7. Using Advanced Editing Techniques

In this chapter, you’ll learn techniques that the pros use to smooth out noisy images, clean up damaged areas, and combine multiple photos to create the best possible composite image.

The previous chapter covered the basics of image editing, teaching you how to make the most of what’s in each photo. Now, it’s time to learn ways that you can bring something extra to your images, or get rid of parts you don’t like. From selecting specific areas within a picture to creating the best possible group shot by combining the best of several pictures, these techniques are what you need to bring your images to the next level.

Selecting Part of an Image

All the great stuff you can do with the Editor wouldn’t be nearly so great without the ability to make selections. Why? Because not every filter or adjustment is something you want to apply to the entire image. Being able to precisely select part of the picture before you make your changes is what separates Photoshop Elements from lesser image-editing programs, and you’ll find several ways to do so—the right selection method for every situation.

Selecting Manually

Let’s start with the most basic selection tool Photoshop Elements has to offer: the Rectangular Marquee tool. It draws rectangular selections with a simple click-and-drag, starting where you click and ending where you release the mouse button (see Figure 7.1). You can drag in any direction—up, down, left, right, it doesn’t matter. If you decide you want to make your starting point start the selection’s center rather than its corner, you can do that, too, by pressing Alt as you drag. The Rectangular Marquee tool works, in short, exactly like the Crop tool, with one important difference: If you want to modify the selection after creating it, you must use the Transform Selection menu command (covered later in this section).

Figure 7.1. Click, drag, selection—that’s all there is to it with the Rectangular Marquee Selection tool.

The Rectangular Marquee has an alternate form: the Elliptical Marquee, which works just like its rectangular sibling except that it creates oval selections. With either Marquee tool, you can force the selection to be the same width and depth—in other words, either square or circular—by pressing Shift as you drag.

If you’re not used to making selections, now would be a good time to practice. Open an image or create a new blank file and click the Marquee tool in the toolbox. Then click anywhere in the image, drag a short distance, and let go. Presto! You have an active selection! Here are a few of the things you can do with it:

• Copy it (press Ctrl+C or choose Copy from the Edit menu). Now that part of the image is on the Clipboard, and you can paste it into another image, a word processor document, or any of a dozen other places.

• Delete it by pressing the Delete key. All gone! Now the selection is filled with the background color, as shown on the toolbox, or (if you were working on a layer rather than the Background layer) you can see through it to whatever’s on the layer or background below.

• Fill it with a color or pattern. Choose Fill Selection from the Edit menu to see your choices (see Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2. You can fill a selection with any solid color or a pattern, and you can make the fill opaque or partially transparent.

• Run a filter on it. Want to put this part of the image behind frosted glass or turn it into a photocopy? Head to the Filter menu and have fun. (Turn to Chapter 10, “Applying Filters and Special Effects,” to learn more.)

• Apply an image adjustment to it. Any of the techniques you learned in the last chapter to modify color, brightness, contrast, and sharpness can be applied to a selection just as well as to the entire image.

Of course, there are many times when you’ll want to select an area that’s not elliptical or rectangular. For those times, Photoshop Elements offers a few other tools, starting with the Lasso tool. With this oddly shaped tool, you can draw an irregular selection to encompass any part of the image. The “point” is the bottom of the lasso’s rope, which can make it hard to draw with. If you have this problem, press the Caps Lock key to turn the cursor into a crosshairs that can make it easier to draw a precise selection. While you’re drawing the selection, it shows up as a solid line trailing behind the cursor. When you release the mouse button, whether you’ve met up with the beginning of the selection or not, the Editor closes the selection, drawing a straight line between the beginning and end points of the line you’ve created with the Lasso.

Like the Marquee tool, the Lasso has an alter ego. In this case, it’s the Polygonal Lasso, which can draw a selection shape made up of straight lines. You click to start the selection, and then click to add a corner. Each click adds another corner as you go around the perimeter of the area you want to select (see Figure 7.3). I find that using the Polygonal Lasso is one of the most foolproof ways to create a fairly complex selection, because you can take your time working your way around the edge.

Figure 7.3. It might seem unsophisticated, but the click-click-click method of creating selections with the Polygonal Lasso is actually pretty accurate if you zoom in and go slow.

When you create selections with the Marquee and Lasso tools, you’re outlining the outer edge of the area you want to select. With the Selection Brush, on the other hand, you can actually create the selection by painting over the area that you want to isolate. You can choose a brush size and shape in the tool Options bar, just as you would if you were actually painting. You also have a choice of two modes: Selection and Mask, both of which are shown in Figure 7.4. In Selection mode, the selection marquee, with its moving dotted lines (“marching ants”) appears as you paint. In Mask mode, on the other hand, the entire picture is covered with a transparent red mask that you erase with the Selection Brush in the areas you want to select. This mask stays in place as you edit it until you switch to a different tool, at which point it turns into a regular selection. If you apply an image adjustment or filter, the effects show up within the clear areas of the mask, because it’s really just a selection, even though it’s represented on your screen in a different way than you’re used to.

Figure 7.4. In Mask mode (shown on right), everything that’s not masked with red will be included in the selection.

