When you open a poorly exposed photo in Elements, the first thing to do is figure out what’s wrong with it, just like a doctor diagnosing a patient. If the exposure’s not perfect, what exactly is wrong? Here’s a list of common symptoms to help figure out where to go next:

Of course, if you’re lucky (or a really skilled photographer), you may not see any of these problems, in which case, skip to Using Levels if you want to do something to make your colors pop.

If your photo is completely over- or underexposed, you need to add special layers to correct the problems. You follow the same steps to fix either problem. The only difference is the layer blend mode (Blend Mode) you choose: Multiply layers darken your image’s exposure while Screen layers lighten it. Figure 7-1 shows Multiply layers in action (and also gives you an idea of the limitations of this technique if your exposure is really far gone). You can download the file window.jpg from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com if you’d like to try the different exposure fixes for yourself.

Be careful, though. If your entire photo isn’t out of whack, using Multiply or Screen layers can ruin the exposure of the parts that were OK to start with, because they’ll increase or decrease the exposure on the entire photo. Your properly exposed areas may blow out (see The Shadows/Highlights Command) and lose the details if you apply a Screen layer, for example. So, if your exposure problem is spotty (as opposed to problems that affect the entire image), try the new Smart Brush (Using Levels) or Shadows/Highlights (The Shadows/Highlights Command) first. If your whole photo needs an exposure correction, here’s how to use layers to fix it:

You’re more likely to need several layers to fix overexposure than you are for underexposure. And, of course, there are limits to what even Elements can do for a blindingly overexposed image. Overexposure is usually tougher to fix than underexposure, especially if the area is blown out, as explained in the box on The Shadows/Highlights Command.

The Shadows/Highlights command is one of the best features in Elements. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for adjusting only the dark or light areas of your photo without messing up the rest of it. Figure 7-2 shows what a great help it can be.

Figure 7-2. The Shadows/Highlights command can bring back details from photos where you were sure there was no information at all—but sometimes at a cost. Left: This photo suffers from the worst of both worlds—a severely underexposed interior along with the overly bright exterior visible through the windows. Right: The Shadows/Highlights tool brings out the hidden detail and reduces the background glare, but it can’t bring back the blown out sidewalks visible through the windows.

The Shadows/Highlights command in the Full Editor works pretty much the same way it does in Quick Fix (Contrast). The single flaw in this great tool is that you can’t apply it as an Adjustment layer (Adding Fill and Adjustment Layers), so you may want to apply Shadows/Highlights to a duplicate layer. Then, later on, you can discard the changes if you want to take another whack at adjusting the photo. In any case, it’s not difficult at all to make amazing changes to your photos with Shadows/Highlights. Here’s how:

The Shadows/Highlights tool is a cinch to use because you just make decisions based on what you’re seeing. Keep these tips in mind:

Shadows/Highlights is great if you want to adjust all the light or dark areas of a photo, but what if you want to tweak the exposure only in certain areas? Or what if you like the photo’s background just fine, but you want to tweak the subject a little? Of course, you can always make a selection in your photo (see Chapter 5 for more about selecting), or copy the selected area to a new layer, and then make your adjustments to that layer. But in Elements 7, Adobe has provided a super simple way to apply a correction to just the area you want, using the new Smart Brush tools.

Most of programs pay no attention to your monitor’s color settings, but a color-managed application like Elements relies on the profile—the information your computer stores about your monitor’s settings—when it decides how to print or display a photo onscreen. If that profile isn’t accurate, neither is the color in Elements.

So, you may need to calibrate your monitor, which is a way of adjusting its settings. A properly calibrated monitor makes all the difference in the world in getting great-looking results. If your photos look bad only in Elements, or if your pictures in print don’t look anything like they look onscreen, you can start fixing the problem by calibrating your monitor.

Getting started with calibrating

Calibrating a monitor sounds intimidating, but it’s actually not that difficult—some people think it’s even kind of fun. You get an extra added benefit in that your monitor may look about a thousand times better than you thought it could. Calibrating may even make it easier to read text in Word, for instance, because the contrast is better. Your options for calibrating your monitor, from best to only okay, are:

• Use a colorimeter. This method may sound disturbingly scientific, but it’s actually the easiest. A colorimeter is just a hardware device with special software that does your calibration for you. The device is much more accurate than calibrating by eye. For a long time, only a pro could afford one, but these days if you shop around you can find the Pantone Huey or the Spyder2Express for about $70 or less. More pro-oriented calibrators like the Eye One Display 2 or the Monaco Optix Spyder are about $200 or less. If you’re serious about controlling your colors in Elements, hardware is by far your best option for calibrating.

