When you make a new file in which to create your artwork, you have to make a few choices about the image’s size, colors, and ultimate purpose. It’s sort of like choosing the right paper or canvas for a real-world art project. If you want to paint a tiny portrait to put in a locket, you don’t start with a sheet of poster board. The best way to understand your choices is to work through them one by one.

Most of the time, you’ll work with pictures that are stored in the Organizer. Sometimes, however, you’ll need to open an image that’s not in the Organizer—for instance, when you’re working with a photo CD that someone else has given you.

As you know, you can add files to the Organizer by choosing File, Get Photos and Videos, From Files and Folders (or pressing Ctrl+Shift+G). If you just want to open a file to work on it, however, and you’re not interested in adding it to your catalog, switch to the Editor and choose File, Open (or press Ctrl+O).

In the Open dialog (see Figure 3.3), first choose Thumbnails from the View menu so you can see the pictures in each folder. Then navigate to the disk or folder where your photo is stored and double-click it to open it.

Figure 3.3. The Open dialog’s View menu offers you several ways to look at the files on a disk.

Photoshop Elements can open files saved in more than a dozen formats. Some of these you’ll see often; others you’ll probably never encounter. We’ll go over the formats Photoshop Elements can use later in this hour when we look at how to save files.

You can open a file from Photoshop Elements in two other ways. The last several files you’ve opened are easily accessible by choosing File, Open Recently Edited File and then picking the file you want.

Of course, you can also open images in Photoshop Elements by double-clicking their icons in Windows—but for that to work, you must have the appropriate file types associated with Photoshop Elements instead of with another program. In Windows, this is easy to accomplish. First, find a file of the type you want to associate with Photoshop Elements (such as JPEG or TIFF). Right-click the file and choose Open With, Choose Program from the contextual menu. In the Open With dialog (see Figure 3.4), first choose Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 (Editor), and then check the box below the list marked Always Use the Selected Program to Open This Kind of File. Click OK, and you’re done—from now on, you can open this file type in Photoshop Elements with a simple double-click on the file.

Figure 3.4. You can choose a program to open the file this time or every time.

If you’re opening a file to combine it with another file that you’re already working on, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s an easy way to do just this. Choose File, Place; locate the file you want to open; and double-click it. This command inserts the new file into the existing image (on a new layer so that it doesn’t interfere with anything you’ve already done) and puts it in Transform mode so that you can resize and position it to your liking (see Figure 3.5). When you get the new picture where you want it, just press Enter or click the check mark at the bottom-right corner of the image, and you’re all set.

Figure 3.5. You have all the time in the world to size and position a placed file before finalizing it by clicking the check mark.

Ah, pixels! These little beasties make up every single image you work with in Photoshop Elements, so it’s important to understand what they are and how many of them you need to make a good-looking picture.

Let’s start with what they are. The word pixel comes from the term “picture element.” Pixels are, in fact, the building blocks of an image, like the tiles that make up a mosaic. Each one is a square area filled with a single color and laid out on a grid.

Video displays (in other words, computer monitors and TVs) also use pixels, but, in those cases, the term refers to a physical part of the display. To see your display’s pixels, lean in close to the screen until you can see the squares. You might need a magnifying glass to see them on a computer, but they’re much easier to spot on the screen of your cell phone or PDA.

At any rate, when you display one image pixel on one monitor pixel (also known as a zoom level of 100%), you won’t see the individual pixels that make up the picture. But if you keep zooming in (see Figure 3.6), they become apparent. You’ll see that all the curves and color gradations in your picture are actually illusory because the entire thing is really made up of a grid of colored squares. The more pixels you’re working with to create the image, the more detailed it can be and the larger you can print or display it without noticing the individual pixels.

Figure 3.6. The window on the right shows the individual pixels that make up the blue sticky note.

To get your head around this, think about the mosaic I mentioned a little bit ago. If you have only, say, nine tiles that you have to arrange on a 3×3 grid, you’re not going to be able to create a very detailed picture. But if you use more tiles, you can construct a big, complex image with lots of details.

