6. Fixing Your Pictures

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to change the size and shape of your pictures, rotate them, and change their orientation by flipping them. You’ll also learn how to crop pictures for the best presentation, how to fix lighting and improve contrast, how to adjust color and make it pop, and how to sharpen details without making your picture look artificial.

Let’s face it: No picture is perfect. Almost every picture that comes off your (or my) camera can use one or more of the fix-ups covered in this chapter. Think of them as ways to present your image in its best light—literally—like washing its face and combing its hair before you send it out to face the world (see Figure 6.1). By resizing, rotating, and cropping a photo, you’re essentially making sure its clothes fit and don’t have any distracting dangling threads. And when you adjust lighting, fix color, and sharpen blurry images, you’re ensuring that they’re clean, tidy, and clear in every detail.

Figure 6.1. A tweak to the lighting, a nudge to the color, a better crop—and this photo is ready for prime time.

For the most part, we’ll look at how the adjustments shown here can be made in Full Edit mode, which has almost as much functionality as Photoshop itself, with pointers here and there to help you find similar functions in the simpler Quick Fix and Guided Edit modes. You’ll find that there’s considerably more functionality in Full Edit, and if you understand what’s behind the Full Edit controls, you’ll be able to apply the Quick Fix and Guided Edit adjustments more effectively.

Rotating, Cropping, and Resizing

The techniques outlined in this section don’t actually change your picture at all—just trim off the bits that you don’t want, make sure it’s straight, and give it a shape and size that show it to best advantage. Before you get started, you’ll need to know where your photo is headed—to the Web, to a frame, or to a printed publication such as a newsletter?—and what part of it you want to grab the viewer’s attention.

Rotating and Flipping

There are two reasons that you might want to rotate your picture. First off, it could just be turned the wrong way; maybe you scanned it upside down, or you took the shot in portrait mode by turning your camera on its side and now you need to orient the resulting image correctly onscreen. Second, it might just be crooked. Even when you use a tripod, there’s no guarantee your photo will be straight, and the odds are stacked against you if you’re shooting by hand, especially if you’re moving while you’re shooting. Fixing either of these problems in the Editor requires a trip to the Rotate submenu of the Image menu.

You’ll notice three sections in the Rotate submenu. You use the commands in the first group to rotate entire images; the second group applies only to individual layers. If you want to rotate your picture in 90-degree increments, then choose 90° Left or 90° Right, or 180° if you want to turn it upside down. Choose Custom if you want to rotate your picture a different number of degrees. Enter the number in the Rotate Canvas dialog, choose °Right or °Left, and click OK. To make sure that none of the picture is deleted, the Editor increases the size of the image and fills in newly created spaces with the Background color that you see in the toolbox (see Figure 6.2). To get rid of this extra space, you’ll need to crop the picture as described in the next section (“Cropping for the Best Shot”).

Figure 6.2. The white space around the picture was created by Photoshop Elements when it rotated the image the number of degrees I specified.

The Straighten Image command works similarly, only when you choose this command Photoshop Elements decides for itself how much to rotate the photo. Sometimes it’s right; other times it’s wrong.

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Straighten an Image

My never-fail technique for straightening images the old-fashioned (and accurate) way goes like this:

1. Choose Info from the Window menu to show the Info panel.
2. Click whichever shape tool is showing in the toolbox to display the submenu of shape tools and choose the Line tool.
3. Find a line in the picture that should be either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical.
4. Drag the Line tool across it, watching the Info panel as you go. In the upper-right corner of the panel are a number of statistics about this line, including its angle (A:). Note the angle measurement—this is the magic number (see Figure 6.3).
   

   Figure 6.3. The angle of the line I’m drawing along the stair (7.2°) is the angle to which I need to rotate this image so that the stair will appear level.

   

5. Immediately click the Undo button to get rid of this extraneous line in the middle of your picture.
6. Now, choose Custom from the Rotate submenu in the Image menu. Enter the magic number from step 4 and click OK.

And that’s all there is to it. Your picture rotates just the right amount to straighten it out, with no guessing as to what that amount might be.

Once your picture is straight, there’s one more thing you might need to do before moving on to the next step: cropping. That’s flipping it, or—as professional printers say—flopping it. Why? Well, if you plan to place the picture on a printed page, or web page, or in a frame with other photos, you generally want to make sure the people or objects in it are facing the rest of the page or the other pictures in the frame rather than looking into space. You might have other reasons, too, depending on your plans for this particular image. Regardless of your motives, to flop the image you just choose Flip Horizontal or Flip Vertical from the Rotate submenu in the Image menu.