  Note

  Your calibration software probably asks you to set the brightness and contrast before you begin, even though most newer LCD monitors don’t have adjustable dials for these anymore. If you’re happy with your monitor’s current brightness and contrast, you can safely ignore this step. And unless you have a reason to choose differently, for an LCD monitor you usually want to set your white point to 6500 (Kelvin) and your gamma to 2.2.

• Software on your computer. There’s a good chance that the drivers (utility software) for your graphics card include some kind of calibration tool. Figure 7-5 shows a typical example. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose Display Settings → Color Management (in Windows XP: Display → Properties → Settings → Advanced) to see what you have.

  

  Figure 7-5. This computer has an old, not very deluxe graphics card; the video driver includes several utilities to help get more accurate color, including this calibration window.

• Adobe Gamma. If you have an older version of Elements (Elements 5 or earlier) you may have this program, which used to come with Elements. It’s pretty ancient, was never meant to work with anything but the old CRT monitors (the big fat ones like old-fashioned televisions), and will not work in Vista at all. If you happen to have Adobe Gamma, it may be better than nothing, but it’s probably less useful than any other utility you might have for adjusting your display.

If your photos still look a little odd even after you’ve calibrated your monitor, you may need to turn on the Ignore EXIF setting in the Editor’s preferences; see Figure 7-6.

Figure 7-6. If you still see a funny color cast (usually red or yellow) on all your digital camera photos, go to Edit → Preferences → Saving Files and turn on “Ignore Camera Data (EXIF) profiles”. Some cameras embed nonstandard color information in their files, and Elements’ Ignore EXIF utility just tells Elements to pay no attention to it, allowing your photos to display and print properly.

The other thing you may need to do to get good color from Elements is to check the color space Elements is using. Color space refers to which standard (out of several possibilities) Elements uses to define your colors. Color space can seem pretty abstruse the first time you hear about it, but it’s simply a way of defining what colors mean. For example, when someone says “green,” what do you envision: a lush emerald color, a deep forest green, a bright lime, or something else?

Choosing a color space is a way to make sure that everything that handles a digital file—Elements, your monitor, your printer—sees the same colors the same way. Over the years, the graphics industry has agreed on standards so that everyone has the same understanding of what you mean when you say red or green—as long as you specify which set of standards you’re using.

Elements only gives you two color spaces to pick from: sRGB (also called sRGB IEC61966-2.1 if you want to impress your geek friends) and Adobe RGB. When you choose a color space, you tell Elements which set of standards you want it to apply to your photos.

If you’re happy with the color you see on your monitor in Elements and you like the prints you’re getting, you don’t need to make any changes. If, on the other hand, you aren’t perfectly satisfied with what Elements is giving you, you’ll probably want to modify your color space, which you can do in the Color Settings dialog box. Go to Edit → Color Settings or press Shift+Ctrl+K. Here are your choices:

Figure 7-7. If you select the “Allow Me to Choose” option for color management, you see the Missing Profile dialog box each time you open a previously untagged image. Here’s where you can decide whether or not to tag your file and how to tag it. (See Creating Categories and Tags for more about tags.)

So what’s your best option? Once again, if everything is looking good, leave it alone. Otherwise, for general use, you’re probably best off starting with No Color Management. Then try the others if that doesn’t work well for you.

If you choose one of the other three options, when you save your file, Elements attempts to embed the file with a tag, or information about the file’s color space—either Adobe RGB or sRGB. (Incidentally, this tag isn’t related to the Organizer tags that you read about in Chapter 2.) If you don’t want a color tag—also known as an ICC Profile—in your file, just turn off the checkbox before you save your file. Figure 7-8 shows where to find the profile information in the Save As dialog box, and how to turn the whole process off.

Figure 7-8. When you save a file, Elements offers to embed the color tag in the file. You can safely turn off the ICC Profile checkbox and leave the file untagged. (Assigning a profile is helpful because then any program that sees your file knows what color standards you’re working with. But if you’re new to Elements, you’ll usually have an easier time if you don’t start embedding profiles in files without a good reason.)

Before you can get started adjusting Levels, you first need to understand the heart, soul, and brain of the Levels dialog box: the Histogram (shown in Figure 7-10).