The same thing goes for pixels, with an added twist. A computer screen has 72 pixels per inch, for a total of 5,184 pixels in a square inch. However, photo printers can produce many, many more pixels per inch—ranging from 300ppi to 1200ppi, or even more. To produce a good printout that doesn’t show the individual pixels, your image needs to be at least 300ppi. You can accomplish this in two ways.

First, you can resize the image without changing any of the pixels. For example, a 2″-square onscreen image (at 72ppi), when switched to 300ppi, will be less than half an inch square. Conversely, a 3″×5″ photo print, scanned at 300ppi, will be 12.5″ by almost 21″ when viewed onscreen at 100%.

Your second choice is to use a technique called resampling. This is what happens when you actually change the number of pixels in an image, whether downward or upward. Photoshop Elements has to create a new grid of pixels, each with its assigned color, that will produce an image that looks the same as the original—and that requires the program to guess what color some of those new pixels should be. Because of this, you should always avoid resampling, if possible. That said, it’s better to decrease an image’s size using resampling than to increase it, simply because any errors in resampling are less likely to show when you are taking away pixels than when you are adding them.

You can set image resolution in Photoshop Elements in two places. The first is the New dialog; you were there in the “Creating a New Image File” section of this chapter. The second place to set the resolution is in the Image Size dialog (see Figure 3.7). That’s where you go when you want to change the image size of an existing picture; to get there, choose Image, Resize, Image Size.

Figure 3.7. The black bracket on the right side of the dialog indicates that Constrain Proportions is turned on.

In addition to fields for entering new size values and one for entering a new resolution, you’ll notice a couple check boxes at the bottom of the Image Size dialog. Constrain Proportions helps ensure that you won’t accidentally squish or stretch an image when resizing it, by automatically calculating the Height value as soon as you enter the Width value (or vice versa). The second check box is for enabling or disabling resampling. The pop-up menu next to it contains five different resampling methods that Photoshop Elements can use:

At some point in your Photoshop Elements career, you’ll want to save an image in a file outside of the Organizer, just as you would with Microsoft Word or any other program. Photoshop Elements can save to almost two dozen formats, but you probably won’t want to use more than a few of those. These are the more common formats:

Other file formats you’re extremely unlikely to see in the wild or ever need to use. Just so you’ll recognize them if you do happen to run across them, here’s a list:

Choosing a File Format

If the picture you’re saving is destined to be posted on the Web, you’ll use the Save for Web command, which presents you with a whole extra dialog box before you even get to the Save As dialog. Stick with me through these sections on using the Save As dialog first; we cover that Save for Web option later in the chapter. You will see that Save As dialog eventually, and you’ll want to know what to do when you get there.

If you’re not saving for the Web, you first need to choose File, Save As or press Shift+Ctrl+S. The Save As dialog looks like the ones you’re used to in other programs (see Figure 3.8); Photoshop Elements has just a few options to which you should pay special attention, starting with file format.

Figure 3.8. The Save Options settings in the Save As dialog stay the way you set them until you change them again.

When you want to share an image with someone who plans to edit it further, the format you choose depends on what software the other person will be using. Any format that both programs support will work, but your best bet is always Photoshop format. Using that format preserves any layers, text, and special effects you’ve added to the image. Other formats that most image-editing programs will likely be able to read include PCX, PDF, and BMP, but these formats may “flatten” your layers, merging them all with the Background layer.

On the other hand, if you need to send a picture for publication in a newsletter, newspaper, magazine, or book, your best format choices are TIFF, EPS, and PDF.

Choosing Other Save Options

After you’ve given your new file a name and chosen a format for it, you have a few other choices to make. Let’s run though them:

• Include in the Organizer—. Check this box to ensure that the new file will automatically show up in your photo catalog in the Organizer. If you’re saving the file to give to someone else, if it’s a backup copy, or if you don’t want to see this file in the Organizer for some other reason, make sure this box is unchecked.

• Save in Version Set with Original—. A version set is like a pile of rough drafts paper-clipped together with the final draft. When you save a version set, you can always go back to previous versions of the picture if you decide you don’t like your latest edits. This option is available only for files you’re including in the Organizer, where a version set looks very much like a stack (see Figure 3.9).

  

  Figure 3.9. I chose Find, All Version Sets to locate these two sets; the one on the right is expanded and shows both the original image and my edited version.