Cropping for the Best Shot

The Crop tool enables you to reshape your picture to suit your needs rather than your camera’s; not all pictures need to be the proportions that your camera produces, you know. True, most picture frames are designed to fit standard print sizes, but not all of them. And when you’re designing for print or the Web, anything goes as far as image shape is concerned. Then, too, even if you do want to use standard proportions, you might not want to include all of the image. Unless you’re really good at composing photos on the fly while you’re shooting, you’ll almost always want to crop out things that distract from the picture’s subject.

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Crop an Image

To use the Crop tool, follow these steps:

1. With your image open in the Editor, switch to the Crop tool, which you’ll find in the toolbox next to the type tools.
2. If you want to crop your image to standard proportions, click the Aspect Ratio pop-up menu in the Tool Options bar and choose one of the options. Most of these are standard photo print sizes from 2.5″ × 2″ to 8″ × 10″. The one ringer in the bunch is Use Photo Ratio, which simply matches whatever proportions the photo currently has. If you don’t want to specify the image proportions, leave the Aspect Ratio menu set to No Restriction.
3. Click and drag in the image to create the cropping marquee (see Figure 6.4).
   

   Figure 6.4. You can drag the corners of the cropping marquee to adjust its size and shape.

   

4. Click a corner or a side handle on the marquee and drag it to change the marquee’s size and shape, or click inside the marquee and drag to reposition it within the image. The light area inside the marquee shows the part of the picture that will remain after you crop it; the dark area outside is the part that will be cropped out.
   

   You can also press the arrow keys to move the cropping marquee around within the image if you need to make just a tiny adjustment.

5. When you’re happy with the crop, double-click within the marquee or click the Apply button (the green checkmark) to finish the cropping operation (see Figure 6.5). You can undo if you change your mind before closing the picture.

Figure 6.5. The final crop follows the boundaries set by the cropping marquee.

Changing Image Size and Resolution

When you want to print an image at a different size or display it onscreen at a different size, you usually have two choices. Sometimes the software you’re using can resize the image itself; other times the program or website can only use the size you give it, which means you’ll need to resize the picture in Photoshop Elements. First, let’s review the relationship between size and resolution.

As you know, a digital image is made up of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of square pixels, each a different color. When you’re talking about a digital image, size refers to the dimensions at which you’re displaying or printing a picture, while resolution is the number of image pixels that are displayed per inch on the computer screen or printed on paper. When you change a digital photo’s size, you can do it with or without changing the number of pixels, which is called resampling. If you don’t allow resampling, reducing the image’s size increases its resolution (same number of pixels in a smaller space) while increasing its size decreases its resolution (same number of pixels to fill a larger area) and can result in what’s often called a “jaggy” image (see Figure 6.6). If, on the other hand, you do allow resampling, you can specify the exact resolution you want, and Photoshop Elements will either delete some pixels (downsampling) or create new pixels between the existing ones (upsampling). Either way, this procedure changes the picture, generally making it blurrier when you upsample and eliminating detail when you downsample. For that reason, it’s best to avoid resampling unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Figure 6.6. Image pixels are square, which isn’t a problem as long as they’re too small for your eye to pick out individual pixels. Here you can see how they come together to form the image.

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Changing Image Resolution

Resampling is a simple procedure, but all this jargon may make it sound more complicated than it is. Let’s take a look at the Image Size dialog to see how all this works in practice.

1. Choose Image Size from the Resize submenu in the Image menu (see Figure 6.7). The dimensions of the current image are shown in two sections: one for its pixel dimensions and one for the size at which it will print (Document Size).
   

   Figure 6.7. Image Size enables you to control both the print dimensions of an image and the number of pixels it contains.

   

2. Check the Resample Image box at the bottom of the dialog. If it isn’t checked, you can’t enter new values in the Pixel Dimensions area (see Figure 6.8), because resampling is the only way to change the number of pixels. On the other hand, if Resample Image is checked, you can enter new pixel dimensions or change the values in the Document Size area and allow Photoshop Elements to calculate the revised pixel dimensions; either method has the same results.
   

   Figure 6.8. When resampling is turned off, changing an image’s size automatically changes its resolution, and vice versa.

