What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>How to use Photoshop Elements tool tips
</objective> <objective>How Elements can walk you through projects step by step
</objective> <objective>How to use Elements’ built-in Help system
</objective> </feature>Okay, you have this digital camera, maybe a scanner, definitely a computer—now what? The answer to that question is an easy three words: Adobe Photoshop Elements. Using this one simple but incredibly powerful program, you can transfer pictures from your camera to your hard drive; control a scanner; organize your photos in a zillion different ways; clean up any messy bits they contain; crop, rotate, and resize them; adjust their lighting and color; and share them with the world online, as prints, or plastered on any number of cool gift items. Photoshop Elements gives you complete control over how your digital images look, without requiring you to become a photo editing expert to accomplish your goals. If your digital pictures are starting to pile up and you just don’t know how to deal with them, I think you’ll find that Photoshop Elements is exactly what you need.
If you hang around with graphics geeks, you’ve probably heard of Adobe Photoshop. This is the photo-editing program that has become such a standard that its name is now a verb: “Oh, that tree was messing up the image’s composition, so I Photoshopped it out.” Yes, that Photoshop. Now, Photoshop Elements is descended from Photoshop, with all the power that implies. If I had to guess, I’d say that probably 95% of the work done in Photoshop around the world every day could just as easily be done in Photoshop Elements; the Photoshop features that you won’t find in Photoshop Elements are ones you’re extremely unlikely to miss. Along with a good chunk of Photoshop’s feature set, Photoshop Elements has several features that Photoshop doesn’t: a built-in image cataloger, auto-everything for days when you don’t feel like doing the work yourself, and tons of templates for cool projects that you can make with your images. (And, of course, you don’t need a graduate degree to use it.) For all this, you pay a fraction of the price of Photoshop: $99, as opposed to $649. Cool, huh? On top of that, every time Photoshop gets new features, some of them trickle down to Photoshop Elements, so it just keeps getting better. In fact, if you’ve used Photoshop Elements before, you’ll be amazed at the new features you’ll find in version 6.
But enough rhapsodizing about the wonders of Photoshop Elements. If you’re reading this book, you’ve probably already decided that you want to learn how to use the program, so let’s move on to some practical information. This hour starts you off with a few places to find help when you get stuck. What kind of help you need depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Cropping photos? Adjusting lighting? Publishing web galleries? All of this might sound rather complicated, but there’s no need to worry. Photoshop Elements can help you figure out what to do, whether you can tell a pixel from a pixie stick or not.
If you know what you want to do, and you have a pretty good idea of how to accomplish it but you haven’t used Photoshop Elements before, tool tips are for you. These look just like the little boxes that pop up over web links, but instead of telling you where a link goes, they tell you what you’re looking at. If you place your cursor over a tool in the toolbox, the tool tip displays its name and its shortcut key. If you stop and hover over an image effect button, you’ll see its name (see Figure 1.1).
Be sure to move your cursor around the whole screen; many more parts of the Photoshop Elements work area have tool tips than you might expect. Check palette tabs, buttons, pop-up menus, and anything else you’re curious about.
If you don’t like tool tips—they can be irritating if you don’t need the information they supply—you can turn them off by choosing Edit, Preferences, General. Click the Show Tool Tips check box; click it again to turn tool tips back on.
In some cases, the name displayed in a tool tip is a link to the appropriate Photoshop Elements Help section. (We talk more about the built-in help shortly.) You’ll recognize these because the text is blue instead of black. Just click the text of the ToolTip to learn more.
When you know what you want to do, but you have no idea how to accomplish it in Photoshop Elements, turn to Guided Edit. This feature, which is new to version 6, presents you with step-by-step instructions and recommendations for a variety of standard editing tasks. The tasks in Guided Edit are divided into the following categories:
Basic Photo Edits—. Cropping, rotating, sharpening, and straightening photos
Lighting and Exposure—. Lightening and darkening photos and improving their contrast
Color Correction—. Making colors clearer, brighter, and more accurate
Guided Activities—. Fixing blotches or rips in a scanned image and performing a complete series of edits in a logical sequence to produce the best possible image
Photomerge—. Replacing part of a photo with the corresponding area in a similar photo to produce the best group photos
When you enter Guided Edit mode, the first thing you’ll see is this list of tasks. Clicking one brings up instructions for completing it, with all the controls placed right there in the Guided Edit tab (see Figure 1.2). These are the same tool buttons you’ll find in the toolbox, and the same sliders you’ll find in a variety of dialog boxes if you’re using Full Edit mode—but in Guided Edit mode, you don’t have to go looking for them.