As you paint with the Selection Brush, you can press Alt while dragging the brush to remove that area from your selection. You can also choose a Hardness value for the Selection Brush, which enables it to paint softer-edged strokes, resulting in partially selected pixels along the edges of each stroke. This enables you to blend the selection with its surroundings, if you copy and paste it elsewhere, or to fade out whatever effect you apply within it. When the Hardness value is set to 100%, on the other hand, each pixel in the picture ends up either selected or not selected—there’s no halfway point.

So far, we’ve looked at selection tools that require you to do all the work, and in the next section we’ll turn to selection tools that do the work for you. Somewhere in the middle is the Magnetic Lasso. It’s an anomaly because it’s partly manual and partly automatic. It works like the regular Lasso tool—you drag it along the perimeter of the area you want to select—but it has a special twist: The Magnetic Lasso tool can detect edges. So as you draw the selection with it, the tool automatically shifts the selection to follow the edges of objects in the picture (see Figure 7.5). When it does a good job, you click to “pin” the selection at that point. When it goes off on a tangent, you can back up and try again.

Figure 7.5. Even if my hand wobbles as I cruise along the edge of the white doorframe with the Magnetic Lasso tool, Photoshop Elements keeps the line of the selection smooth.

Using Automatic Selection Methods

The most venerable of the automatic selection tools and commands in the Editor is the Magic Wand tool, which creates selections based on the color of each pixel. Its use is simple: Click anywhere in the picture, and all the similar-colored pixels in the picture (if Contiguous isn’t checked in the Options bar) or all the adjacent similar-colored pixels (if it is checked) are immediately selected. How close in color a pixel must be in order to be included in the selection is controlled by the Tolerance setting, also in the Options bar, which defaults to 32 on a scale from 0 to 255. Higher numbers include more shades of the same color and result in larger selections; lower numbers give you smaller selections that contain fewer shades (see Figure 7.6).

Figure 7.6. Clicking a pink area with the Magic Wand selects all of the dress except the white polka dots and belt.

Suppose you want to include more than one color in your selection? That’s where the buttons at the left end of the Options bar come in. When New Selection is active, each click of the Magic Wand starts a new selection. If you want to modify a selection you already have, click Add to Selection, Subtract from Selection, or Intersect with Selection to perform those functions. To ensure that the contents of all layers are included in creating the selection, check the box labeled Sample All Layers. And unless you want hard-edged selections, be sure that Anti-alias is checked; this adds partially selected pixels along the edges of your selection so that any changes you make within the selected area blend smoothly with their surroundings.

Similar to the Magic Wand, but even more magical, is the Quick Selection tool, which also creates color-based selections. It combines the smarts of the Magic Wand with the Selection Brush’s ease of use, and it automatically switches to Add to Selection mode as soon as you click or click and drag to create a selection, so selecting an irregular, multicolored area is a breeze (see Figure 7.7). As with the Selection Brush, the Quick Selection tool lets you choose a brush size and shape, and it includes a Sample All Layers check box like the Magic Wand’s so that you can base selections on the content of all layers rather than just the current layer. To create a selection, click or click and drag in the area you want to select. To remove extra bits from the selection, press Alt as you click or click and drag.

Figure 7.7. Another click or two and all the red hair will be selected.

One last automatic way to create a selection is to select all the nontransparent areas of a layer—called the transparency mask—by pressing Ctrl as you click the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel. Any pixel that’s colored will be included in the selection. Any pixel that’s completely transparent won’t be (see Figure 7.8).

Figure 7.8. This selection encompasses all the nontransparent pixels on the layer; in other words, it’s mandolin shaped.

LET ME TRY IT

Saving Selections

If you’ve spent a long time getting a selection just right, it might be a good idea to save it so that you won’t have to repeat all your work if you decide you want to select the same area sometime in the future. Here’s how to do that:

1. Create a selection using any method or combination of methods.
2. When the selection is complete, choose Save Selection from the Select menu.
3. Choose New in the Selection pop-up menu and give your selection a name, preferably something that will make sense later, like “teapot outline,” rather than “selection 1.”
4. Click OK to save your selection.
5. When you want to recall it, choose Load Selection from the Select menu, make a choice in the Selection pop-up menu, and click OK.

Modifying Selections

If you don’t get a selection just right the first time you create it, don’t panic. You can modify it in a number of ways, instead of starting over from scratch. For the most part, this is what the Select menu is all about, but before we go there, let’s take a look at some useful keyboard shortcuts.

If you’ve experimented with all the selection tools, you’ve noticed that they each have a set of similar buttons at the left end of the Options bar. These enable you to combine selections in different ways:

• Click Add and make another selection to keep building on the current selection.

• Click Subtract and make another selection to remove the newly selected area from the previous selection.

• Click Intersect and make another selection to select the overlapping areas of the two selections.

These work with all the selection tools, and they all have corresponding keyboard shortcuts, too: Shift for add, Alt for subtract, and Shift+Alt for intersect. When you’re really on a roll, you’ll move along much faster if you use the keyboard shortcuts, so it’s worth taking some time to embed them in your brain.