   

   If you turn on resampling to produce a low-res web image or a higher-res image that you can print larger, you’re risking blurring the picture. Always save the original version of a picture before you resample it, just in case you decide the resampling does too much damage.

3. Check Scale Size to ensure that styles such as glows and shadows stay proportional to the image. If you leave the box unchecked when resizing an image, the styles stay at the same absolute size, which may make them look too small or too large for the objects to which they’re applied.
4. Most of the time, you’ll want to be sure Constrain Proportions is checked. IF you want to resize the image disproportionately (in other words, stretch it or squish it), leave this box unchecked.
   

   When Resample Image is turned on, you have a choice of resampling methods from the pop-up menu below it. Unless you’re resizing a picture with all straight lines and 90-degree corners, in which case you’d choose Nearest Neighbor, you’ll want to use one of the Bicubic options, each of which is labeled with the application for which it’s best.

5. Enter new values in either the Pixel Dimensions or Document Size area. For a web image, you’re more likely to use the Pixel Dimensions area, because web images are measured in pixels. For a printed image, you’ll generally be aiming at a specific size and resolution, such as 2″ × 3″ at 300 pixels per inch.
   

   If you get mixed up (as I often do when I’m changing size and resolution at the same time), press Alt to turn the Cancel button into a Reset button, then click Reset to return all the values in the dialog to their original numbers so you can start over.

6. When you have finished making changes, click OK to apply them to the picture.

Adjusting Lighting

How the light falls on a scene usually determines the mood of the photo, as well as how well the image’s details show up. Although you can’t put back details that are completely lost, you can adjust a picture’s lighting in Photoshop Elements to make it more even, or more dramatic, with strong shadows and highlights. Each pixel that helps make up the image, in addition to a color value if it’s a color picture, also has a lightness value. White is the lightest, black is the darkest, and all other colors and shades of gray fall in between. Photoshop Elements offers several ways for you to manipulate these levels, either across an entire image or focusing only on the highlights, shadows, or midtones.

Highlights are the brightest areas of an image; in a black-and-white picture, these are light gray to white. Shadows, conversely, are the darkest areas of an image—dark gray to black in a black-and-white picture. Everything in between qualifies as a midtone. These definitions apply to color pictures as well as black-and-white ones; highlights, shadows, and midtones are just easier to spot in a black-and-white picture because there’s no color to distract you.

You can see how brightness levels are distributed within a picture by looking at the Histogram panel (see Figure 6.9). A histogram is a bar graph showing how many pixels at each possible brightness level are contained within an image. For example, a picture that’s all black and dark grays would have a lot of tall bars on the left side of the histogram, indicating a lot of shadows, and very short bars on the right side, indicating few highlights. You can even adjust a picture’s histogram directly on the graph by using the Levels command.

Figure 6.9. Most of the pixels in this photo are of medium brightness, with almost none being pure black.

Remember, you can compensate for lighting flaws to a degree by editing the image, but you’re better off knowing your camera’s strengths and weaknesses and sticking to shots you know you can capture accurately.

Lightening and Darkening Images

Images that are too light or too dark generally happen because of poor lighting conditions that consumer-level cameras can’t deal with or inappropriate settings that make the camera incapable of dealing with that lighting. For example, you disabled the flash for an outdoor close-up and forgot to turn it back on when you went inside and started shooting there. You also may want to lighten or darken a picture to compensate for the way it will be displayed. Onscreen images can be darker than print images, for one thing, since the fact that they’re lit up on a screen often exaggerates their highlights.

The best way the Editor provides for you to work with an image’s overall lightness is the Levels dialog, which incorporates a histogram and sliders that enable you to redistribute the image’s dark and light areas to suit your tastes.

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Using the Levels Dialog to Redistribute Dark and Light Areas in an Image

Here’s how to make the best use of the Levels dialog:

1. Choose Levels from the Adjust Lighting submenu in the Enhance menu (or press Ctrl+L). (See Figure 6.10.)
   

   Figure 6.10. By moving the Levels dialog’s three sliders, I can remap the image’s brightness levels along a different range.

   

2. To see what Photoshop Elements considers the optimum Levels adjustment, click the Auto button. If you like what you see, you’re done—click OK. If not, move on to the next step.
3. The eyedropper tools on the right side of the Levels dialog give you a quick and easy method of indicating what you want to be the lightest and darkest points in the image. Click the black eyedropper, and then click it in the image in an area that you want to be pure black. Then do the same with the white eyedropper, only this time clicking an area in the image that you want to be pure white.
   