For each Guided Edit task, you can click Tell Me More below the instructions to view help information about the specific topic at hand.
By now, you’ve probably noticed the Help menu at the top of the Photoshop Elements window. Not surprisingly, it provides access to Photoshop Elements’ built-in Help. Choose Help, Photoshop Elements Help, or press F1 if you prefer keyboard shortcuts. The Help system displays in your web browser, offering you a choice of three ways to navigate: Find your topic in the table of contents, check the index for the keyword you have in mind, or search for relevant terms (see Figure 1.3).
The Help system provides what Adobe calls “abbreviated” information on just about every tool and feature of Photoshop Elements. If you want greater detail on any topic in Help, click This Page on the Web at the bottom of that topic’s page to open the corresponding LiveDocs page on the Adobe website. These pages are constantly updated, so they provide the most complete and up-to-date help Adobe has to offer. And they look very much like the built-in help, so you might not even notice that you’ve switched to the Web. Of course, if you don’t have an Internet connection when you click on a LiveDocs link, you won’t go anywhere.
If you prefer to read useful information on paper, you can print any topic from the built-in help or LiveDocs using your web browser’s Print command. Better yet, you can download the Photoshop Elements Help PDF (www.adobe.com/go/learn_pse_printpdf) and print the sections you want to read, or take the PDF with you on your PDA or e-book reader.
By the Way
The Photoshop Help PDF is what we used to call a user manual, before software companies decided it was too expensive to bother printing them anymore. It’s more than 450 pages of solid, comprehensive information, so although it’s great to have around, you probably don’t want to print the whole thing.
For those fortunate readers who have used Photoshop Elements before, some catching up might be in order. As I mentioned earlier, this program just keeps getting easier to use and more powerful with each upgrade. To give you an idea of where Photoshop Elements is as of version 6, here’s a rundown on the new features and capabilities added in each new version of the program.
On the other hand, if you’re new to Photoshop Elements and none of this means anything to you, that’s fine—just skip ahead to the Summary at the end of this hour.
The first change experienced users will notice in version 6 is a new, streamlined, tab-based interface that draws a very sharp line between the Organizer and the Editor (see Figure 1.4). Then there’s Guided Edit (mentioned earlier in this hour), which walks you through image-editing tasks without actually doing them for you. The Magic Selection tool has been renamed the Quick Selection tool, like its counterpart in Photoshop, and the Refine Edge dialog box enables you to modify the tool’s selection parameters while keeping it active. Smart Albums, in the Organizer, update themselves automatically whenever a new image shows up that fits the criteria you’ve defined. You’ll also find more Create options and a centralized Sharing center. And ... but we should save some of the fun stuff for later hours. Don’t worry, there’s a lot more to learn about Photoshop Elements 6 as we travel through these 24 hours, and I think you’re really going to enjoy the ride.
You learned about several ways—in addition to reading this book—to get help using Photoshop Elements. Tool tips and built-in help tell you most of what you want to know. If you have web access, you can also check out the great information on the Adobe website, in the form of both LiveDocs (expanded help) and a PDF version of a traditional user manual.
All this talk about needing help is making me nervous. Isn’t Photoshop Elements supposed to be easy to use? | |
Don’t worry—Photoshop Elements really is easy to use. You might not ever need to use any of the resources we’ve looked at in this hour, but wouldn’t you rather know how to get to them if you ever do want them? | |
Can I find help in any other places? | |
Oh, sure, especially on the Web. A couple of my favorite Photoshop Elements websites are Easy Elements (www.easyelements.com) and the About.com Photoshop Elements subsite (http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/). For print lovers, the Adobe Photoshop Elements Techniques newsletter comes out eight times a year and has tons of great tips, as well as a lot of extra content on the associated website (www.photoshopelementsuser.com). | |
What if I decide Photoshop Elements just doesn’t have the power I really need? | |
If and when you decide to make the move to the big leagues, you can upgrade from Photoshop Elements to Photoshop itself for about $100 less than it would cost to buy Photoshop outright. So you have nothing whatsoever to lose by starting with Elements and later moving on up. |
Let’s start things off easy. Choose Display, Date View to switch to viewing your photos in the framework of a calendar. Click the Month button at the bottom of the window, and then use the arrow buttons to move from month to month so you can check out the pictures on the calendar. Click a day to display its photo at the right side of the screen then use the arrows below the picture to see more photos from that day. Enter recurring events, such as birthdays and anniversaries, in the calendar by clicking the New Event button at the right edge of the window. You can even use this calendar as a journal by adding text notes to the days. Have fun!