Now back to the Select menu. The first group of useful commands you’ll find there provides ways of altering a selection’s edge. As you know, selections created using a soft-edged brush with the Selection Brush tool have partially selected pixels along the edges. If you copy and paste those partially selected pixels, they’ll appear transparent. If you fill them with a solid color, the color won’t completely cover the existing image. As it turns out, this useful effect is possible to achieve with any selection, no matter which tool or tools you used to create it. With a selection active, choose Feather from the Select menu, enter a Radius value, and click OK. You have just turned the edge pixels of the selection from completely selected to partially selected, with the selection fading out completely at the radius distance outside the original selection border (see Figure 7.9). Once you get into retouching and want your modifications to look realistic, you’ll seldom create a selection without feathering it at least a bit.

Figure 7.9. Before copying and pasting the greyhound into another photo, I need to feather the edges of the selection a bit to soften them.

What else can you do to a selection’s edges with the Select commands? Well, you can enlarge or shrink them a specified number of pixels with the Expand and Contract commands in the Modify submenu. Also in the Modify submenu, is the Border command, which changes your selection to a hollow shape encompassing just the edges of the original selection, with a width that you specify (see Figure 7.10). Think of a picture frame—which, incidentally, is one of the things you can add to an image using this command. Also, you can try the Smooth command for color-based or freehand (Lasso) selections that have too many zigs and zags.

Figure 7.10. After applying the Border command, this elliptical selection has turned into a hollow ellipse.

The Refine Edge command kicks things up a notch by combining sliders for Smooth, Feather, and Contract/Expand in a single dialog (see Figure 7.11). Drag the Smooth slider to the right to turn the edges of the selection into straight lines and curves, and do the same with the Feather slider to soften the edges. The Contract/Expand slider goes both ways. Drag left to shrink the selection and right to enlarge it. The best part of the Refine Edge dialog, though, is the fact that you can see the effects your settings have on the selection right in the image window, in either Selection mode (marching ants) or Mask mode (with a mask overlay). Click a preview button in the dialog to switch preview modes. The Refine Edge dialog takes much of the guesswork out of working with selections.

Figure 7.11. In the Refine Edge dialog, I can smooth, feather, and shrink or grow the selection, all at once.

The Select menu’s Grow and Similar commands enable you to turn any selection into a color-based one. Starting with an active selection, when you choose Grow, the selection is changed to encompass all the adjacent areas in the image that contain the same colors as the original selection. Similar, on the other hand, does the same thing but includes similarly colored pixels from throughout the image, not just those adjacent to the original selection.

Finally, you can reshape an existing selection by using the Transform commands. This gets around the biggest difference between the way the Rectangular Marquee tool operates and the way the Crop tool works, because when you’re in Transform mode, you can drag corners and side points to reshape and resize a selection the same way you would a crop marquee (see Figure 7.12). With a selection active, choose Transform Selection from the Select menu; now you’re in complete control. Try any of these actions:

Figure 7.12. By transforming an elliptical selection, I can quickly create a selection of the inside of the birdbath bowl without having to trace its edges.

• To resize the selection, drag any handle of the bounding box. Press Shift as you drag a corner handle to retain the existing proportions.

• To rotate the selection, click and drag outside of the bounding box. Press Shift as you drag if you want to constrain the rotation to 15° increments, and click a difference square on the reference point locator in the tool Options bar if you want to change the point around which the selection rotates.

• To distort the selection, press Ctrl and drag any handle.

• To skew the selection, press Ctrl+Shift and drag any side handle of the bounding box.

• To apply perspective to the selection, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift and drag a any corner handle.

When you’re happy with the selection’s new shape, either press Enter or click the Commit button to apply the changes. Of course, you can always relocate a selection within the image window by clicking and dragging it with any selection tool active.

Smoothing Out Dust and Film Grain

No matter where it comes from—the camera lens, the negative, or the print you scanned—dust has a way of making photos look, well, scruffy. Film grain, too, which is the texture of the plastic film itself, can show up in photos if you zoom in enough. And, of course, the modern-day scourge of noise generated by the light-capturing parts of a digital camera (see Figure 7.13) is a problem, too. Dealing with these specks and splotches is a task for the Editor’s filters, and, in extreme cases, the Spot Healing Brush.

Figure 7.13. The multi-colored, grainy distortion visible in the blue area and in the dog’s black fur is digital noise.

Using Filters to Remove Noise

Several Photoshop Elements filters can help clean up a noisy or grainy picture. Each targets a specific kind of noise, which means you have to know what you’re dealing with before you can decide what filter to use.

If your image shows visible film grain (which is common in highly enlarged prints and images produced from scanned negatives) or a lot of digital noise, Despeckle is the first line of defense. (Choose Despeckle from the Noise submenu in the Filter menu.) This filter locates the edges in a picture and blurs all of the image or selection except for those edges, ideally smoothing out the noise without blurring the outlines of objects in the picture. Because Despeckle has no user controls, it’s a one-shot deal—either it works, in which case you move on, or it doesn’t, in which case you hit Undo and try something else.

For more control, try the Reduce Noise filter (also in the Filter menu’s Noise submenu). Reduce Noise can work wonders on graininess due to low-light shooting, and it can also help remove JPEG compression artifacts. Like Despeckle, this filter detects edges within the picture and tries to keep them sharp while smoothing surfaces. Start by setting Reduce Color Noise and Preserve Details to 0 and unchecking Remove JPEG Artifact (see Figure 7.14). Then drag the Strength slider to the right, watching as you go, just until the point at which the image’s edges start to blur. Switch to the Preserve Details slider and move it to the right to restore the sharpness of the edges. That takes care of basic graininess. To get rid of multicolored “chromatic” noise in areas that should be solid-colored, drag the Reduce Color Noise slider to the right, and to minimize JPEG artifacts, check the Remove JPEG Artifact box. If either of these has no visible effect, reset it and apply just the basic Strength and Preserve Details settings; there’s no point in letting Photoshop Elements rearrange pixels in your picture that aren’t going to make it look better.