• Layers—. If you’ve built layers into your image and you think there’s the slightest possibility that you’ll want to modify the layers’ contents, make sure this box is checked. On the other hand, flattening layers makes a file smaller, so feel free to uncheck the box and save a file without layers if you’re certain you won’t need the layers again.

• As a Copy—. When you’re working with an existing image (as opposed to one you’ve just created from scratch), that image’s file already has a name, which is entered in the Save As dialog’s File Name field when you get there. To add the word copy to that name to avoid saving over an existing file, check this box.

• ICC Profile—. This box includes a description, or profile, of your monitor’s characteristics in your file so that other computers and devices can translate its colors correctly. This ensures that the color remains consistent, no matter where or how you view or print the photo.

  By the Way

  To learn more about ICC profiles and how they’re used in color management, turn to Hour 9, “Printing Your Pictures.”

• Thumbnail—. This setting makes Thumbnail view work in Open dialog boxes; if you save an image without a Thumbnail, you’ll see a generic file icon in Windows and in the Open dialog instead of seeing a small preview of the image. Thumbnails make image files a tiny bit larger than they might otherwise be, but the difference is so slight that it’s not worth leaving off thumbnails just to save room on your hard drive.

• Use Lowercase Extensions—. It’s a good policy to stick with lowercase filename extensions (such as .tif instead of .TIF), or so I’ve been told, so leave this box checked.

Some file formats have additional options that show up in a separate dialog box after you click Save. These include JPEG, JPEG 2000, Photoshop EPS, Photoshop PDF, PNG, and TIFF. You’re better off creating JPEG and PNG files via Save for Web, because you’ll have much more scope for customizing the file size and quality of the file using Save for Web. However, you’ll see similar—if much more limited—options in each of these formats’ Options dialog boxes if you opt to use Save As instead. That leaves us with Photoshop EPS, Photoshop PDF, and TIFF.

Saving a Photoshop EPS File

When you’re saving a Photoshop EPS file (see Figure 3.10), the Preview option controls how the image will look if it’s imported into a page-layout program. TIFF (8 bits per pixel) results in a good-looking grayscale or color preview, and TIFF (1 bit per pixel) is black and white only; choose the 1 bit option only if you really need the EPS file to be as small as possible. In the Encoding pop-up menu, start by choosing Binary. If the program or printing device that the file is sent to can’t read it, then switch to ASCII. Skip JPEG; this option uses lossy compression to make the file smaller, just as in a JPEG file. If the image is low resolution and you’re planning to print it, check the Image Interpolation box; the picture will be anti-aliased when printed, which will make it look less jagged.

Figure 3.10. I prefer to save EPS files with an 8-bit preview image and binary encoding.

Saving a Photoshop PDF File

Photoshop PDF files have three save options (see Figure 3.11). First, you need to choose a compression method: ZIP or JPEG. Again, stick to ZIP if you want the picture to remain the same; use JPEG if you need a smaller file and don’t mind a few JPEG artifacts here and there. If you do choose JPEG, you’ll have five quality levels from which to choose: High, Medium High, Medium, Medium Low, and Low. There’s no preview, so you might need to save several versions of a file in PDF format to determine which compression level you find acceptable. Finally, you can check the box labeled View PDF After Saving if you want to open the file in a PDF reader such as Acrobat Reader after it’s saved.

Figure 3.11. If you like, you can view the new PDF file in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader as soon as it’s created.

Saving a TIFF File

The options for saving a TIFF file are slightly more complex (see Figure 3.12). First, you need to choose an Image Compression method. If you’re working with older page-layout software or printing devices, you might need to skip compression with TIFF images by choosing None; otherwise, LZW provides the best compression without removing any image data. If you need a supersmall file, you can try JPEG compression, and then you’ll need to set a Quality level. Next comes Pixel Order, and I think I can safely say that you’ll never need to change this setting from its default of Interleaved. The same goes for Byte Order: Windows PCs sometimes can’t read Macintosh-encoded TIFF files, but Macs can read PC-encoded files—so just leave this set at IBM PC.

Figure 3.12. TIFF files have several options, but the most important one is your choice of image compression method.

