5. Working in the Editor

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use the Photoshop Elements Editor’s three editing modes to get just the right amount of help accomplishing your tasks and how to manipulate the Editor’s windows and panels to customize your workspace to suit your needs.

No matter now organized your photo collection gets, the real fun begins when you start to work on your photos—or play with them, depending on your perspective (see Figure 5.1). In Photoshop Elements, that fun happens when you move from the Organizer to the Editor.

Figure 5.1. Does this look like work? Not to me.

The Editor is where Photoshop Elements starts to really look like Photoshop itself. It has three different editing modes: Quick Fix, Guided Edit, and Full Edit. You can accomplish many of the same things in each of these modes; which one you use depends on your level of expertise and how much control you want to exercise over the images you’re editing.

Getting back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer is simple. First, of course, you can open the Editor directly from the startup screen, without going to the Organizer first. Do this if you want to create a completely new image file or if you want to work on an image that you don’t want to add to the Organizer. If you’re already working in the Organizer, on the other hand, you can switch to the Editor in a couple of different ways:

• Right-click one or more thumbnails and choose Edit with Photoshop Elements from the contextual menu.

• Click one or more thumbnails, and then click the Fix button in the toolbar. Click the Edit Photos button at the bottom of the Fix panel to switch to the Editor.

Once you’re working in the Editor, you can go back to the Organizer by clicking the Organizer button next to the Undo and Redo buttons in the menu bar.

Using the Three Editing Modes

Each of the Editor’s three editing modes has plenty to recommend it; there are good reasons for using each mode at various times. Quick Fix offers you a great way to make a few selective tweaks to a photo, such as brightening it up a bit, without having to search through menus to find the commands you want or decide among different methods of accomplishing the same thing. If you want some guidance as you work, on the other hand, Guided Edit is definitely the right choice. In this editing mode, the tools and commands you need for each task are presented to you along with instructions for their use that show you exactly how to get the job done most effectively. Finally, when you feel comfortable that you know what you’re doing and you want to spend the time needed to get the best possible results, you can turn to Full Edit mode, where you can access a complete set of tools and commands that offer you a generous subset of what the full-blown version of Photoshop can do.

To switch back and forth from one mode to another, you need only choose the mode you want from the Edit pop-up menu at the top of your screen (see Figure 5.2). You can use multiple editing modes on the same image; you’re not locked into one mode for an entire editing session. If you feel comfortable cropping and resizing the image yourself, but you want guidance on adjusting its color, you can start out in Full Edit mode and then switch to Guided Edit when you’re ready to start making color adjustments.

Figure 5.2. The edit mode you’re currently using is always displayed in the Edit tab.

When you’re working in Quick Fix mode, you’ll rarely need to access the tools or menus; everything you need is in the Quick Fix panel on the right side of the screen. You can change the zoom level of your image view, and you can choose whether to show both the before and after versions of the picture, or just before or after. Guided Edit mode is quite similar to Quick Fix mode in appearance, with all the instructions and controls appearing in the Guided Edit panel on the right (in the same location as the Quick Fix panel). Again, you’re given a limited set of tools, and many of the menu commands are grayed out, inaccessible until you switch to Full Edit mode. In this last mode, the right side of your screen becomes the Panel Bin, where a selection of useful panels are stored. All the tools (several dozen of them) are available, and you can use all the menu commands as appropriate. (Of course, some commands are unavailable at any given time because they don’t apply to the current situation, such as Save Selection when there’s no active selection.)

Let’s take a look at how you’d adjust a photo’s lighting in each of the three edit modes:

• Full Edit—Choose Shadows/Highlights from the Adjust Lighting submenu in the Enhance menu. This brings up a dialog box containing sliders labeled Lighten Shadows, Darken Highlights, and Midtone Contrast, each accompanied by a numeric entry field in which you can type a percentage between 0% and 100% (see Figure 5.3). Your changes appear in the image as you move the sliders. Click OK when you like what you see.

Figure 5.3. Full Edit mode puts the Shadows/Highlights controls in a separate dialog box.