Figure 7.14. The Reduce Noise filter can smooth out the noise to some extent.

So far, you’ve been dealing with noise produced by the picture-taking process itself, either film based or digital. The Dust & Scratches filter can help restore pictures that are marred by dust, scratches, even cat hair on the camera’s lens or a print or negative that you scanned to produce the digital file. Because it’s looking for pixels or groups of pixels that are surrounded by a sea of pixels in a different color, Dust & Scratches is not so great at retaining sharp edges. One way to get around this is to apply it only to selected areas of the image (see “Selecting Part of an Image,” earlier in this chapter). Whether you’re working with the entire image or a selected area, the procedure is the same. Choose Dust & Scratches from the Filter menu’s Noise submenu. Set the Threshold value (see Figure 7.15) to a fairly low but nonzero number, and then drag the Radius slider to the right to eliminate the artifacts you don’t want. The Threshold number determines how close in color two pixels must be in order to be considered part of different objects, while the Radius value controls how much blurring is applied to the objects that the filter locates. You’ll probably find that you need to experiment a bit to find the right balance between these two values.

Figure 7.15. The preview area of the dialog shows how the Dust & Scratches filter can blur out scratches and other artifacts in scanned prints.

Getting Rid of Debris with the Spot Healing Brush

Noise-reduction filters can only do so much smoothing without altering your pictures unacceptably. After you’ve done what you can with these filters, any remaining flaws in your image can be smoothed out using the Healing Brush and the Spot Healing Brush, both of which occupy the same slot in the toolbox. In the next section, we look at how you can use the Healing Brush to clean up large areas of damage.

LET ME TRY IT

Using the Spot Healing Brush

For our purposes here, you can use the Spot Healing Brush to remove spots surrounded by a solid color or pattern with a good-sized margin. It couldn’t be simpler to use:

1. Click the Spot Healing Brush in the toolbox (it shares a spot with the Healing Brush).
2. Choose which type of match you want the Spot Healing Brush to use in the Options bar. Click Proximity Match for solid colors, in which case the tool should only look at the outermost pixels within its radius. Or click Create Texture if you want the new pixels to match a pattern or texture, for which the tool needs to look at all the pixels within its radius.
3. Click over the spot you want to get rid of (see Figure 7.16). As you click, you can see the radius of the tool’s effect. The Editor grabs the color and texture of the pixels within this radius and applies them to cover the spot and blend it in perfectly.
   

   Figure 7.16. Another approach to removing the scratches and dust from a scanned print is to zap the worst offenders with the Spot Healing Brush. Here, I’ve cleaned up the right side of the image.

   

   If the radius is too small, you might find that the spot isn’t completely eradicated or that the patch job is too obvious. If it’s too large, the Editor may pull in pixels from a neighboring area of yet a third color that you don’t want included in the patch.

4. If you need to adjust the radius, first undo, and then change the Size value in the Options bar before clicking again.

Deleting Scratches and Unwanted Objects

What if a picture’s problems are bigger than a few specks of dust or a scratch? With the Clone Stamp and the Healing Brush tools, you can get rid of larger objects without a trace. Now, of course, techniques such as this are why photographic evidence isn’t what it used to be. Want to see a photo of a UFO hovering over the White House’s roof? No problem, just give me an hour (see Figure 7.17). Still, used in the right way for the right reasons, they can be powerful tools for good—good pictures, that is.

Figure 7.17. I swear, this is an unretouched photo.

LET ME TRY IT

Using the Clone Stamp

A clone, of course, is an exact copy, and a stamp, better known in real life as a rubber stamp. It’s a tool that can reproduce an image by transferring it from one surface to another. Put those two concepts together, and you get the Editor’s Clone Stamp tool, which can copy an area from one part of the image (or from a different image) to another. You can use the Clone Stamp to make copies of objects—turn a single flower into a field of blossoms, for example—or to copy the background over obtrusive objects to get rid of them.

Follow these steps to use the Clone Stamp:

1. Click the Clone Stamp tool in the toolbox (see Figure 7.18).
   

   Figure 7.18. The Clone Stamp looks like a little rubber stamp.

   

2. Choose a brush size and shape. Usually, a soft-edged brush about the same size or a little bigger than the object you want to clone is best. If you’re cloning a large area, experiment with different brush size—too small, and the cloned area looks blotchy; too large, and you may accidentally overlap objects that you don’t want to cover up.
3. Check the Aligned box to keep all subsequent applications of the Clone Stamp tool (until you choose a new source point) in the same relative positions as the corresponding pixels at the source point. If Aligned isn’t checked, you start creating a new clone each time you click the Clone Stamp tool again.
4. Press Alt and click in the center of the area you want to copy. A small crosshairs cursor shows the exact location of your source point.
5. Click or click and drag in the area where you want to place the cloned pixels (see Figure 7.19).
   

