Introduction - Photoshop Elements The Missing Manual [Book]

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To use an iconized panel, click its icon and it jumps out to the side of the group, full size. To shrink it back to an icon, click its icon again. You can combine panels in the bin by dragging their icons onto each other. Then those panels open as a combined group, like the panels in Figure Clicking one of the icons in the group collapses the opened, grouped panels back to icons.

You can also separate combined panels in icon view by dragging the icons away from each other. In the Editor, the long narrow photo tray at the bottom of your screen is called the Project bin Figure It shows you what photos you have open, but it also does a lot more than that. The bin has two drop-down menus:. Here you see the bin three ways: as it normally appears top , as a floating panel bottom left , and collapsed to an icon bottom right.

Show Open Files. If you send a bunch of photos over from the Organizer at once, you may think something went awry because no photo appears on your desktop or in the Project bin.

If you regularly keep lots of photos open and you have an iPad, check out the Adobe Nav app, which lets you sort through open photos in Elements, see info about your photos, and switch tools without using your mouse. You can read more about Nav at www. Bin Actions.

You can also use this menu to reset the style source images you use in the Style Match feature, explained on Merging Styles. The Project bin is useful, but if you have a small monitor, you may prefer to use the space it takes up for your editing work.

The Project bin behaves just like any of the other panels, so you can drag it loose from the bottom of the screen and combine it with the other panels. You can even collapse it to an icon or drag it into the Panel bin. If you combine it with other panels, the combined panel may be a little wider than it would be without the Project bin, although you can still collapse the combined group to icons. Older versions of Elements used floating windows, where each image appears in a separate window that you could drag around.

Many people switch back and forth between floating and tabbed windows as they work, depending on which is most convenient. All the things you can do with image windows—including how to switch between tabbed view and floating windows—are explained on Image Views.

Because your view may vary, most of the illustrations in this book show only the image itself and the tool in use, without a window frame or tab boundary around it. Elements gives you an amazing array of tools to use when working on your photos. You get almost two dozen primary tools to help select, paint on, and otherwise manipulate images, and some of the tools have as many as six subtools hiding beneath them see Figure Right-clicking or holding the mouse button down when you click the icon reveals the hidden subtools.

The long, skinny strip on the left side of the Full Edit window shown back in Figure on page 24 is the Tools panel. It stays perfectly organized so you can always find what you want without ever having to tidy it up. To activate a tool, click its icon. Each tool comes with its own collection of options, as shown in Figure As the box on Doubling Up explains, you may have either a single- or double-columned Tools panel.

You probably have a bunch of Allen wrenches in your garage that you only use every year or so. The mighty Tools panel. For grouped tools, the icon you see is the one for the last tool in the group you used. This Tools panel has two columns; the box on page 33 explains how to switch from one column to two. To activate the tool, just press the appropriate key.

If the tool you want is part of a group, all the tools in that group have the same keyboard shortcut, so just keep pressing that key to cycle through the group until you get to the tool you want. Your monitor determines whether you start with one or two columns in your Tools panel.

If your screen is large enough, Elements starts you off with a single column; if not, you get two. If you had a single-row panel when you clicked, it changes to a nice, compact double-column panel with extra-large color squares see Figure You can reverse this by clicking the arrows again.

If you want to hide it temporarily, press the Tab key and it disappears along with your other panels; press Tab again to bring them back. You can deactivate it by clicking a different tool.

When you open the Editor, Elements activates the tool you were using the last time you closed the program. Wherever Adobe found a stray corner in Elements, they stuck some help into it. Here are a few of the ways you can summon assistance if you need it:. Help menu. You can click blue-text tooltips for more information about whatever your cursor is hovering over. Dialog box links.

Most dialog boxes have a few words of bright blue text somewhere in them. That text is actually a link to Elements Help. It walks you through a variety of popular editing tasks, like cropping, sharpening, correcting colors, and removing blemishes. Guided Edit is really easy to use:. Guided Edit gives you step-by-step help with basic photo editing. Just use the tools that appear in the right-hand panel once you choose an activity, like the ones shown here.