• Guided Edit—Click the Lighten or Darken Guided Edit task in the Lighting and Exposure category. Lighten Shadows, Darken Highlights, and Midtone Contrast sliders appear in the Guided Edit panel, with numeric entry fields (0–100) and instructions and notes on their use (see Figure 5.4). Click Done when you like the results of your changes.

Figure 5.4. The notes alongside each of the Lighten or Darken sliders can help you figure out which control you need to use for your particular image.

• Quick Fix—The Lighting category in the Quick Fix panel contains Lighten Shadows, Darken Highlights, and Midtone Contrast sliders, again with numeric entry fields (0–100) and a useful feature: a grid of nine preview thumbnails showing how your image will look with each of nine levels of adjustment. Click the small grid icons to display a grid. You can either drag the sliders to make changes (see Figure 5.5) or click a thumbnail to choose that adjustment level. Click the Accept button when you’re done making changes, or simply move on to another adjustment.

Figure 5.5. The sliders work the same way in Quick Fix mode as they do in Full Edit and Guided Edit modes, but they’re accompanied by Auto buttons.

As you can see, for adjusting lighting the three edit modes have essentially the same controls and can offer you similar results. That’s not the case with all the adjustments you might want to apply to an image, however. For color adjustments, Quick Fix offers only a couple of sliders, whereas Guided Edit has a more expansive selection of tasks and Full Edit offers powerful tools that don’t appear in either Quick Fix or Guided Edit modes, such as Adjust Color Curves and Color Variations (see Table 5.1.)

Table 5.1. What’s In Each Editing Mode

Making Quick Fixes

Of course, the main selling point of Quick Fixes is that they are, in fact, quick to apply. Most have both an Auto button, which tells Photoshop Elements to calculate the right amount of adjustment, and a slider, which enables you to determine how much adjustment you want to apply (see Figure 5.6). The preview grid of nine thumbnails, new to Photoshop Elements 8, gives you an idea of what your changes will look like before you even touch the slider. If you don’t see a preview thumbnail that looks the way you want your picture to look, that’s a good indicator that Quick Fix isn’t the best way to accomplish your goal and you should consider switching to Full Edit Mode.

Figure 5.6. The only drawback to using the Auto buttons in Quick Fix mode is that Photoshop Elements doesn’t show you what it has actually done to the picture, so you’re not able to learn by watching.

The Quick Fix interface shows your picture in a before version, an after version, or both, arranged side by side or one on top of the other. Choose an option from the View pop-up menu at the bottom of the screen below the image preview to switch your view. You can also click a Rotate button (located next to the View menu) to turn the image on its side or upside down, and you can choose a Zoom level from the slider by clicking the arrow next to the current view percentage. At the top of the screen, above the image preview, you can choose one of four common zoom settings: Actual Pixels (which is web size), Fit Screen, Fill Screen, and Print Size.

The Quick Fixes You Can Use

The Quick Fix adjustments themselves are listed in the Quick Fix panel on the right, arranged in categories. You can show or hide the adjustments within each category by clicking the disclosure triangle next to the category name. Here’s what you have to choose from:

• Smart Fix—Here you’ll find only an Amount slider. This fix adjusts both lighting and color by correcting color balance and calibrating both shadows and highlights to bring out detail.

• Lighting—This fix offers five different controls, starting with Auto buttons for Levels and Contrast.

• Auto Levels attempts to spread out the light, medium, and dark tones in the picture evenly so that the image isn’t overwhelmed by any of these. For some images it works great; others, not so much. It’s always worth a try, but be prepared to click that Undo button if it doesn’t work out.

• Auto Contrast, on the other hand, works to enhance image detail by making sure that the differences between light and dark areas of the picture are clear. Unless the picture is quite flat and muddy, Auto Contrast often doesn’t do much at all.

• The Lighten Shadows, Darken Highlights, and Midtone Contrast sliders duplicate the sliders in Full Edit mode’s Shadows/Highlights dialog. The first two are fairly obvious in their effect; increase the Lighten Shadows value to bring out shadow detail and increase the Darken Highlights value to bring out detail lost in overly bright highlights (see Figure 5.7). The Midtone Contrast value, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. It starts out in the middle. Drag left to lighten the picture’s medium tones, and drag right to darken them.