   Figure 7.19. Cloning sand over this seagull effectively erases her from existence.

   

You can vary both the Clone Stamp’s Opacity value and its Mode, which determines how the colors it applies blend with the image’s existing colors. When the Mode is set to Normal, the Clone Stamp paints right over whatever was in that spot before; other modes enable the new colors to combine with the existing colors to produce more sophisticated effects. (Turn to Chapter 9, “Using Layers for Collage and More,” to learn more about how different blending modes work.)

Using the Healing Brush

Cross the Spot Healing Brush with the Clone Stamp and you get the Healing Brush. You can use the Healing Brush to paint in a larger area than the Spot Healing Brush can cover and have it seamlessly blended with the pixels around it the same way the Spot Healing Brush does. The Healing Brush is ideal for removing medium-sized objects—too large to cover with a single click, but small enough that you can paint over them with a single stroke. (If you have to use more than one brushstroke, the blending process can leave blotches and streaks.)

Like the Clone Stamp, the Healing Brush requires you to set an origin point by Alt-clicking before you begin to paint with it. Choose a point away from object edges, such as the middle of the sky or grass, rather than a spot right next to a cloud or fence, so that you won’t end up painting in unwanted objects. Once your origin point is set, just click and drag over the object you want to delete (see Figure 7.20). You can also choose a brush size and shape and set the tool’s mode to determine how the new pixels combine with the existing ones; most of the time you’ll want to use Normal.

Figure 7.20. The Healing Brush can get rid of this unsightly seaweed even more smoothly than the Clone Stamp could.

Merging Multiple Photos

How many times have you flipped through a series of photos and wanted to pick and choose a bit from each to make the perfect shot? That’s what Photomerge is all about. By using these commands, similar to Guided Edit tasks, you can combine the best parts of multiple photos to magically create the perfect photo that never really happened.

Combining Pieces to Make the Best Possible Shot

With Photomerge Group Shot, you never again have to pick the least bad photo of the gang—the one with the fewest closed eyes or grimaces—because you can pull together a picture in which everyone looks his or her best. The process begins when you choose the photos you want to combine in the Organizer or open them in the Editor. Either way, your next step is to choose Photomerge Group Shot from the File menu’s New submenu.

Choose the best picture of the lot as a starting point and drag it into the Final window. Then click each of the other photos in the Project Bin and mark the parts that you want to move into the Final photo. When you draw in the image with the Pencil tool, the area covered will be used in the Final shot (see Figure 7.21) If you change your mind about an area you’ve indicated with the Pencil, use the Eraser to remove those markings.

Figure 7.21. Using Photomerge Group Shot, I can combine the best parts of these two photos to make one photo worth keeping.

When you click Done, Photoshop Elements combines all the selected photos into one image containing the parts you’ve indicated. And the best news? You can do the same thing to combine individual facial features into a composite (using Photomerge Faces) and to remove intrusive objects from scenic photos (using Photomerge Scene Cleaner).

All of these techniques work better if you take lots of similar photos so that you have plenty to choose from when it’s time to combine. In some cases, you may even want to take advantage of your camera’s multishot mode, if it has one, to take a burst of several photos very quickly. You’ll also want to familiarize yourself with the concept of stacks (covered in Chapter 2, “Organizing Your Collection”) so that you can store these myriad near-identical pictures in your catalog efficiently.

Combining Multiple Exposures

New to Photoshop Elements 8 is the ability to merge multiple photos to improve lighting. For example, suppose you have one indoor shot in which the flash didn’t fire, giving you a clear (if dim) view of the background, and another almost identical photo that did use the flash, lighting up the foreground perfectly. With Photomerge Exposure, you can combine these two photos to get the best of both worlds. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll probably find yourself shooting more photos with different lighting in order to take advantage of Photomerge Exposure.

Start by choosing the photos you want to combine—at least 2, and no more than 10. They need to be even more similar than photos you might use for Photomerge Group Shot, because the content of the photo can’t change, just the lighting. Then choose Photomerge Exposure from the File menu’s New submenu.

The Editor assembles your photos into a composite, lining up identical objects within the images, and presents you with its guidance in the panel on the right. First, click the Automatic tab, and then choose either Simple Blending (even more automatic) or Smart Blending (in which you can vary how the photos combine). If you choose Smart Blending, you can use three sliders (see Figure 7.22) to control the result. First, click the photo in the Project Bin that you want to use as the foreground image so that it appears on the left, labeled Foreground. Then drag each of the other photos in turn to the Background area and drag the sliders to manipulate how it’s combined with the foreground image:

Figure 7.22. If these photos had been taken from the same angle, I could combine them to get one photo with the bright detail of the log cabin and the clear, light background.

• Highlight Details—Drag left to tone down light areas of the combined photo, right to make them pop.

• Shadows—To darken shadows, drag left; to lighten them, drag right.

• Saturation—Drag to the right to intensify colors and to the left to dull them.

When you’re satisfied with what you see, click Done to finalize the combination image. You might have to crop the image to get rid of areas around the edges where the images didn’t quite line up, because Photoshop Elements focuses its attention on making sure the center of the image looks right.