This next setting is rather interesting: Save Image Pyramid. With this turned on, the file you’re saving actually ends up containing multiple versions of the image, both low res and high res. In theory, you can choose which version you want to import when you’re using the image. In practice, however, only Adobe InDesign supports this feature. So unless you’re a heavy user of InDesign, skip this one; it just makes the file bigger and doesn’t give you any advantage. Interestingly, even Photoshop Elements doesn’t support multiresolution files; it simply opens the highest-resolution image contained in the file.

Save Transparency is available only if the image has transparent areas. If you choose this option, Photoshop Elements includes an extra alpha channel in the image that shows what areas are transparent. As with image pyramids, not all page layout programs support transparency channels (PageMaker, for instance, doesn’t), so be sure that this feature works with the other programs with which you plan to use this file before you use it.

Finally, turn on Layer Compression if you’re keeping the layers in the image instead of flattening them. If you choose to do this, the layers will still be there when you reopen the picture in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, but the image will look the same, as if it were flat, when you use the file elsewhere. Choose Layer Compression—and leave it set to the default RLE compression method—only if the file will be edited in Photoshop Elements in the future.

Setting Preferences for File Saving

Photoshop Elements preferences have a few settings that can save you time when you’re saving files. To see what’s there, choose Edit, Preferences, Saving Files (see Figure 3.13). You can set the following preferences:

Figure 3.13. If you leave On First Save and Image Previews set to Ask, you’ll always have the option to use a different setting when you get to the Save As dialog.

• On First Save—. This determines what happens when you first edit a file from the Organizer. If you choose Always Ask, Photoshop Elements politely points out that you’re saving over a file and asks if you want to save a new version instead. Ask If Original does the same thing, but only if the file you’re working on is an original (that is, it’s not a previously saved version). Finally, you can choose Save Over Current File, which bypasses this useful notification. I prefer to leave this set to Ask If Original.

• Image Previews—. Choose Never Save or Always Save to determine this setting for all the files you save in the future. If you prefer to decide about previews on a case-by-case basis, choose Ask When Saving.

• File Extension—. Same here—decide which format you want to use all or most of the time, and choose it here.

• Ignore Camera Data (EXIF) Profiles—. Leave this setting off; Photoshop Elements can use a camera profile to make sure the color you see onscreen matches the real-world color, so you don’t want the program to ignore embedded profiles.

• Maximize PSD File Compatibility—. If you frequently move files between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, leave this set to Always. Otherwise, you’re better off leaving it at Ask so that you have the option to change the setting when you save each file.

• Recent File List Contains ____ Files—. Here you can determine how many files appear in the File menu’s Open Recently Edited File submenu. Your choices are 0 to 30.

Save an Image for the Web

In general, each web format removes data from pictures saved in it so that file sizes remain low. For that reason, make sure you treat these formats as destination formats, not working formats; always save your web version of a photo with a different name from the original file so you can go back to the original if you need to print it or make other edits to it.

1. Choose File, Save for Web, or press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S.

2. If you can’t see the whole picture in the preview area, press Ctrl+0 (zero) to fit it into the available space. If you want to zoom in and out and check details while you’re working in the Save for Web dialog, you can use the Zoom tool in the mini toolbox at left side of the window.

3. Choose a preset and then modify the settings.

   • For a photo, start with one of the JPEG or PNG-24 settings. With JPEG, you need to choose a Quality setting between 0 and 100, and then check Progressive and ICC Profile. If you’re feeling more adventurous, choose PNG-24, which yields a much larger file size but won’t modify the image to be able to compress it, as JPEG does. JPEG’s lossy compression scheme produces very small files, but you can sometimes see the changes made when compressing an image as blotches or blurs called artifacts (see Figure 3.14).

     

     Figure 3.14. The blurry halos surrounding this tower at the New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium are JPEG artifacts.

   • For art with no gradients (logos, simple graphs, and clip art), choose one of the GIF or PNG-8 settings. First, experiment with the Colors and Dither settings to get the smallest file size that still looks good; with both of these formats, you can reduce the number of colors an image contains to reduce its file size. Then you can use dithering to simulate more colors by placing different-colored pixels next to each other. As you use fewer colors, you’ll want to increase the percentage of dithering you allow.