   What’s the gray eyedropper for? I’m glad you asked. It’s a way of indicating which colors you want to be neutral; you can remove a color cast—an overall tinge of color that shouldn’t be there—by clicking with it on a gray shadow or rock in a color picture.

4. Most of your work is done at this point. Now you just have to adjust the sliders below the histogram. Each slider controls a different range of tones within the image. The black slider enables you to darken or lighten shadows, the white slider does the same for highlights, and the gray slider works on the picture’s midtones. No matter which slider you’re using, drag to the right to darken those tones or to the left to lighten them. What this does is remap the image across a smaller range of lightness levels, which means you need to work with care; if you take the number of levels down too far, the image starts to look cartoonish.
   

   To start, drag the black and white sliders to the beginning of the upward curves on their respective ends of the graph. Then drag the midtone slider to brighten or darken the image overall (see Figure 6.11). Most commonly, you’ll want to make the midtones lighter by dragging to the left, but don’t go too far or the image will lose depth and appear flat.

   Figure 6.11. Lightening up the midtones usually makes a picture “pop.”

   

5. If you want to eliminate the darkest or lightest tones from the image entirely, drag the corresponding slider on the Output Levels gradient bar. Doing this reduces image contrast, so it’s not usually a good idea.
6. Adjust the sliders until you like the looks of your picture. If you want to start over again, just click Reset. When you’ve finished, click OK.

Fixing Dark Shadows or Bright Highlights

Often, you don’t want to darken or lighten an entire image; you want to focus just on those deep shadows that are hiding detail or those way-too-bright highlights that are pulling the viewer’s eye from the rest of the image. In these cases, the Editor’s Shadows/Highlights command is the way to go. But wield it with care; used with a heavy hand, these controls can ruin a picture.

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Adjusting Shadows and Highlights

1. In the Editor, choose Shadows/Highlights from the Adjust Lighting submenu in the Enhance menu.
2. Drag the three adjustment sliders (or enter values in the text entry fields) to make your changes (see Figure 6.12). Note that the Editor always starts you off with a 25% setting on the Lighten Shadows slider, and I find that this default value is almost always way too much, giving you flat gray shadows rather than nice shadowy ones. I usually pull this value back to 10% to 15%, but of course each image needs a different setting.
   

   Figure 6.12. The default values that the Editor inserts in the Shadows/Highlights dialog are rarely right.

   

   • Lighten Shadows—This control lightens darker areas in the photo, allowing detail in the shadows to emerge.

   • Darken Highlights—Drag this slider to darken light areas of the photo. Unless the area is pure white, without any detail, this should reveal more details in the photo’s highlights.

   • Midtone Contrast—The midtones, or medium-bright areas of an image, can be darkened or lightened by dragging this slider. Use midtone contrast to enhance the effect of lightening shadows or darkening highlights by meeting the other settings in the middle. In other words, if you make the midtones a bit darker, you don’t have to lighten the shadows as much, giving you a less exaggerated effect.

3. Click OK when you’re happy with the effect you’ve achieved. Remember, you can click Reset at any time to start over from the point at which you opened the Levels dialog. (Press Alt to turn the Cancel button into a Reset button.)

Improving Contrast

Contrast, when you’re talking about photos, refers to the balance between light and dark areas of a picture. A picture that doesn’t have bright spots and shadows looks dull because it lacks contrast. The Editor offers you several ways of improving a picture’s contrast, including Levels and the Dodge and Burn tools, but it also features a command designed specifically for this purpose: Brightness/Contrast in the Adjust Lighting submenu of the Enhance menu.

When you choose Brightness/Contrast, you’re presented a very simple dialog with two sliders. You guessed it; one is for brightness, the other for contrast (see Figure 6.13). Drag the Brightness slider to the right to lighten the entire image or to the left to darken the entire image. The Contrast slider, on the other hand, does two things at once. Drag to the right to darken shadows and brighten highlights, while also pushing midtones in either the highlight or shadow direction. This increases overall contrast in the picture. To do the opposite, flattening out the contrast for an image that’s too exaggerated, drag to the left.

Figure 6.13. The colors in this picture are subtle, but increasing its brightness and contrast pump them up quite a bit.