Repositioning Objects

One of the coolest new features in Photoshop Elements 8 is the ability to recompose a photo to change its proportions while preserving the shapes of the important objects in the picture, such as people. Photoshop Elements works this magic by identifying (with your help) areas in an image that can be compressed without obvious distortion, such as skies, fields, and stretches of open water. Then it squishes those areas without changing the areas of the picture you want to maintain.

LET ME TRY IT

Recomposing an Image

Beware of trying to reshape an image too radically with the Recompose tool; even bushes and trees can look squished if you go too far. Use a careful hand and a judicious eye, and the changes to your photos will be pretty much undetectable.

1. Open a photo in the Editor’s Full Edit mode and then either choose Recompose from the Image menu or switch to the Recompose tool, which shares a toolbox slot with the Crop tool.
2. Paint over areas you want to preserve with the Protect Brush (see Figure 7.23). You can set the brush size and shape in the Options bar, and you can also switch to the Protect Eraser in the Options bar to erase protection markings.
   

   Figure 7.23. By scribbling all over the person in this photo, I can make sure his proportions aren’t changed when I resize the photo as a whole.

   

   To automatically locate and protect skin tones, click the Highlight Skin Tones button in the Options bar.

3. Paint over areas you want to get rid of with the Remove Brush, erasing extra markings with the Remove Eraser.
4. Set your desired image proportions in the Preset menu, or leave the menu set at No Restriction if you don’t have specific proportions in mind.
5. Drag any of the handles around the edge of the image to change the image’s size and shape (see Figure 7.24). When you’re done, click the Commit button to finalize the changes or click Cancel to restore the image to its previous state.
   

   Figure 7.24. The changed proportions of the rocks and trees don’t show. Meanwhile, the happy hiker stays perfectly himself.

   

Changing Colors

A digital image is nothing more or less than a collection of pixels laid out in a grid, each with a specific color value. As such, digital pictures are subject to your every whim when it comes to color—you can edit them with a light touch to produce more realistic color, go a little further to create prettier color, or let your imagination take flight and completely change their colors. Photoshop Elements, of course, offers several ways you can accomplish these tasks.

Before you start changing an image’s colors, it’s a good idea to get a handle on what those colors actually are. To help with this task, the Info panel can give you the specific formula for creating any color that’s already present in the image. When it’s visible, it displays the RGB (red, green, and blue) values for the color directly under the cursor, modifying them as you move around the picture. Choose Info from the Editor’s Window menu to display the panel (see Figure 7.25). By clicking the eyedroppers in the panel’s top two sections, you can switch those sections to display color values in the HSB (hue, saturation, and brightness) or hexadecimal (Web) systems, or in grayscale terms (brightness only).

Figure 7.25. The two sets of RGB values tell you the “recipe” for the selected color in regular RGB terms and in hexadecimal (used in web programming).

Replacing Colors

The Editor offers two ways to replace one color with another. The Replace Color command uses a powerful dialog box so that you can work on an entire image or selected area at once, and the Color Replacement tool enables you to carefully paint in a new color one brushstroke at a time.

Start by opening an image with at least one fairly prominent color, such as the prize ribbons in Figure 7.26, and choose Replace Color from the Adjust Color submenu in the Enhance menu. To change the blue ribbon that dominates this picture, I’d start by clicking anywhere in the blue within the image window. Immediately, a preview of the affected area shows up in white on black in the Replace Color dialog. Next, I can perform any combination of three actions to further refine my selection:

Figure 7.26. The white on black preview shows which areas of the image will be affected by the color change.

• Click Localized Color Clusters to restrict the selection to objects close to where I clicked, leaving similarly colored objects elsewhere in the image alone.

• Click the Add or Subtract eyedropper and click again, either in the image window or in the preview area, to increase or decrease the selected area’s size.

• Drag the Fuzziness slider to control how similar a pixel’s color must be to the selected pixel in order to be included in the selection. Higher Fuzziness values add more similarly colored pixels to the selection. With a Fuzziness value of 0, the only pixels that will be affected are the ones that are exactly the same color as the one I clicked.

When I’m satisfied that the selection includes all the areas I want to change, I can start working with the sliders in the Replacement area to choose a new color. In my example image, I can turn the blue ribbon red by entering these values: Hue +128, Saturation +21, and Lightness −23. The Result swatch in the Replacement area shows the color I’ll end up with.

I can make a similar change by switching to the Color Replacement tool (it shares a toolbox slot with the Brush), choosing a Foreground color, and simply painting in the image. Whatever color I first click for each stroke is the color that gets changed (see Figure 7.27), with the Tolerance percentage in the tool Options bar serving the same purpose as the Color Replacement dialog’s Fuzziness slider. Lower the Tolerance value to affect fewer pixels and raise it to change more pixels.

Figure 7.27. The Color Replacement tool uses the Foreground color to replace the color you first click on. Here, the gold lettering isn’t affected, only the blue ribbon.

Adjusting Hues

The simplest way to change the hues, or colors, in a picture is to choose Hue/Saturation from the Adjust Color submenu in the Enhance menu. This dialog contains three sliders: Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. Adobe has never really explained why the command is “Adjust Hue/Saturation,” leaving out the Lightness part of the dialog, but at the moment we’re only concerned with Hue anyway.