Figure 5.7. Using the Lighting sliders in Quick Fix mode enables you to fix shadows or highlights without lightening or darkening the rest of the picture.

• Color—In this category, you have two slider controls: Saturation and Hue. Increase the Saturation value to make the picture’s colors more intense, and decrease it to tone down the image a bit. Drag the Hue slider to change all the photo’s colors at the same time, moving them along the color wheel the same distance. For example, if you drag the slider all the way to the left, orange objects in the picture turn blue (the color opposite orange on the color wheel), while green objects turn pink and red ones turn light blue (cyan).

• Balance—More color controls are found under the Balance category: the Temperature and Tint sliders. Use the Temperature slider to make the entire image appear cooler (bluer) or warmer (more orange); bumping Temperature up slightly is a great way to make outdoor pictures taken on a cloudy day look sunnier. The Tint slider is most useful with indoor photos and can be used to compensate for problems with indoor lighting. Fluorescent lighting tends to look greenish, while incandescent lighting tends to look too yellow or even orange. For images affected by one of these problems, drag the slider left or right until the lighting looks more natural.

• Detail—Here’s your chance to compensate for low levels of blurriness in a picture. Drag the Sharpen slider to increase contrast around hard edges in the image, but be careful not to overdo it. Overly sharpened images are a sure sign of inept computer manipulation.

LET ME TRY IT

Applying Quick Fixes

The Quick Fix panel’s Auto buttons have the same functions as the corresponding Quick Fix functions in the Organizer. Sometimes the results are good, and other times not, but Auto is almost always worth a try. If you don’t like the results, just click Undo; or if the picture looks better but still not quite there, then use the Auto fix as a leaping-off point for further adjustments. If you’re not sure you know how best to use the controls, just remember that each Quick Fix category is also accompanied by a light bulb-shaped Help button that you can click to view Photoshop Elements help in your web browser. Unless you don’t have an Internet connection, this connects directly to Adobe’s website, so you’re always seeing the most updated version of the help text. The buttons aren’t interchangeable; each one takes you directly to a help section that covers that particular function.

You can apply Quick Fix adjustments in three ways: using the thumbnail presets, using the Auto button, or by adjusting settings manually. Follow these steps:

1. If you’re in the Organizer, click the orange Fix button and choose Quick Photo Edit to switch to the Editor in Quick Fix mode. If you’re already working in the Editor, click the orange Edit button and choose EDIT Quick to switch to Quick Fix mode.
2. Scroll through the list of fixes in the Quick Fix panel—Smart Fix, Lighting, Color, Balance, and Detail—and click the disclosure triangle next to the category of fix you want to use.
3. Click a preview grid button below a particular fix’s name (such as Saturation) if you want to see a grid of preset thumbnails from which to choose.
4. Hold your cursor over a thumbnail to see the effects of that setting in the image window, and click a thumbnail to apply its setting (see Figure 5.8). Click and drag on a thumbnail to adjust that setting upward or downward just a bit.
   

   Figure 5.8. The thumbnails show you a range of adjustments, from all the way in one direction to all the way in the other direction. Here, the grid starts with complete desaturation (removal of all color) and runs up to maximum saturation (intensification of color).

   

5. If you prefer, drag the slider to choose a custom adjustment amount.
6. To have Photoshop Elements choose the amount of adjustment the image needs, click the Auto button next to the Quick Fix category name.
7. When you’re happy with the image’s appearance, click the checkmark next to the Quick Fix category name to accept the changes and reset the “Before” version of the image to its current state. If you don’t want to apply the changes, click Cancel instead.

One of the best enhancements brought to the Photoshop Elements Editor by version 8 is the Show Previews button. Click this button, which looks like a grid of tiny squares, to display a larger grid of nine preview thumbnails, each showing a different amount of adjustment. You can hold your cursor over a thumbnail to see the effects of that adjustment in the main image window, and then click to apply that adjustment (see Figure 5.9). Being able to see exactly what sort of changes each particular Quick Fix makes before even touching the controls can make you much more confident in applying these fixes.

Figure 5.9. When you hold the cursor over any thumbnail, its effects are shown in the image window. Clicking the center thumbnail returns the image to its original colors; clicking another thumbnail applies that change.

