to locate them in the toolbox or the menus, and Photoshop Elements will offer you helpful instructions as you work.

But if you really don’t know how to accomplish your desired result (perhaps you haven’t finished reading this book yet), or if you’re just in a hurry, you need Quick Fix. In the Editor, the Quick Fixes are grouped into four categories, each with one or more sliders you can use to make your own changes to the picture, accompanied by an Auto button you can click to have Photoshop Elements do the work for you (see Figure 6.1). In the Organizer, the Fix tab contains six buttons that correspond to the six Auto buttons in the Editor; if you’re too pressed for time even to switch to the Editor, you can just click and go.

Figure 6.1. Click Auto or drag the slider—that’s all there is to a Quick Fix.

Before we go over what each Quick Fix is and when you should use it, here’s the basic workflow for using any Quick Fix:

Try to use only one or two of the Auto fixes on any given image because they overlap somewhat. Using more than one can “fix” an image too much and actually create problems that didn’t exist before, such as too-bright highlights. And always save Sharpen for last so that you don’t undo its work by modifying the picture’s highlights and shadows.

The General fixes include Smart Fix, which sounds promising, and Red Eye Fix, which is downright indispensable. You already know what red eye is and why you don’t want it, but what exactly does Smart Fix do?

Smart Fix adjusts both lighting and color at the same time, leaving your image ready for sharpening. Ideally, while maintaining or improving contrast, Smart Fix lightens shadows that are too dark and darkens highlights that are too bright. You can apply it either by clicking Auto or by dragging the slider to determine exactly how much you’re willing to let Photoshop Elements mess around with your picture.

Clicking the Auto button usually yields the same amount of modification as dragging the slider halfway. If you drag the slider all the way to the right, an undesirable color cast might appear. This is, quite literally, too much of a good thing; the maximum setting for the Smart Fix slider makes the same changes Photoshop Elements would do automatically, only to a greater degree. For example, if an image is too orange, adding a bit of green to it balances the color. But adding more green just turns the whole picture greenish.

Now, before we move on, you should know one thing about Red Eye Fix: It doesn’t always work. That’s right, Photoshop Elements might be magical, but it’s not infallible. Occasionally, the program finds an area in the image that it thinks is a red eye and “fixes” it, which is not so good if the area is actually supposed to be red. Other times, it inexplicably overlooks the huge case of red eye right in the middle of the picture. If Red Eye Fix doesn’t work for you, undo and switch to Full Edit mode so you can make the fix manually using the Red Eye Removal tool. We go over how to do that in Hour 13, “Removing Red Eye, Dust, and Scratches.”

These Quick Fixes concentrate on adjusting the overall lightness of each image. You’re presented with different tools for fixing different problems; you can adjust highlights, the image’s brightest areas; shadows, the image’s darkest areas; or midtones, the areas that are in between. With the Lighting Quick Fixes, you can choose to work with one of these or all three at the same time.

Light and Shadows

The Quick Fixes found in the Lighting category are the same commands you’ll find in the Enhance menu’s Adjust Lighting submenu: Levels, Brightness/Contrast, and Shadows/Highlights. These three tools attempt to accomplish the same thing in three different ways.

• Levels remaps the darkest pixel in the image to true black and the lightest one to true white, spreading out all the ones in between. It can affect the picture’s overall color, so it’s useful primarily when the image has a color cast.

• Contrast does the same thing, only without affecting color. Use it when the picture’s color is just the way you want it, but you want to bump up the contrast between light and dark areas.

• Shadows/Highlights controls enable you to adjust a photo’s highlights, shadows, or midtones independently of each other. Lighten Shadows pulls more detail out of shadowed areas but leaves solid black areas alone; Darken Highlights adds more depth to bright areas but leaves solid white areas alone. Drag the Midtone Contrast slider to reduce or increase the contrast in medium areas.

Fix a Dark Photo

For this task, we use a photo that I took recently, one that really embodies the phrase “should have known better.” I wanted to capture the graceful Art Deco shape of the greyhound atop this standing ashtray, but I should have moved the whole thing away from the window before taking the shot. As it was, the bright backlighting really confused my camera’s flash; the area around the window is way too dark. Let’s see what we can do with this photo; it’s called ashtray.jpg, and you can download it from the book’s website at www.informit.com/title/9780672330179.

1. Locate the file in the Organizer or on your hard drive and open it.

2. In the View menu, choose Before & After: Horizontal or Before & After Vertical (see Figure 6.3). (If you have a widescreen monitor, the Horizontal view works particularly well.)