4. Compare the Original preview on the left with the image as it will look with the current settings on the right; also look at the file size you’ll end up with, which appears under the preview on the right. When you’re happy with the way the image looks and the projected file size, you can move on to the other settings.

   Did you Know?

   To get a better idea of what image size means in terms of how long a picture takes to display, choose a Size/Download Time option from the pop-up menu at the upper-right corner of the preview area. Don’t assume that everyone’s Internet connection is as fast (or as slow) as yours; it’s usually best to stick with a middle option, such as 128Kbps Dual ISDN.

5. If your image has transparent areas where you want the web page’s background color to show through, check the Transparency box. Note that this option isn’t available for JPEG images—only for GIF and PNG files.

6. Finally, you have an opportunity to change the image’s screen size (as opposed to its file size). Enter new values in the New Size portion of the Image Size area, and click Apply to see how your resized picture looks. You can keep trying different sizes until you’re happy; the change won’t actually be made to your image until you save it.

7. When you’re happy with the way the image looks and its projected file size, click OK.

8. From here, all you have to do is pick a location and a name for the file in the Save Optimized As dialog. When you’ve done that, click Save, and you’re finished.

Let the Image Fit the Size

Because file size is so important when you’re creating image files for the Web, Photoshop Elements offers you the option of specifying a size and having the format, compression, and color settings automatically adjusted to produce a file of that size.

To do this, click the triangle to the right of the Save for Web Preset pop-up menu and choose Optimize to File Size (see Figure 3.15). Enter the size you’re looking for and click a Start With option: Choose Current Settings if you need the file to be a particular format, or choose Auto Select GIF/JPEG if you don’t care what format Photoshop Elements uses. Then click OK.

Figure 3.15. Choose your file size, and Photoshop Elements does the rest for you.

You’ll find yourself back in the Save for Web dialog, with new settings and a new “after” preview presented for your approval. If you’re happy with it, click OK and continue through the Save Optimized As dialog to save the image file.

Photoshop Elements is a very forgiving program. It gives you plenty of chances to undo your mistakes and two ways to do this. First is our old friend, the Undo command. The Undo command and its sibling, the Redo command, sit at the top of the Edit menu and are also accessible via keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Z to undo, Ctrl+Y to redo) and via Undo and Redo buttons in the menu bar. Because Photoshop Elements tracks the history of your image as you work on it, stopping only when you close the file, you can use Undo to move a step back in that history and Redo to move a step forward.

The number of steps back you can take is set to 50 by default, but you can change that number to anything between 2 and 1,000. Choose Edit, Preferences, Performance, and then choose a number of History States (see Figure 3.16). If your computer has any trouble running Photoshop Elements, increasing the number of history states that it must keep track of can slow it even further, so choose a number based on the available computing power.

Figure 3.16. If you’re like me, you’ll need more than 50 history states to keep track of what you’ve done to an image.

If you’re list oriented, you’ll love the Undo History palette (choose Window, Undo History to display it). It shows each command you’ve executed in a neat list (see Figure 3.17), going from the picture’s original state right at the top all the way to the last thing you did at the bottom. Click a list entry to restore the photo to its state immediately after you performed that action—in other words, to undo your way directly back to that point. You can also redo commands using the Undo History palette, if you click farther down in the list, as long as you don’t make any changes to the image in between. As soon as you do modify the image, all the grayed-out history states disappear from the Undo History palette.

Figure 3.17. Every step you take, Photoshop Elements is watching you.

In this hour, you learned how to create new, blank image files; open image files that aren’t stored in the Organizer; and save files in different formats. We talked about the various formats that are available for saving files, and you learned which formats to use in different circumstances. You looked at the options in the very large Save for Web dialog box and learned how to choose the right settings for the type of image you’re working with. Finally, we took a look at the ways you can undo your mistakes in Photoshop Elements, either undoing one at a time or by reviewing a list of all the actions you’ve taken to edit the picture you’re working on.

All the technical details involved with opening and saving files may not be very interesting, but they’re important to know. Give these quiz questions a try to see how well you’ve learned the material in this hour, and then try one or both of the activities.