When you’re satisfied with the results of your changes, whether you’ve used the Auto button or a slider, you have a couple of choices. First, you can click the Accept button to apply that change or the Cancel button to discard it. (These buttons only appear after you’ve made changes to a Quick Fix’s settings; they’re located right next to the Quick Fix’s name.) Or, if you want to keep making different fixes, you can move straight to another Quick Fix and use its controls. After you’re done applying Quick Fix adjustments, click Close to save your changes and close the image or click Reset to discard all of your changes and go back to the original version.

Other Tools in Quick Fix Mode

For the most part, the controls in Quick Fix mode consist of the Quick Fix panel, but you do have access to a few of the standard Photoshop Elements tools, and a few Touch Up buttons that live in the toolbox in Quick Fix mode (see Figure 5.10). The tools you can use in Quick Fix mode include the Zoom, Hand, Quick Selection, Crop, and Red Eye Removal tools. Here’s what you can do with each:

• Zoom—Click in the image window to enlarge your view, or press Alt and click to reduce it. If you want to focus on a specific part of the picture, click and drag in the image window to zoom that section of the picture so that it fills the window.

• Hand—Click in the image window and drag to move the picture around. Obviously, this has no effect if the entire photo is already visible in the window.

• Quick Selection—Click or click and drag on any color in the image to select similarly colored, adjacent areas (see Figure 5.11). Use the three buttons in the Tool Options bar above to determine whether subsequent clicks start a new selection (New Selection), add to the current selection (Add to Selection), or remove the color you click from the existing selection (Subtract from Selection).

• Crop—Click and drag with this tool to exclude the parts of the image that you want to delete. After you’ve drawn a cropping marquee, you can drag its corners to adjust its size and shape, and when you’ve got what you want, click the Accept button (the green check mark) to apply the crop. Everything inside the marquee stays; everything outside it is deleted, and the image window shrinks to the new size of the picture.

• Red Eye Removal—It couldn’t be simpler to get rid of red eye caused by flash photography; just click on each red eye in the picture to fix it.

Figure 5.10. Five tools and three Touch Up buttons are all that the toolbox holds in Quick Fix mode.

Figure 5.11. A series of clicks on the pink petals in this photo was all I needed to select just the petals, leaving the leaves and branches unselected. Now I’m ready to change the flowers to any color I like.

The three Touch Up buttons available in Quick Fix mode are Brighten (whiten) Teeth, Make Dull Skies Blue, and Black and White–High Contrast. Each of these works like a combination of the Quick Selection brush with the color controls in the Quick Fix panel. Choose a Touch Up, click and drag to select the area of the image that you want to touch up, and when your selection is complete Photoshop Elements automatically applies the appropriate changes (see Figure 5.12). Click Undo to roll the image back to its pre-touch-up state, Reset to remove all the modifications you’ve made since opening the picture, or Close to close the image and either save the changes or not.

Figure 5.12. This beach shot taken in Rhode Island looks much nicer with a bluer sky.

Learning from Guided Edit Mode

In Guided Edit mode, Photoshop Elements helps you along by showing you what tools and commands to use to accomplish your chosen task and by putting them right in front of you so that you don’t have to search them out amid Full Edit mode’s jungle of tools and menus (see Figure 5.13). You can use Guided Edit mode when you know what you want to do but you don’t want to have to think about it too much, or if you’re learning Photoshop Elements and want some assistance. It’s a useful method of learning the best way to accomplish certain tasks and the best sequence in which to perform them. You can follow the Guided Edit instructions the first couple of times you’re confronted with a particular task and then do the steps yourself in future, using Full Edit mode.

Figure 5.13. Using Guided Edit is like working through a tutorial with a trusted teacher who tells you what you need to know and shows you how to apply that information.

Guided Edits are divided into several categories, as follows:

• Basic Photo Edits—These are Crop Photo, Recompose Photo, Rotate and/or Straighten Photo, and Sharpen Photo (all things that you’re likely to want to do to any snapshot to make it presentable). Cropping enables you to trim the photo to the size and shape you want, and the Recompose procedure can move objects in a picture closer together for better composition without any obvious deletions. Rotation is something you’ll use on any photo taken in portrait mode (by turning your camera), and we all have an occasional need to straighten a slightly crooked shot. Finally, you can sharpen the photo’s details if it’s not too blurry.