If you already have an image open, it appears in the Guided Edit window automatically. If you have several photos in the Project bin, then you can switch images by double-clicking the thumbnail of the one you want to work on. Your options are grouped into major categories like Basic Edits and Lens Effects, with a variety of specific projects under each heading.

If several steps are involved, then Elements shows you only the buttons and sliders you need to use for the current step, and then switches to a new set of choices for the next step as you go along. If you want to start over, click Reset.

If you change your mind about the whole project, click Cancel. If there are more steps, then you may see another set of instructions. If you click one, up pops the Adobe Elements Inspiration Browser, a mini-program that lets you watch tutorials, as you can see in Figure You need a Photoshop. The Inspiration Browser offers a wealth of tutorials on many different Elements-related topics. Some are videos, and others are in PDF format.

The first time you start the Inspiration Browser, you may see a license agreement for yet another program: Adobe AIR, which lets other programs show you content stored online without you having to launch a web browser and navigate to a website. Adobe AIR got installed automatically along with Elements. The tutorials are all in either PDF or video format. Some are by well-known Elements gurus, but anyone can submit a tutorial for the Inspiration Browser. You can also click one of the column headings to see the available tutorials arranged by title, author, difficulty, date posted, category, type video or PDF , or the average star rating people have given it.

The Inspiration Browser is a great resource and may well give you most of the Elements help you need beyond this book. Elements has a couple of really wonderful features to help you avoid making permanent mistakes: the Undo command and the Undo History panel. No matter where you are in Elements, you can almost always change your mind about what you just did. These keyboard shortcuts are great for toggling changes on and off while you decide whether you want to keep them.

You can only go back sequentially. You can also hop to a given spot in the list by clicking the place where you want to go instead of using the slider. Slide the pointer down to redo your work.

Just drag the slider up and watch your changes disappear one by one as you go. Be careful, though: You can back up only as many steps as Elements is set to remember. If Elements runs slowly on your machine, then reducing the number of history states it remembers try 20 may speed things up a bit.

Create wonderful projects like collages and calendars that you can print or share with your friends digitally. Scrapbookers—get ready to be wowed. And Elements can do an amazing job of fixing problems in your photos, but only if you give it something to work with.

Text on a path Artistic Text. In Elements 10 you can create text that runs around in a circle or follows the outline of a shape or an object in your photo. Brush-on textures Controlling the Colors You See. The Smart Brush tools now let you add textures to areas in your photos. New crop overlays The Crop Tool. When you decide to trim down a photo, Elements 10 has a new overlay feature to help you decide where to crop it. You can choose a basic grid or one that helps you position your subjects according to the Rule of Thirds or the Golden Ratio.

New Guided Edits Guided Edit. Elements 10 gives you two new Guided Edits, where the program walks you through the steps for creating effects that might be difficult to figure out on your own. New Organizer searches Searching by Metadata.

Elements has been able to search for and identify people in your photos for a while now, but Elements 10 can also search through your photos to find pets or objects.

Mobile app compatibility. As of this writing, these apps are only for iPad, but Adobe plans to make them available for Android tablets, too. Windows screen resolution fix. These have been fixed in Elements You could easily get confused about the differences between Elements and the full version of Adobe Photoshop.

Because Elements is so much less expensive, and because many of its more advanced controls are tucked away, a lot of Photoshop aficionados tend to view Elements as some kind of toy version of their program. Your inkjet printer also uses those ink colors to print, but it expects you to give it an RGB file, which is what Elements creates.

The same holds true for a handful of other Elements tools. If you use Elements, then you have to look for another program to help out with that. And you also get Guided Edit mode Guided Edit , which provides step-by-step walkthroughs of some popular editing tasks, like sharpening a photo or cropping it to fit on standard photo paper. The very best way to learn Elements is just to dive right in and play with it. Try all the different filters to see what they do. Add a filter on top of another filter.