The Histogram is the black bumpy mound in the window. It’s really nothing more than a bar graph indicating the distribution of the colors in your photo. (It’s a bar graph, but there’s no space between the bars, which is what causes the mountainous look.)

Figure 7-10. One of the scariest sights in Elements, the Levels dialog box is actually your very good friend. If it frightens you, take comfort in knowing that you’ve always got the Auto button here, which is the same Auto Levels command as in Quick Fix. But it’s worth persevering: The other options here give you much better control over the end results.

From left to right, the Histogram shows the brightness range from dark to light (the 0 to 255 mentioned earlier in this section). The height of the “mountain” at any given point shows how many pixels in your photo are that particular brightness. You can tell a lot about your photo by where the mound of color is before you adjust it, as demonstrated in Figure 7-11.

Figure 7-11. Top: If the bars in your Histogram are all smushed together, your photo doesn’t have a lot of tonal range. As long as you like how the photo looks, that’s not important. But if you’re unhappy with the color in the photo, it’s usually going to be harder to get it exactly right compared to a photo that has a wider tonal distribution. Middle: If all your colors are bunched up on the left side, your photo is underexposed. Bottom: If you just have a big lump that’s all on the right side, your photo is overexposed.

If you look above the Histogram, you can see that there’s a little menu that says RGB. If you pull that down, you can also see a separate Histogram for each individual color. You can adjust all three channels at once in the RGB setting, or change each channel separately for maximum control of your colors.

The Histogram contains so much information about your photo that Adobe also makes it available in the Full Editor in its own palette (Figure 7-12); this way, you can always see it and use it to monitor how you’re changing the colors in an image. Once you get fluent in reading Histogramese, you’ll probably want to keep this palette around.

Figure 7-12. If you keep the Histogram on your desktop, you can always see what effect your changes are having on the color distribution in your photo. To get this nifty Technicolor view, go to Window → Histogram and then choose Colors from the pull-down menu on the palette. To update a Histogram, click the upper-right triangle as shown here. If you’re really into statistical information, there’s a bunch of it available at the bottom of this palette, but if you’re not a pro, you can safely ignore these numbers.

The Histogram is just a graph, and you don’t do anything to it directly. What you do when you use Levels is use the Histogram as a guide so that you can tell Elements what to consider as the black and white points—that is, the darkest and lightest points, in your photo. (Remember, you’re thinking in terms of brightness values, not shades of color, for these settings.)

Once you’ve set the end points, you can adjust the midtones—the tones in between that would appear gray in a black-and-white photo. If that seems complicated, it’s not—at least, not when you’re actually doing it. Once you’ve made a Levels adjustment, the next time you open the Levels dialog box, you’ll see that your Histogram now runs the entire length of the scale because you’ve told Elements to redistribute your colors so that they cover the full dark-to-light range.

The next two sections show you—finally!—how to actually adjust your image’s Levels.

One way to adjust Levels is to set the black, white, and/or gray points by using the eyedroppers on the right side of the Levels dialog box. It’s quite simple—just follow these steps:

See, it’s not so hard. If you mess up, just click the Reset button, and you can start over again.

The eyedropper method works fine if your photo has spots that should be black, white, or gray, but a lot of the time, your picture may not have any of these colors.

Fortunately, the Levels sliders give you yet another way to apply Levels, and it’s by far the most popular method, giving you maximum control over your colors.

If you look directly under the Histogram, you’ll see three little triangles, called Input sliders. The left triangle is the slider for setting the black point in your photo, the right slider sets the white point, and the middle slider adjusts your midtones (gray). You just drag them to make changes to the color levels in your photo, as shown in Figure 7-13.

Figure 7-13. Here’s how to use the Levels sliders. You want to move the left and right sliders from the ends of the track until they’re under the outer edges of the color data in the graph. If there’s empty space on the end, just move the slider until it’s under the first mound of data. The red arrows in this figure show where you’d position the left and right sliders for this photo.

When you move the left Input slider, you tell Levels, “Take all the pixels from this point down and consider them black.” With the right slider, you’re saying, “Make this pixel and all higher values white.” The middle slider, the midtones slider, adjusts the brightness values that are considered medium gray. All three adjustments improve the contrast of your image.

The easiest way to use the Levels sliders is to:

You can adjust your entire image or just each color channel individually. The most accurate way is to first choose each color channel separately from the Channel drop-down menu in the Levels dialog box. Adjust the end points for each channel by itself, and then go back to RGB and tweak just the gamma slider.