• Lighting and Exposure—Like the Lighting Quick Fix, the Lighten or Darken task enables you to adjust highlights and shadows independently, while Brightness and Contrast works on the entire image at once. Adjust Levels shows you how to use a Full Edit tool that’s favored by professionals to even out the light and dark tones in images.

• Color Correction—No matter how good your camera is, you’ll undoubtedly find yourself needing to correct image colors at least once in a while. You can do so with three different Guided Edit tasks: Enhance Colors, Remove a Color Cast, and Correct Skin Tone (each of which is fairly obvious in its application).

• Guided Activities—What you can accomplish with the Touch Up Scratches, Blemishes, or Tear Marks Guided Edit is pretty apparent. The Guide for Editing a Photo walks you through the basic steps that you’d use on any photo you want to improve, while Fix Keystone Distortion shows you how to adjust the proportions of objects that were photographed at an angle, such as tall buildings shot from ground level (see Figure 5.14).

Figure 5.14. Keystone distortion can also appear when you’re shooting down at your subject—see how the shape of the jug is distorted?

• Photomerge—These are some of the coolest functions in all of Photoshop Elements. When they work well, they can be like magic. Group Shot is for combining multiple shots of the same group to produce one photo in which each person looks his or her best. Faces does the same thing with multiple close-up shots of people’s faces, and Scene Cleaner can remove unwanted objects such as passing cars by combining images in which they appear with the best shots that don’t have them. Finally, you can use Exposure to combine dark and light shots (such as with and without flash) to create one image in which all parts are well-lit.

• Automated Actions—Action Player plays actions, which are recorded series of steps that accomplish specific tasks. You can create actions in Photoshop itself, but not in Photoshop Elements. However, Elements does play actions created in Photoshop via this Guided Edit task. To play an action, choose an action set from the pop-up menu, and then choose an action from the second pop-up menu. Click Play Action, and then sit back and watch Photoshop Elements do all the work by itself. If you don’t like the results, click Reset and either choose another action to play or click Cancel to leave the Action Player.

• Photographic Effects—These tasks create the special effects implied by their names: Line Drawing, Old Fashioned Photo, and Saturated Slide Film Effect.

LET ME TRY IT

Performing a Guided Edit

To start a Guided Edit task, click its name in the Guided Edit panel. From there, all you have to do is follow the instructions in the Guided Edit panel.

1. If you’re in the Organizer, click the orange Fix button and choose Guided Photo Edit to switch to the Editor in Quick Fix mode. If you’re already working in the Editor, click the orange Edit button and choose EDIT Guided to switch to Guided Edit mode.
2. Scroll through the list of categories in the Guided Edit panel and click the disclosure triangle next to the category of fix you want to use.
3. Follow the instructions in the Guided Edit pane, adjusting image settings as necessary (see Figure 5.15). If the steps are numbered, be sure you follow them in the correct order.
   

   Figure 5.15. The text in the Guided Edit pane often teaches you some of the theory behind the adjustments you’re making.

   

4. To have Photoshop Elements choose the amount of adjustment the image needs, click the Auto button at the top of the Guided Edit pane.
5. When you’re happy with the image’s appearance, click Done at the bottom of the Guided Edit pane. If you don’t want to apply the changes, click Cancel instead.

Of course, a few Guided Edit tasks have special requirements:

• All of the Photomerge Guided Edits require that you have more than one image open. All the open images are visible in the Project Bin; before starting the Photomerge task, you need to open the Project Bin and Ctrl-click all the images you want to use for the task.

• The Action Player Guided Edit comes with a few action sets (Captions, Lose Weight, Resize and Crop, and Special Effects), but you can load more. Action files have an .atn filename extension. Find your ProgramData or Application Data folder (depending on whether your computer runs on Windows Vista or Windows XP) and locate the Photoshop Elements 8.0 folder within the Adobe folder inside it. From there, find this location: Localeen_USWorkflow Panelsactions, and then drop your action file or files inside that folder. For Mac users, the folder is located in almost the same place, except that the folder you need within en_US is called Support Files. It should already contain an action file called BatchMac.atn.