Adjusting Color

There are lots of reasons that you might want to fiddle with the color in a photo. For example, your goal might be to make the picture look prettier or more lifelike, to make it reproduce better, or for artistic reasons, such as drawing attention to certain areas of the image. Whatever your goal, the Editor can get you there with a wide range of color-modification tools and commands. You can also choose to get rid of a picture’s color and go grayscale, for an old-fashioned look or for increased drama.

Correcting Color

Why might a picture’s color be “wrong”? Usually, this happens because the scene’s lighting affected how the camera captured it—it made colors appear lighter or darker than they really are or created a color cast that changed their appearance. You’ll also run into situations in which the true colors of the objects you photographed don’t match how you visualize those objects in your mind. Sometimes, you’ll find, you need to adjust image color to what looks most appropriate rather than what’s actually most accurate.

Sometimes what needs to be done to a picture to fix it is very clear. For example, old snapshots often have a color cast due to deterioration of the chemicals and paper used to create the original print. After scanning these, you can get rid of the extraneous color using the Remove Color Cast command, found in the Adjust Color submenu of the Enhance menu. After choosing the command, you’re presented with an eyedropper. Just click anywhere in the picture that should be a neutral color (white, gray, or pure black). If you don’t like the result, click somewhere else until you get the color the way you want it (see Figure 6.14), and then click OK. Remember, you can still adjust the color in other ways, so your results after this step don’t have to be perfect.

Figure 6.14. Clicking the gray T-shirt will remove the yellow color cast caused in this picture by incandescent lighting.

After a color cast has been dealt with, take a look at any people in the picture. Do they look right? Or does their skin look “off”? Adjusting the image’s color so that a key object looks right often makes everything else in the picture look right too, and skin tones are an easy target, especially if you know the people in the picture. To fix skin tones, choose Adjust Color for Skin Tone from the Adjust Color submenu of the Enhance menu. Again, you’re presented with an eyedropper. This time, use it to click on a skin-colored area anywhere in the picture. The Editor automatically adjusts the entire image to produce what it considers realistic skin tones, based on what colors you’ve indicated as skin tones. Then you can tweak the results by dragging the Skin and Ambient Light sliders (see Figure 6.15). These three controls work as follows:

Figure 6.15. Clicking an area of skin gets rid of the greenish tone cast over the whole photo by the bushes.

• Tan—Changes the level of brown in skin tones.

• Blush—Makes skin tones more or less red.

• Temperature—Changes the overall color of skin tones, making the entire image appear more blue (cooler) or more red (warmer) according to your setting.

Like a Guided Edit task, Adjust Color for Skin Tone provides instructions for its use right in the dialog. You really can’t go wrong; remember, if the picture gets hopelessly messed up, you can always just click Reset to start over again.

Photoshop Elements also offers a couple of less-specific color-correction commands, one for more expert users and one that enables you to eyeball your changes—perfect for nonexperts. The first of these is Adjust Color Curves (choose Adjust Color Curves from the Adjust Color submenu in the Enhance menu), which works via a somewhat intimidatingly scientific-looking dialog (see Figure 6.16). The easy way to work with curves is to choose a preset from the Styles list in the lower-left corner of the dialog. The best way to choose is to click through each in turn and see what it does to the picture, shown both in preview form right in the dialog and also in the image window itself.

Figure 6.16. By working with the color curve, you can adjust a picture’s highlights, midtones, and shadows separately at the same time.

If you don’t find just the effect you’re looking for in the Style presets, you can adjust the curves yourself by dragging the sliders next to the curve grid. To get an idea of what each slider does, take a look at how the curve changes for each of the preset Styles. You can modify the curve in the following ways:

• Adjust Highlights—Drag this slider left and right to move the top part of the curve up and down. This changes the brightness of the light colors in the picture.

• Midtone Brightness—This slider moves the midpoint of the curve up and down, making the medium-bright colors in the image darker or lighter.

• Midtone Contrast—By moving the midpoint of the curve left or right, you can change which colors are assigned to the middle of the brightness range, making them appear more or less different from the highlights and shadows.

• Adjust Shadows—The final slider works just like the first one, only it operates on the shadow areas in the picture rather than the highlights.

Experimentation is key when working with the color curve. As you become more familiar with the Editor’s interface for adjusting the curve, you’ll learn which general direction you need to push the curve in to achieve your goal, but the exact curve adjustments needed are unique to each image.