   

   Figure 6.3. Widescreen monitors really lend themselves to this kind of side-by-side image editing.

3. Let’s experiment. First, click the Auto Levels button. Clearly, that’s not the right tool to fix this image because it makes almost no change. Moving on....

4. Now let’s try clicking the Auto Contrast button. Still no improvement—there’s already plenty of contrast in this picture, just not the kind we want.

5. Next, let’s pull out my favorite tools in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements: Shadows/Highlights. We know the shadows in this picture are too dark, so start by dragging the Lighten Shadows slider to the right. Not too far; you don’t want to mess with the dark colors in the window frame and the ashtray base. The ideal amount of adjustment for this picture is about a third of the slider’s total length.

6. Now let’s see what happens if you pull the Darken Highlights slider about halfway to the right. You should see the tree outside the window solidify as some of its lightest leaves are darkened.

7. Finally, drag the Midtone Contrast slider just a bit to the left—not quite to the first tick mark on the line. Now you should be able to see more detail on the window frame and the ashtray base.

This photo’s still far from perfect, but at least you can see the greyhound pretty well now (see Figure 6.4). I took the photo with the idea of re-creating the greyhound as line art for a T-shirt, so these fixes help a lot; now I’ll be able to redraw details such as the ribs and the mouth that weren’t visible before.

Figure 6.4. A couple Smart Fixes really pull out the greyhound from the dark background so you can see its details.

If you’ve studied art, you might have run across the idea of defining colors in terms of their hue, their saturation (or intensity), and their brightness. And if you’ve never heard of this color model, you might want to stop off at the sidebar on this page, “Color Me Impressed,” and spend some time getting used to it.

Color Me Impressed

What better way to learn about how color works than to get your hands dirty with some paint—metaphorically, of course. To get a handle on how hue, saturation, and brightness work together, switch to Full Edit mode and click the Foreground color swatch in the toolbox to open the Color Picker (see Figure 6.5).

Figure 6.5. In HSB mode, your color choice is determined by the position of the cursor in the color field combined with the slider’s hue setting.

Choosing colors with the Color Picker is almost exactly like poking your fingers into a paint palette and mixing up just the shade you need. First, drag the slider on the rainbow-colored hue bar to choose the basic color you want.

Then click around in the larger color field to choose darker, lighter, more intense, and less intense variations of that color. The color you’re mixing up is displayed as the top swatch next to the color slider, with the previous Foreground color below it for comparison. As you move from left to right in the color field, your color choice becomes more saturated—basically, it moves farther from gray. And as you move from top to bottom, the color becomes darker.

Meanwhile, the numbers in the H, S, and B fields to the right of the color slider show you the actual mathematical values associated with each color you choose. Hue is measured in degrees; it’s often pictured as a rainbow-colored circle instead of a straight bar. True red is considered the zero point, so the number of degrees indicates how far around the circle your color is from red. A measurement of 180° gives you the opposite, or complement, of red, which is cyan (greenish blue).

Saturation and brightness are both measured in percentages. A saturation value of 0 gives you a color with no color in it—that is, a shade of gray. And brightness ranges from 0%, which is black, to 100%, which is white. Try clicking and dragging in the color field to see how the saturation and brightness numbers change as you move the cursor.

Feel free to experiment with the Color Picker until you feel you have a good understanding of how colors depend on these three attributes of hue, saturation, and brightness. Then you can move on to working with the Color Fixes.

The Sharpen slider is definitely not a panacea—it can’t restore details that weren’t part of a picture to begin with—but it can create the illusion of a sharper image. It’s more of that Photoshop Elements magic, and it’s based on some pretty heavy-duty math, combined with an old-time darkroom technique.

Photoshop Elements Quick Fix mode works just as advertised: It’s quick, and it enables you to fix a wide variety of common image problems. In this hour, you adjusted shadows and highlights using the Lighting Fixes, removed a color cast using the Color Fixes, and restored detail to a blurry photo using the Sharpen Fix. In the next hour, you’ll learn how to use all the Photoshop Elements selection tools so that you can apply these and other fixes to selected parts of an image. You’ll also learn how you can use layers to keep image elements separate.

You might find that Quick Fix doesn’t do what you want for every image you try it on, but you won’t find out unless you try. Answer the Quiz questions, and then use the Activities to get some experience with Quick Fix under your belt.