As you work in Guided Edit mode, you can change how your image preview appears. Click the window mode button at the bottom of the Guided Edit panel to cycle through the three views: After Only, Before & After–Horizontal, and Before & After–Vertical.

Working in Full Edit Mode

The Editor’s Full Edit mode looks similar to Photoshop itself. In fact, it has almost all of Photoshop’s power; there are very few things you can do in Photoshop that you can’t accomplish in Photoshop Elements. Sometimes specific features aren’t available in Photoshop Elements, such as the Quick Mask selection mode, which enables you to create a selection by painting over the parts of the image you want to select and erasing the parts you don’t want to select. But you can work around that lack with a little ingenuity. How? By creating an empty layer above your image and painting the area you want to select there, then selecting the transparency mask of that layer, returning to the image layer, and deleting the new layer. It takes a few more steps, but the functionality is there.

Even if that particular workaround doesn’t mean anything to you at this point—it will after you’ve read a few more chapters of this book—the point to remember here is that the Photoshop Elements Editor can help you do whatever you want with your pictures. The power is there, and it’s all yours. When you need to run filters, add type, or add layers to your picture, Full Edit mode is where you’ll be.

Let’s take a good look at the Full Edit workspace (see Figure 5.16). It has more components than the other two edit modes, including the following:

• Tool Options bar—These controls vary depending on which tool you’re using. They enable you to fine-tune and modify the behavior of each tool.

• Toolbox—The Editor puts four dozen different tools at your disposal (that’s right, almost 50 tools to play with). Some of these are purely utilitarian; for example, you use the selection tools to isolate the portion of the image you want to modify so that you don’t affect the rest of the picture. Other tools, such as the Gradient tool and the Cookie Cutter tool, let you express your creativity in all sorts of ways.

• Panel Bin—This area replaces the Quick Fix panel and the Guided Edit panel. Here’s where the Editor’s many panels are stored, by default, when they’re visible. You can hide and show panels to get the combination that’s most useful to you at the time, and you can drag their borders up and down to resize them. You can also drag panels out of the Panel Bin so that they float over the image window, which is useful when you want to see more panels than will reasonably fit in your Panel Bin or when you want to move a panel right next to the section of the image you’re working on at the moment.

• Project Bin—You can only work on one picture at a time in the Editor, but you can have as many image files open as your computer’s RAM allows. The ones you’re not editing can be stored in the Project Bin, which you can keep open (so you can see all of your current pictures) or closed (to reduce visual clutter), or you can leave multiple windows open while you work. The section “Arranging Windows and Panels,” later in this chapter, looks at ways to manage all these objects floating on your screen.

• Image window(s)—The bulk of the work area in Full Edit mode, as with Guided Edit and Quick Fix modes, is taken up by the photo itself, in the middle of the screen. This is where you click (or click and drag) tools to apply them to the picture.

Figure 5.16. This view of the Editor will look quite familiar if you’ve ever seen Photoshop itself in action.

In Quick Fix and Guided Edit modes, you spend most of your time manipulating controls in the Quick Fix and Guided Edit panels. As you can see, Full Edit mode also has panels, located in that same spot, but much less of the action takes place there. A typical workflow in Full Edit mode involves many more menu commands, a lot of tool switching, and work in dialogs that float over the image rather than sitting within a panel.

Using Tools in Full Edit Mode

The tools you’ll use in Full Edit mode can be divided into several categories based on their functions. Figure 5.17 shows all the tools with their names. You may want to refer back to this page later on if you can’t figure out where some of the hidden tools are lurking.

Figure 5.17. Grouping similar tools together makes it easier to find the one you need.

The navigation and measuring tools, located at the top of the toolbox, include the Move, Zoom, Hand, and Eyedropper tools. The first three enable you to navigate within image windows and move objects, and the Eyedropper is for measuring image colors. Below these four, you’ll see four more slots that contain various selection tools, with type tools and crop tools below that. Next are the retouching tools, which include the Red Eye Removal tool, the Healing Brushes, the Stamps, the Erasers, the Blur and Sharpen tools, and the Sponge, Dodge, and Burn tools. Then, of course, there are the painting and drawing tools: the Brushes and the Pencil, the Paint Bucket, and the Gradient tool. Finally, just below the Paint Bucket, is a single slot containing the tools you use for working with shapes.