For a simpler, more intuitive method of adjusting image color, you may want to try Color Variations, which is similar to Quick Fix’s preview grids, but bigger and with much more control (see Figure 6.17). With your image open, start by choosing Color Variations from the Adjust Color submenu of the Enhance menu. The dialog shows you several different thumbnail versions of your picture, each with a slight adjustment to the color in one direction or another, along with larger before and after versions of the image. Clicking any of the smaller thumbnails applies that change to the after image, so this is an easy method of color correction that doesn’t require you to be in a particularly technical mindframe.

Figure 6.17. When you’re in a “more of this, less of that” mood, Color Variations is perfect.

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Pumping up the Saturation with Variations

Even when an image’s color looks “correct,” you may still want to give it a little extra pop. Be careful when you’re doing this with a picture that will be printed, because printer and printing press inks can’t reproduce the brightest, most intense colors you can create onscreen. But for Web images, the sky’s the limit. Follow these steps:

1. With the image you want to edit open in Full Edit mode, choose Color Variations from the Adjust Color submenu of the Enhance menu
2. Click a radio button to indicate what you want to work on: shadows, highlights, midtones, or the picture’s saturation (the intensity of its colors).
3. Drag the Amount slider to determine how much adjustment each click of a thumbnail applies to the picture. It’s best to start with the slider at the left end, for subtle adjustments; I rarely move it further right than the middle position in which it starts.
4. Now you’re ready to start making adjustments. Just click any thumbnail to see how that adjustment looks on the after version of your picture. If you don’t like it, click again to move further in that color direction, click the opposite thumbnail (Increase Green if you initially clicked Decrease Green, for example), or click Undo to remove the change. You can start from scratch at any time by clicking the Reset Image button.
5. When you’ve achieved an after image that you like, click OK to close the dialog and apply the overall change to your picture.

Intensifying Colors

Saturation refers to just how colorful a color is. Fully saturated colors are also referred to as “pure,” and the opposite of a saturated color is gray (whether it’s closer to white, to black, or somewhere in between). An image with less-saturated colors looks duller and less vibrant than one with high saturation—but pictures whose saturation is very high look like cartoons. You need to find the right balance for the effect you’re trying to achieve in a given picture.

Color Variations is one way you can adjust saturation, but there’s a better way: the Hue/Saturation command. In Full Edit mode, you adjust saturation by choosing Adjust Hue/Saturation from the Adjust Color submenu of the Enhance menu. This brings up a dialog containing three sliders, one each for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness (see Figure 6.18), which are the three components of colors in the HSL system of defining color.

Figure 6.18. It’s amazing how much color is there to be found in images that seem dull at first.

Hue, naturally, refers to the actual color of an image pixel: red, green, blue, or some combination of these. Lightness refers to how bright or dark the color is, with the lower limit being pure black and the upper limit being pure white. Finally, saturation refers to how intense the color is, with any shade of gray having a saturation value of 0 and fully saturated, blindingly bright colors having a saturation value of 100. Using these three values, you can define all the colors that can be reproduced using red, green, and blue light (which is how computer monitors show color) and many that can’t. What this means in terms of editing a picture is that you can brighten, darken, intensify, tone down, or color-shift its colors using the simple sliders in the Hue/Saturation dialog.

To get an idea of what the Saturation slider does, open the dialog (the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+U) and drag the slider all the way to the left. Boom! Black-and-white picture, right? Now drag the slider all the way to the right. Pow! Comic-book picture. From this little experiment, you can see that the extreme ends of the Saturation slider are only useful for extreme effects. A tiny bump in the Saturation value, on the other hand, can give your picture just the little something that it needs to go from drab to fab. Conversely, lowering the Saturation value can tone a gaudy image down and make it more old-fashioned or more civilized, depending on how you look at it.

Saturation adjustments are often most useful when you apply them to one section of the picture by selecting it before choosing the Hue/Saturation command. You might try this to tone down a really scary Hawaiian shirt in the background of your best beach shot, for example, so that the bright colors don’t pull the viewer’s eye away from the rest of the picture. Another, more hands-on way to accomplish the same thing—spot editing of saturation—is by using the Sponge tool.

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Adjusting Color Saturation with the Sponge

Sharing a toolbox spot with the Dodge and Burn tools (see Figure 6.19), this handy little accessory enables you to “paint” increased or decreased saturation into an image with the same mouse strokes you’d use to paint an object or erase part of the picture.

Figure 6.19. This is a bit further than you’d normally want to take the Sponge tool, but it gives you the idea.

