All AboutPhotoshopElements 2

Photoshop Elements’ most important role is bringing thepower of the world’s most deservedly popular photo

retouching program (Photoshop) within the budgetary reachof most of the world’s computer owners. This means thateveryone, not just photographers, Web designers, and graphic designers can afford the software (Elements is nor-mally available for under $100), and can take advantage of its many features.

Understanding What Elements Does

Unlike the “lite” versions of other applications, Elements pro-vides most of Photoshop’s key features, most in the sameform and with the same options that you find supportingthem in Photoshop. Some features are “missing,” but you haveworkarounds for most of them, enabling you to achieve simi-lar results without the exact tools as they appear inPhotoshop. Elements also has a few tools and features thatPhotoshop doesn’t have, and that the Adobe designers willhopefully make part of Photoshop in its next release — apaintbrush-like selection tool is my personal favorite from theElements toolbox.

What Can You Do with Elements?The list of functions you can’t do with Photoshop Elementswould be a much shorter list, and you can find that in the next

11C H A P T E R

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In This Chapter

Identifying Elements’strengths

Deciding if Elementscan do what youneed to do

Choosing betweenPhotoshop andPhotoshop Elements

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section of this chapter. For now, the list of functions you can do, along with visualexamples of those things, follows:

✦ Scan photographs. With a scanner attached to your computer, you can takeprinted photos (or any other artwork for that matter), and scan them directlyinto Elements. You can do this simply to be able to print copies of a photo onphoto-quality paper, or so that you can resize, crop, or retouch the scannedimage.

✦ Restore damaged photos. Think that precious and only-remaining photo ofyour great grandmother is damaged beyond repair? Think again. Elementstoolbox contains tools that allow you to recreate lost portions of the image,bring details out the darkness, and restore depth and detail that’s been lost tosunlight, dryness, mildew, and rough handling. Figures 1-1 and 1-2 are beforeand after versions of the same photo — in the first figure, you see a photo thatlooks ready for disposal. In the second figure, that same photo is ready forframing.

Figure 1-1: Before: A torn, scratched, and faded photo seems beyond saving.

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Figure 1-2: After: A little restoration goes a long way with Photoshop Elements.

✦ Adjust the color and contrast in photos and other images. Whether yourflash was too bright or it never went off, you can fix the contrast and light lev-els. You can also remove a color cast (such as a greenish or yellowish tingethat’s taken over an older print or Polaroid, and you can add or removecolor that’s too faded, too bright, or just wrong. Figures 1-3 and 1-4 are exam-ples of the sort of corrections Elements can make — selected areas in eachimage have been fixed — the first one in terms of lighting, and the second interms of color.

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Figure 1-3: Let there be light? Well, maybe not so much.

Figure 1-4: It’s not easy being green, but it is easy to get rid of unwanted green casts in a photo.

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✦ Create graphics in Web-safe formats. Any artwork you create in Elements, beit a drawing, painting, or photo you retouched or made your own through theuse of special effects, can become a graphic for the Web. Web browsersrequire the use of a small set of file formats, and good sense dictates thatthose images load quickly so as not to bore your site visitors. Elements makesit easy to pick the right format for your Web-bound graphics, and to makesure they load quickly without losing visual quality in the bargain. Figure 1-5shows an image being optimized for the Web in Elements’ powerful Save forWeb dialog box.

Figure 1-5: From stats on how long the image will take to load to tools for setting image quality and color, the Save for Web dialog box makes it easy to create Web-safe graphics.

✦ Colorize black and white (grayscale) photos. Remember how Ted Turner“colorized” all those great black and white movies? Some people loved thechange, and others hated it. You can be the judge when it comes to your blackand white photos, and if you want to add color — a splash in one spot or overthe entire image — you can do so quite easily with Elements. Figure 1-6 showsa black and white photo that now looks like it was taken with color film —back in the 1800s!

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Figure 1-6: Formerly drab and lifeless, this old man is now a colorful character.

✦ Create original artwork. You have an idea, a vision, and you want to create apicture, a shape, a design of some sort. Can Elements help you? Yes — withpaint brushes, pencils, special effects and filters, and tools for drawing shapesof just about any description. Figure 1-7 shows just such an original design,something you could make without even stretching Element’s capabilities.

✦ Design Web page backgrounds and navigational tools. From a visually-appealing “wallpaper” for your Web page to a series of tabs or buttons, youcan use Elements’ tools to create a pattern, draw a button or tab, and placeinstructional text on anything you create. Figure 1-8 shows a row of naviga-tional tabs that was created in Elements. After they are placed in a Web page,you can convert each tab to a hotspot — a hyperlinked section of the image,pointing to another page or site.

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Figure 1-7: Anything you can imagine can be rendered with Elements brushes, pencils, and special effects features.

Figure 1-8: Create your own custom Web page buttons and tabs with Elements.

✦ Add text to photos and other images. A picture’s worth a thousand words, orso the saying goes. If you need to augment the message in your photo or otherpicture, Elements’ Type tool stands ready to give you text in any font, size,color, and style (see Figure 1-9). There are even special type effects that willmake your text stand out — from making it look three-dimensional to creatingthe look of see-through, plastic letters. You can also cut away content fromyour image in the shape of text, using a type mask. The possibilities are nearlyunlimited.