All of these tools are covered in later chapters, so stay tuned.

Using Menus in Full Edit Mode

The drop-down menus in the Photoshop Elements Editor work like menus in any other program. Some commands end with an ellipsis, indicating that the command leads to a dialog box; others have submenus of related commands. Dimmed commands are not available under the current circumstances. For example, the Save Selection command isn’t available when there isn’t an active selection in your image window.

The Editor’s File and Edit menus contain the typical commands (Open, Close, Save, and the like in File; Cut/Copy/Paste in Edit) and a few unique to Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, such as Place, Organize Open Files, and Process Multiple Files. The other menus are as follows:

• Image—These commands enable you to rotate, resize, and reshape an image, and to divide a scan of multiple photos into individual image files. You can also change a picture’s color mode and delete its background with the Magic Extractor.

• Enhance—Auto versions of the Quick Fixes reside here: Auto Smart Fix, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Color Correction, Auto Sharpen, and Auto Red Eye Fix, along with adjustments that require more expertise, such as Adjust Smart Fix, Adjust Lighting, Adjust Color, Convert to Black and White, Unsharp Mask, and Adjust Sharpness.

• Layer—Once you start working with layers in Chapter 9, “Using Layers for Collage and More,” you’ll learn all about these commands, which enable you to create, delete, and manipulate different types of layers.

• Select—Similarly, these commands all deal with creating, deleting, and manipulating selections, as well as saving them for future use and loading saved selections.

• Filter—Want to turn your picture into an oil painting or spin it around until it’s dizzy? Filters are for you, and they’re all here in this menu, categorized into Adjustments, Artistic, Blur, Brush Strokes, Distort, Noise, Pixelate, Render, Sketch, Stylize, Texture, Video, Other, and Digimarc. Chapter 10 covers all of these kinds of filters.

• View and Window—The commands in these two menus are all about working with windows and panels.

• Help—If you still need help after reading this book, the Help menu should be your destination. It contains links to online help and technical support NS video tutorials and user forums, along with registration and activation functions.

Arranging Windows and Panels

The Editor, especially in Full Edit mode, has a lot of windows and panels. Keeping track of what’s going on with your image and making sure you can see everything you need to see at any given time can get tricky. That’s why Photoshop Elements offers several different ways to keep windows and panels from getting out of control. For example, in Full Edit mode you can keep panels docked in the Panel Bin or drag them out to undock them. You can also hide panels you’re not using, whether they’re docked or undocked, and you can minimize panels to icon mode so that they’re still visible onscreen but take up less space.

After you’ve dealt with the myriad panels that Full Edit mode sports, you’ll still have to figure out how to manage multiple windows and how to move around within a window when you’re zoomed in on details within the image.

Docking and Undocking Panels

The three areas you’ll find yourself dealing with when it comes to panels are the toolbox, the Panel Bin, and the Project Bin.

The toolbox starts out at the left edge of your screen. Double-click the gripper bar at the top of the toolbox, or click the double triangle at the left side of the gripper bar, to switch between single-column and double-column layouts (see Figure 5.18). Click to choose a tool. If a tool space has a small triangle in its lower-right corner, it’s hiding additional tools; click and hold or Ctrl-click to see these, and click one to switch to it. You can also drag the toolbox away from the side of the screen and leave it floating or dock it on the other side of the screen.

Figure 5.18. Double-column mode looks more like the traditional Photoshop Tools panel (although Photoshop’s Tools panel can operate in both single- and double-column modes these days), but single-column mode leaves more space open for images in the center of the workspace.

The Panel Bin, normally located on the right side of the screen, can also be relocated to the other side. It can hold any or all of 10 different panels: Adjustments, Color Swatches, Content, Effects, Favorites, Histogram, Info, Layers, Navigator, and Undo History. Click the double arrow at the top of the Panel Bin to switch to Icon view, in which each panel is represented by a small icon and its name (see Figure 5.19). Open one of these “iconized” panels by clicking the icon, and then minimize it back into icon view by clicking its double arrow when you’re done. To resize a panel, click the line between it and an adjacent panel and drag up or down as appropriate.