Click around on all the different tools and try them. Get crazy—you can stack up as many filters, effects, and Layer styles as you want without crashing the program. Elements is a cool program and lots of fun to use, but figuring out how to make it do what you want is another matter. That approach is as useful to people who are advanced photographers as it is to those who are just getting started with their first digital cameras. This book periodically recommends other books, covering topics too specialized or tangential for a manual about Elements.

For example, pop-out menus are more likely to have a white background on a Mac instead of a dark one. However, the Editor is exactly the same in all versions of Elements. Part One. The first part of this book helps you get started with the program. Chapter 2 covers how to get photos into Elements, the basics of organizing them, and how to open files and create new images from scratch. Chapter 3 explains how to rotate and crop photos, and includes a primer on that most important digital imaging concept—resolution.

Part Two. Chapter 4 shows how to use the Quick Fix window to dramatically improve your photos. Part Three. Having Elements is like having a darkroom on your computer. Chapter 8 covers topics unique to people who use digital cameras, like Raw conversion and batch-processing photos. Chapter 10 shows you how to convert color photos to black and white, and how to tint and colorize black-and-white photos. Part Four. This part covers the fun stuff: painting on photos and drawing shapes Chapter 12 , using filters and effects to create more artistic looks Chapter 13 , and adding text to images Chapter Part Five.

However, the Editor is exactly the same in all versions of Elements. Part One. The first part of this book helps you get started with the program. Chapter 2 covers how to get photos into Elements, the basics of organizing them, and how to open files and create new images from scratch. Chapter 3 explains how to rotate and crop photos, and includes a primer on that most important digital imaging concept—resolution. Part Two. Chapter 4 shows how to use the Quick Fix window to dramatically improve your photos.

Part Three. Having Elements is like having a darkroom on your computer. Chapter 8 covers topics unique to people who use digital cameras, like Raw conversion and batch-processing photos.

Chapter 10 shows you how to convert color photos to black and white, and how to tint and colorize black-and-white photos. Part Four. This part covers the fun stuff: painting on photos and drawing shapes Chapter 12 , using filters and effects to create more artistic looks Chapter 13 , and adding text to images Chapter Part Five.

Part Six. You can get hundreds of plug-ins and additional styles, brushes, and other nifty tools to customize your copy of Elements and increase its abilities; the Internet and your local bookstore are chock full of additional info.

Chapter 19 offers a look at some of these resources, as well as information about using a graphics tablet with Elements, and suggests some places to turn after you finish this book. Part Seven. Appendix A helps you get your copy of Elements up and running, and suggests what to do if it starts misbehaving. So what do you need to read first? Read all of Chapter 1.

If you want to organize your photos, then read about the Organizer also in Chapter 2. If you want to use the Organizer to label and keep track of them, then read Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 explains how to adjust your view of photos in the Editor. Chapter 4 shows you how to use the Quick Fix window to easily edit and correct photos. Chapter 16 covers printing, both at home and from online services. Chapter 17 explains how to email photos, and Chapter 18 teaches you how to post photos at Photoshop. You can come back and pick up the rest of the info in the book as you get more comfortable with Elements and want to explore more of the wonderful things you can do with it.

This book assumes that you know how to perform basic activities on your computer like clicking and double-clicking your mouse buttons and dragging objects onscreen.

To right-click means to press the right mouse button once, which calls up a menu of special features. To double-click means to press the left button twice, quickly, without moving the mouse between clicks. Most onscreen selection buttons are pretty obvious, but you may not be familiar with radio buttons : To choose an option, click the little empty circle next to it.

But if you have a one-button mouse, you can Control-click instead—that means to press the Control key on your keyboard and then press your mouse button once. Figure 1. Mac file paths are shown using the same arrows.

Otherwise, all the different versions are specified. Figure I-2 explains. Figure 2. In Mac OS X Lion, Apple has made it a little harder to find your Library folders. After that, you can always find the Library folder by just clicking the name of your hard drive in the list on the left side of a Finder window. The other Library folder you may need is the one for your user account, which is a hidden file in Lion.

To make it visible, in the Finder, open the Go menu and then press the Option key. You can also communicate with the Missing Manual team and tell us what you love or hate about the book.

Head over to www. Go to www. If you register this book at oreilly.

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