1. With an image open in Full Edit mode, switch to the Sponge tool.
2. Begin at the left end of the Options bar by choosing a brush size and shape. In this respect, the Sponge tool works very much like the Dodge and Burn tools (see “Dealing with Highlights and Shadows Close-In,” earlier in this chapter).
3. Then move on to the Mode pop-up menu, which simply determines whether the Sponge further saturates the colors under its strokes or desaturates them; make the choice according to what you want to do to the image.
4. Set the Flow amount to give you control over how much change each stroke of the Sponge makes. If you’re looking for a noticeable change, you’ll probably want to set Flow higher than you would set Exposure when using the Dodge or Burn tools; even at its highest Flow setting of 100%, the Sponge still takes 10 or so strokes to remove all the color from an area of the image.
5. Click and drag in the image to adjust saturation.

Going from Color to Black and White

You might not think it, but converting a color into a shade of gray isn’t a cut-and-dried process, because you’re translating two kinds of information—color and brightness—into a single language. For example, a photo of a lush pink rose against green leaves, as shown in Figure 6.20, has lots of contrast, right? This is the case even if the pink and green are about the same general brightness, because of the difference between the two colors. But if you remove color from that picture, you’re going to want to make the rose and the leaves two different shades of gray, to retain the contrast. This sort of thing does not happen automatically when you just convert an image file from RGB color mode to grayscale mode. If you want Photoshop Elements to help you out with the process, you’ll need to use the Convert to Black and White command, located in the Enhance menu.

Figure 6.20. The color provides plenty of contrast—but what happens when you get rid of the color?

When you choose Convert to Black and White, the Editor brings up another of its giant dialogs containing multiple thumbnails (see Figure 6.21). This time, the thumbnails are simply the before image (in color) and the after image (in black and white). They’re accompanied by a list of presets, ranging from Newspaper to Scenic Landscapes, that make good starting points for various kinds of pictures. After choosing a preset, you can fine-tune the conversion for your particular image by dragging the four sliders next to the preset list. The three color sliders change the brightness of their respective colors in the black-and-white version of the picture, while the Contrast slider modifies the image’s overall contrast in the same way as the Contrast slider found in the Brightness/Contrast dialog (see “Improving Contrast,” earlier in this chapter).

Figure 6.21. Scenic Landscape is intended for pictures like this one.

No numeric values display in the Convert to Black and White dialog; everything’s done purely by eye. Start by cycling through the presets. You’ll notice that the same photo looks very different when converted using different settings. Here’s the general outline of what each preset does to your picture (see Figure 6.22):

Figure 6.22. The same photo looks strikingly different when converted with each of the six preset in Convert to Black and White.

• Infrared Effect—This setting is supposed to look like what you’d see through infrared goggles, with light greenery and dark skies.

• Newspaper—To compensate for newspapers’ relatively low-quality printing, this setting applies very strong contrast.

• Portraits—Here the blue channel is made darker, which does the same for skin tones.

• Scenic Landscape—The green and blue channels are made darker and red is made lighter, producing darker, more intense skies and greenery.

• Urban/Snapshots—Both the blue and the green channel are darker in this preset, darkening both skin tones and greenery.

• Vivid Landscape—This setting is similar to Scenic Landscape, only more so.

Sharpening Blurry Images

One of the most annoying situations in all of photography, to my mind, is this: You take a great shot that looks incredible on your camera’s LCD screen, and then when you get it onto your computer you discover that it’s out of focus. There are three possible responses to this problem. First, you can abandon the picture and try again another time. Second, you can use it for filter fodder; by the time you’ve run a few artistic filters on it to turn it into an oil painting, the original lack of focus will be completely irrelevant. Or, third, you can attempt to rescue the photo with some judicious sharpening.

Now, the sharpening commands in Photoshop Elements are not a panacea. They won’t magically fix a really blurry image, and they have to be used with care. Too much sharpening yields halos around object edges that can make a picture look worse than the blurry original. So strive for subtlety when using these techniques.

Using the Sharpen Commands

When you want to sharpen an entire image at once, the Editor offers you two choices: the Unsharp Mask and Adjust Sharpness commands. Which to use? For most pictures, Adjust Sharpness is your best bet. For really bad cases, or blur caused by special circumstances such as a particularly hazy day, give Unsharp Mask, which is imported straight from Photoshop itself, a try.

The Adjust Sharpness dialog (see Figure 6.23) has several settings, as follows:

Figure 6.23. The first step in making Adjust Sharpness settings is to specify what kind of blur you want the Editor to remove.