Figure 5.19. If you minimize your panels, there’s room to keep them all open onscreen so that you don’t have to keep traipsing back to the Window menu to find them.

Of course, panels don’t have to stay in the Panel Bin. Click a panel’s name and drag it out of the Panel Bin to undock it. To put it back, drag it to the Panel Bin and position below another panel. When you can see a blue line between the two, release the mouse button to dock the panel in that position. To hide the Panel Bin, choose Panel Bin from the Window menu.

The Project Bin appears in all three editing modes. Sometimes you’ll want to use it to keep track of multiple open images; other times you only have a single picture open and the Project Bin is just taking up space you could be using to edit your photo. Double-click the Project Bin’s tab to hide it; double-click again to show it.

Arranging Image Windows

Image windows can float or be tabbed. Floating windows can be sized any way you like, and commands in the Window menu enable you to arrange multiple image windows so that you can see them all simultaneously. If you want to work with multiple images but only see one at a time, you can combine all the image windows into a single tabbed window, in which you switch images by clicking the tab for the picture you want to move to (see Figure 5.20).

Figure 5.20. Here a single window holds four photos.

The Images submenu in the Window menu contains a variety of commands for both floating windows and tabbed windows. Starting with floating window commands, you can choose Tile to resize and rearrange all open windows so that you can see them all. Afterward, you’ll often want to choose Match Zoom to switch all open windows to the same zoom level as the current image window or Match Location to switch all open windows to show the same part of the image as the current image window. If you want to see the open windows but you don’t need to see the images they contain, choose Cascade rather than Tile to stack the image windows one in front of another so that you can see all the title bars. And if you really don’t want your windows to float after all, choose Consolidate All to Tabs to combine all floating windows into a single tabbed window.

When you’re dealing with tabbed windows, two commands can turn them back into floating windows: Float in Window (which pops the current image out of the tab bar) and Float All in Windows (which pops all the open images out of the tab bar and removes the tabbed window altogether).

No matter which mode your current image windows use, the New Window command creates a new floating window showing the current image. Changes made in either window are immediately reflected in the other, making this a good way to have both a close-up view and a zoomed-out view of an image while you work on it.

LET ME TRY IT

Using Tabbed Windows and Independent Windows

Using independent windows makes it easier to drag objects from one window to another, but tabbed windows can be much easier to keep track of. To switch modes, you just have to drag a window’s title bar to a new position.

1. To add a window to the tab bar, click its title bar and drag to the top of the image area until you see a blue outline, then release the mouse button.
2. To combine images into a single independent tabbed window, drag the title bar of one over the other until you see the blue outline, then release the mouse button (see Figure 5.21).
   

   Figure 5.21. The blue outline tells you where the window will go when you release the mouse button.

   

3. To turn a tabbed window, no matter its location, into an independent window, drag the image’s title bar out of the window into the main image area. Or, if you prefer, choose Float in Window from the Images submenu of the Window menu.
4. To turn all open image windows into tabbed windows, choose Consolidate All to Tabs from the Images submenu of the Window menu.

Moving Around in Image Windows

In a Note earlier in this chapter you learned how to temporarily switch from whatever tool you’re using to the Hand tool (press spacebar) or the Zoom tool (press Ctrl) so that you can change your zoom level and move the image around within its window. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Photoshop Elements also has a panel for that (see Figure 5.22).

Figure 5.22. You’ll find the Navigator panel particularly useful when you’re really zoomed in on an image.

The Navigator panel is designed to help you move around within windows when you’re zoomed in to a level at which the entire image isn’t visible. It displays a thumbnail preview of your image, overlaid with a red rectangle showing what part of the image is visible. You can click and drag this view box around in the preview to look at different parts of the image. Meanwhile, you can use the Navigator panel to change your zoom level in three different ways: Enter a zoom percentage in the text entry field, click the Zoom In (+) or Zoom Out (−) buttons, or drag the slider between the Zoom in and Zoom Out buttons.