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Figure 1-9: Add a caption, title, or use type as a decorative component in your image.

✦ Apply special effects to photos and drawings. You can turn photos intopaintings or drawings, turning the pixels that make up your realistic imageinto brush or pencil strokes, watercolor, or the look of pastels, smudged toperfection. As shown in Figure 1-10, where part of the image is still a photo,and the other half has been turned into a painting, you can turn a relativelyboring photo into an alleged work of art with a simple menu selection.

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Figure 1-10: Choose just about any artist’s medium for your Elements filter, converting a photo (or any drawing in any style) into something that looks painted or drawn by hand.

What Can’t You Do with Elements?Photoshop Elements is not intended for creating crisp, sharp line art. Elements isnot a vector-based illustration tool, and its bitmap method of creating and retouch-ing images does not yield the kind of sharp edges and clean lines that some artworkrequires. Applications such as Adobe’s Illustrator or CorelDRAW! are better toolsfor that kind of art, but if Elements is the only tool at your disposal, you can stillcreate very nice line art, much like the image seen in Figure 1-11. The same image,created in Illustrator, appears in Figure 1-12. See much difference? Probably not. Forsome very high-quality print jobs, however, the latter image will be the more desir-able, but if you’re designing for the Web or for personal use (printed on an inkjetprinter, for example), the former image will probably do just fine.

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Figure 1-11: A logo with colored shapes and straight lines, created in Elements

Figure 1-12: The same logo, created in Illustrator

What are vector and bitmap images? Vector images are made up of mathematicalinformation — the length of a line, the depth of a curve, the angle of a corner, thespace between two sides of a closed shape. A bitmap image is made up of agroup of pixels, each one a particular color, making up the appearance of text,lines, and shapes. Photos are best rendered in a bitmap-based product, such asPhotoshop or Photoshop Elements, where as a piece of line or clip art wouldprobably be better designed in a vector-based application, such as Illustrator orCorelDRAW!.

Tip

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Another thing you probably don’t want to do in Photoshop Elements is page layout.Tools such as QuarkXPress and PageMaker are better suited to creating a magazineor book layout, placing text and image placeholders around on the page to deter-mine how the page components will work together visually. While you can do thisin Elements, no tools specifically are designed for these jobs in the application. Theaforementioned Quark and PageMaker are created specifically for page layout tasks,and have the proper tools ready and waiting.

Do You Need Photoshop Instead?Good question. If you look at the Photoshop workspace and compare it to theElements workspace (see Figures 1-13 and 1-14, respectively), you’ll see that they’requite similar. At first glance, they’re nearly identical. The choice between the prod-ucts, therefore, will be determined by the details.

Figure 1-13: The Photoshop workspace contains a full set of tools, palettes, and an options bar for virtually every tool and feature.

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Figure 1-14: So does the Elements workspace, with a few minor exceptions

So getting down to those details, you have a few features in Photoshop that youwon’t find in Elements. One of the first ones people notice is the Channels palette,which is conspicuously missing from Elements’ docking well. What does theChannels palette do? It allows you to break your image down into colors — red,green, and blue (for an RGB image) or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (for a CMYKimage) and to isolate the different colors in channels. After being isolated, you cantinker with a particular channel to achieve various retouching effects. Figure 1-15shows the Channels palette in Photoshop, and a photograph with just the red chan-nel displayed.

You have ways to work around this in Elements, however, as you’ll discover. TheType formatting tools are also somewhat limited in Elements, but not in such a waythat the average user would find them lacking. Some of the dialog boxes for variousfilters and special effects are also somewhat pared down, and someone who hasbecome quite adept with Photoshop may feel slightly limited or controlled by thereduced set of options offered for some tools in Elements. As a user of both prod-ucts, and as someone who creates mostly Web graphics and print content for infor-mal projects, I have yet to find any of these “limitations” significant enough to sayI’d only use Photoshop. In fact, due to some of the simplified tools, sometimes it’sfaster for me to work in Elements, despite my having spent more years as aPhotoshop user.

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Figure 1-15: Some Photoshop users would miss the Channels palette, which is absent from Elements.

What does this all mean? If you’re a professional photographer, creating work formagazines, books, or for use in television or other visual media, you may want touse Photoshop so that you have every possible tool and option for those tools atyour fingertips. While even a professional photographer won’t use every tool inPhotoshop’s arsenal every day, having them available can be reassuring. If, on theother hand, you’re a Web designer, graphic artist, or a growing business or homeuser, Elements has everything you’d ever need to do just about anything you’d everwant to do with photographs, scanned images of any description, or original draw-ings. Of course, if you have several hundred dollars to spend on your photoretouching and Web graphics software, go ahead and buy Photoshop, and knowthat you have the world’s most popular and powerful photo retouching software inyour hands. If $100 or less sounds more like your ballpark, with Elements you havethe right tools, the right price, and now, the right book.

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