Normally, when you adjust an image’s hue, all the colors in the image move the same distance and direction around the color wheel (see Figure 7.28). So if you drag the Hue slider to a setting of –60, that effectively changes each color in the image to the next color around the color wheel. Red changes to magenta, yellow changes to red, green changes to yellow, and so on. You can follow these changes by watching the two color ramps at the bottom of the dialog. The upper one shows the original colors, and the lower one lines up the new colors next to their original counterparts. And, of course, if the Preview box is checked, you’ll see the image itself change.

Figure 7.28. The six full-strength primary colors—red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow—are spaced at even intervals around the wheel, with secondary colors between them and everything shading lighter to white in the middle.

When you’re working with hue settings, you have the option of choosing a specific range of colors from the pop-up menu at the top of the dialog, which allows only those colors to be affected by your changes.

Check the Colorize box if you want to simply lay a single hue over the entire picture. With this box checked, Photoshop Elements does the equivalent of converting the image to grayscale and then replacing all the shades of gray with shades of the color you choose with the Hue slider (see Figure 7.29).

Figure 7.29. The Colorize option and a hue shift turns these ferns into alien foliage.

Applying New Color with a Smart Brush

The Smart Brush and Detail Smart Brush are fabulous retouching tools, first introduced in Photoshop Elements 7. Using one of these tools accomplishes three things at once: creates a selection, adds an adjustment layer using that selection as a mask, and applies a change to the image on the adjustment layer. Let’s take a look at why this is so awesome.

First, creating a selection to apply an image modification is always useful. After you’ve straightened out a picture’s overall lighting and sharpness, it’s rare that you’d want to make a color change that would affect the whole picture. If you select the area you want to work on, you can be sure that the rest of the image will remain untouched.

Second, adjustment layers are completely editable, which means that you can always remove them, modify the area that they affect, or change the image modification that they apply, all the time leaving the underlying pixels in their pristine original state. Believe me, there’s nothing more irritating than spending 20 minutes turning someone’s shirt from yellow to purple by simply painting the color onto the Background layer and then realizing you were actually supposed to be making the shirt green. Oops! You’ll have to restore the image to its original state in the Undo History panel and do the painting all over again—unless you use an adjustment layer to make the change, in which case you can simply double-click the adjustment layer to change its color settings as many times as you want.

Finally, because the selection you create with the Smart Brush (or Detail Smart Brush) is used to make a mask on the adjustment layer, rather than just being used as a temporary selection, you can go back and change it, too. Suppose you accidentally included part of the person’s neck in that shirt selection? Doing things the old-fashioned way, you’d have to start over again. Using the Smart Brush, you can simply edit the mask with a click or two to remove the extraneous color from your subject’s neck.

All right, now that you’ve waded through all this blather about how great Smart Brushes are, let’s take a look at how you actually use them. The process combines the tool with a special panel that enables you to choose what adjustment you want to apply.

Start by choosing the Smart Brush. As soon as you click it in the tool panel, a drop-down panel appears, showing the dozens of effects you can apply with the Smart Brush (see Figure 7.30). A pop-up menu groups effects into several categories, as follows:

Figure 7.30. The Smart Brush can apply dozens of different effects.

• All Purpose—Includes several generally useful effects from the other categories.

• Black and White—Grayscale conversions that emphasize different colors in the image, similar to the different choices in the Black and White dialog.

• Color—A range of strong hues useful for colorizing objects. (This is what you’d use to change the color of that shirt we were talking about earlier.)

• Lighting—Brighter, Darker, Spotlight, and so on.

• Nature—Effects to make the sky more blue, the vegetation more green, or insert a sunset where none existed before.

• Photographic—A selection of vintage photograph styles, such as sepia and tintype.

• Portrait—Useful touchups for close-up shots of people, including Lipstick, Pearly Whites, and Spray Tan.

• Reverse Effects—Effects applied to the areas you don’t paint with the Smart Brush, such as Reverse-High Noon and Reverse-Night.

• Special Effects—Funky filter-based effects including Rubber Stamp and Impressionista.

If you want to see all the effects at once, choose Show All from the pop-up menu. Choose from the list by clicking the effect you want to apply, and then start painting in your image (see Figure 7.31). Remember, Photoshop Elements will determine the boundaries of the object you’re painting by analyzing its texture and color, the same way the Quick Selection Brush does. So you’ll get best results if you modify objects that stand out from their backgrounds, giving the software a good idea of where their edges are.

Figure 7.31. Here the Smart Brush is applying a Blueprint effect to the skeleton flamingo.

As you paint, a selection is created and the selected effect appears within the selected area. You can refine the selection by switching the tool’s mode. It starts out on New Selection and switches automatically to Add to Selection as soon as you start to paint. To remove part of the selection, click the Remove from Selection button in the Options bar and click or click and drag over the area you want to remove the effect from. If you find that the Smart Brush is being a little too heavy handed and you no longer want help determining the edges of the object you’re painting, switch to the Detail Smart Brush, which applies the effect only where you paint, without extending the selection automatically.

Switch tools to finish your painting. A push-pin icon appears in the middle of the selection (see Figure 7.32). You can double-click the pin any time to change the effect’s settings, apply a different effect to the same selection, or edit the mask. To create a new selection, switch to the Smart Brush’s New Selection mode in the tool Options bar.