• Amount—This controls how much sharpening is applied to the image (or to the selected area). You can enter a value in the field or drag the slider to change the amount of contrast along hard edges in the image, which makes them appear clearer.

• Radius—Lower values here restrict the sharpening effect to the areas immediately adjacent to edges. Higher values enable it to spread further out, thus making it more obvious.

• Remove—Believe it or not, there are different kinds of blur, depending on what caused the effect. Adjust Sharpness can deal with three different varieties, and it does better if you tell it what’s going on in your photo. Choose Gaussian Blur for overall sharpening, Lens Blur for sharper edges and detail with fewer halos, or Motion Blur to fix the blur you get when the camera or the photo’s subject moved just as the shutter closed.

• Angle—Only available when you’re removing motion blur, this control lets the Editor know the direction of the blur you’re trying to eliminate. You can enter the angle by typing a number of degrees in the entry field or by dragging the angle proxy around in a circle.

• More Refined—Unless your computer is very, very slow, just turn this on and leave it that way. The filter takes slightly longer to complete, but the results are much better.

Make good use of the large preview area when you’re working in the Adjust Sharpness dialog, because there’s no way to calculate the right settings for each image—you just have to experiment with different combinations of Amount and Radius until you get just the right amount of sharpening, not too little and not too much. You’ll want to do most of your work with the preview zoom set to 100%, to make sure you’re getting the most accurate view of the image. And remember that sharpening effects tend to look more intense onscreen than they do when you print your picture, so a good exercise to get used to these controls is to try a few sample prints at different settings and compare them to the onscreen view of the same settings.

For heavy-duty sharpening, you can turn to the Unsharp Mask command, which is designed to get rid of Gaussian blur by blurring the image more. Got that? All right, here’s how it works. When you apply the Unsharp Mask command, Photoshop Elements creates a copy of the image in its memory and blurs that copy. Then, by comparing the two versions of the image, the program can detect where the image’s details are and enhance them by increasing contrast along their edges, making the light side of each edge lighter and the dark side darker.

LET ME TRY IT

Using Unsharp Masking

This filter is based on a technique used in traditional photo darkrooms, and you’ll find that it works quite well.

1. Start by choosing Unsharp Mask from the Enhance menu. The settings in this dialog are very similar to those in the Adjust Sharpness dialog (see Figure 6.24).
   

   Figure 6.24. Because the preview is smaller, you’ll find yourself referring to the image window much more with Unsharp Mask than with Adjust Sharpness.

   

2. Set the Amount to control how much sharpening is applied.
3. Adjust the Radius slider to determine how far outward from the image’s edges the sharpening effect can extend. The higher the resolution of your image, the higher this value will need to be, but that doesn’t mean you should go too far up; I rarely use a Radius value higher than 2 or 3.
4. Choose a Threshold—value to specify how different in color and brightness adjacent pixels must be in order to qualify as edge pixels. Raise this value if you notice that image noise is being exacerbated by your sharpening. Normally, you’ll want it to be higher than 0 but lower than 20.
5. As you’re working in the Unsharp Mask dialog, be sure to check your changes throughout the image by clicking at various spots in the image window to focus on those areas in the preview. For best results, you really will need to adjust all three sliders, not just the Amount slider.

Using the Sharpen Tool

If you’re into analogies and you’ve read the rest of this chapter, this might prove helpful: The Sharpen tool is to the Sharpen filters as the Sponge tool is to the Hue/Saturation dialog (see “Intensifying Colors,” earlier in this chapter). In other words, you can accomplish similar results with the Sharpen tool as with the Sharpen filters, but it’s not something you’d want to do to an entire image. If you want to sharpen, not just the whole image, but a particular part of it, the Sharpen tool is for you. It’s what you use when you want to make sure the title of the book your photo’s subject is carrying can be read, or when you want to focus in on the eyes behind the glasses in a portrait.

After switching to the Sharpen tool, take a quick trip to the tool Options bar to choose a brush shape (preferably soft-edged) and size, and then set the Strength value. Start with a lower percentage, and up it if you aren’t seeing any results. Then zoom in on the area you want to sharpen and go for it, zooming out occasionally to check your progress (see Figure 6.25). Don’t forget, you can always click Undo or press Ctrl+Z if you go too far.

Figure 6.25. The Sharpen tool enables me to make the type clearer without over-sharpening the rest of the scene.