Figure 7.32. Double-clicking the push-pin puts you back in edit mode.

Adjusting Perspective

The Correct Camera Distortion filter, located right at the top of the Editor’s Filter menu, is primarily intended to fix optical oddities attributable to your camera lens, such as when an image of the sky is darker around the edges than in the center. But I find it most useful for fixing distorted perspective caused by not shooting an object straight-on. To see what I mean, open a picture taken from above or below an object in the Editor and choose Correct Camera Distortion from the Filter menu (see Figure 7.33).

Figure 7.33. I took this picture from too great a height and at a funny angle; it needs help.

If objects in the picture that should be square instead look bulgy or pinched, drag the Remove Distortion slider to restore a normal shape. Drag left to fix pincushion distortion, right to fix barrel distortion, but don’t worry about the technical terms. Just move the slider until your picture looks right. Check the Show Grid box if you want to use the gridlines to help you get things lined up correctly.

If you do notice that the picture is unwarrantedly dark around the edges, use the controls in the Vignette section to fix it. Drag the Amount slider to control how much lightening is applied to the edges of the picture, and use the Midpoint slider to change the location of the vignette’s middle point vignette (halfway between its greatest effect and its least effect).

The third section enables you to control perspective, and these are the settings that I use most often (see Figure 7.34). Drag the Vertical Perspective slider left to widen the top of the image—what you’d need to do for tall buildings shot from street level—or right to narrow the top of the image. Use the Horizontal Perspective slider the same way, only drag left to widen the left side of the image, making objects on the left appear closer to you, or right to widen the right side of the image, making objects on that side appear closer.

Figure 7.34. Adjusting the perspective and angle makes both the girl and the giant vase look more normal.

The Angle control and the Edge Extension section enable you to make the kind of clean-up changes (straightening and cropping) that a picture is always going to need after you’ve adjusted its perspective. Drag the Angle proxy or enter a new value in the Angle field to rotate the image as necessary, and drag the Scale slider to zoom in on the picture and get rid of the transparent areas produced by your perspective machinations.

Deleting the Background

It’s not really magic, but it will seem that way when you see it work for the first time. By detecting hard edges within the image—with a little help from you—the Magic Extractor can delete pixels outside those edges and maintain a smooth line so that the object you’re extracting appears to float in space. Then you can add in any background you like—flat white, a blue sky, your living room, whatever appeals to you. Of course, the object you want to extract from the background needs to have strong edges that the Editor can locate (with your help), so keep that in mind when choosing a picture to try this out with.

LET ME TRY IT

Using the Magic Extractor

Begin by choosing Magic Extractor from the Image menu, and you’ll see another one of the Editor’s special giant dialogs open up (see Figure 7.35). This one shows the picture, a set of tools you can use to mark regions of the photo, a few refinement settings, and abbreviated step-by-step instructions. Here’s an expanded look at those instructions:

Figure 7.35. Extraction happens in this large dialog, with its own set of tools.

1. With the Foreground Brush, which is active when you start out, click or click and drag over the object you want to keep. You can choose the size of the brush and the foreground marker color in the dialog’s Tool Options section. The default red foreground color may not work with an image that contains lots of red.
2. Switch to the Background brush and click or click and drag over the background that you want deleted. Again, you can choose the brush’s size and a background marker color, if the default blue doesn’t work for you.
3. If you make a mistake, you can erase either background or foreground markings with the Point Eraser tool, which you’ll find just below the Background and Foreground Eraser tools in the dialog’s toolbox.
4. When you think you’ve marked enough for Photoshop Elements to get the idea, click the Preview button to see how the image looks without its background. In Preview mode, the background is replaced with the Photoshop Elements typical checkerboard pattern, indicating transparency (see Figure 7.36). You can choose a different option: Black Matte, White Matte, Gray Matte, Mask (which shows a white foreground shape against a black background), or Rubylith (which overlays red on the background, like the Selection Brush in Mask mode). Feel free to switch among these options to get the best view.
   

   Figure 7.36. I’ve changed the background and foreground marking colors to show up better on this brightly colored picture.

   

5. You’ll probably need to move around the image and change your magnification to get a better view of the area you’re working on. For this purpose, you can use the Zoom and Hand tools conveniently located at the bottom of the dialog’s toolbox.
6. To refine the edges of the extracted image, you can use several tools and settings:
   

   • Paint with the Add to Selection tool to add areas that Photoshop Elements thought were background to your foreground object.

   • Paint with the Remove from Selection tool to do the opposite—get rid of extra bits of background that you don’t want.

   • Use the Smoothing Brush along edges to smooth out rough spots.

   • Enter a Feather value to make the object’s edges partially transparent, which smoothes the transition between the object and whatever background you end up giving it.

   • Click the Fill Holes button to have Photoshop Elements remove any holes it made in the foreground object by mistakenly assuming those pixels were actually part of the background.

   • Enter a value in pixels and click the Defringe button to trim off a few pixels all the way around the edge of the extracted object.

7. When you’re happy with the result, click OK to finalize the extraction. Your object is now floating on a transparent layer, minus all those icky background pixels. You can copy and paste it into a different image, or paste something else into this image and then move it behind your floating object (see Figure 7.37). Have fun!

Figure 7.37. The flamingo float adds a touch of class to this garden scene, don’t you think?