The last control you may want to use in the Levels dialog box is the Output Levels slider. Output Levels work roughly the same way as your brightness and contrast controls on your TV. Moving these sliders makes the darkest pixels darker and the lightest pixels lighter. Among pros, this is known as adjusting the tonal range of a photo.

Adjusting Levels will improve almost every photo you take, but if your photo has a bad color cast—if it’s too orange or too blue—you may need something else. The next section shows you how to get rid of unwanted color.

The Color Cast tool is another eyedropper sampling tool that adjusts the colors in your photo based on the pixels you click. In this case, you show Elements where a neutral color should be. As you saw with the heron in Figure 7-14, the Color Cast command can make a big difference with just one click. To use it:

The Color Cast tool works pretty well if your image has areas that should be black, white, or gray, even if they’re very tiny. The tricky thing is when you have an image that doesn’t have a good area to sample—when there isn’t any black, white, or gray anywhere in the picture. If that’s the case, consider using the Photo Filter (Photo Filter).

The Color Variations window (Figure 7-15) is very appealing to many Elements beginners, because it gives you a visual clue about what to do to fix the color in your photo. You just click the little preview thumbnail that shows the color balance you like best, and Elements applies the necessary change to make your photo look like the thumbnail.

Figure 7-15. A lot of the time, you’ll do better using the Quick Fix window to make the kinds of changes you can make with Color Variations, but Color Variations comes in handy when you can see exactly what your photo needs—in this case, a little less blue and a bit more lightness. The effect is a bit exaggerated here so that you can see it easily. The after photo is redder than you’d probably want it to be. If that happens to you, click Reset and move the slider (lower left) to the left a bit before you try again.

However, Color Variations has some pretty severe limitations, most notably the microscopic size of the thumbnails. It’s very hard to see what you’re doing, and even newcomers can usually get better results in Quick Fix (Using the Color sliders).

Still, Color Variations is useful for those times when you know something is not quite right in your color but you can’t figure out exactly what to do about it. And because it’s adjustable, Color Variations is good for when you do know what you want but you want to make only the tiniest sliver of a difference to your photo’s color. To use the Color Variations tool:

Figure 7-18 shows you the Color Picker. It has an intimidating number of options, but, most of the time, you don’t need them all. Picking a color is as easy as clicking wherever you see the color you want.

Figure 7-18. For the majority of beginners, the most important parts of the Elements Color Picker are the vertical rectangular slider in the middle (called, appropriately enough, the Color Slider), and the big square box, called the Color Field. Use the Slider to get the general color you want, and then click in the Field for the exact shade.

The Color Picker is actually pretty simple to use:

That’s the basic way to use the Color Picker. See the box on Saving colors in the Swatches palette for ways to enter a numeric value for your color if you know it, or to change the shades the Color Picker is offering you.

If you’ve ever repainted your house, you’ve probably had the frustrating experience of spotting the exact color you want somewhere—if only there were a way to capture that color. That’s one problem you’ll never run into in Elements, thanks to the handy Eyedropper tool that lets you sample any color you see on your monitor and then automatically make it the Foreground color in Elements. If you can get a color into your computer, Elements can grab it.

Sampling a color (that is, snagging it for your own use) couldn’t be simpler than it is with the Eyedropper. Just move your cursor over the color you want and click. It even works on colors that aren’t already in Elements, as explained in Figure 7-19. Sampling is perfect for projects like scrapbook pages, where you might want to use, say, the color from an event program cover as a theme color for the project. Just scan the program and sample the color with the Eyedropper.

Figure 7-19. To use the Eyedropper tool to sample colors outside of Elements, start by clicking anywhere inside your Elements file. Then, while still holding your mouse button down, move your cursor over to the non-Elements object (a Web page, for instance), until the eyedropper is over the area you want to sample. Then you can let go, and you’ll see the new color in the Elements color squares. If you let go before you get to the non-Elements object, it won’t work. Here, the Eyedropper (where the arrow is pointing) is sampling the green color from a photo in Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery. If you don’t have a big monitor, it can take a bit of maneuvering to get the program windows positioned so that you can perform this procedure.

By now, you may be thinking that Elements has more eyedroppers than your medicine cabinet. But this time, the Eyedropper in question is the Official Elements Eyedropper tool that has its own place in the Toolbox. It’s one of the easiest tools to use:

If you want to keep your color sample around so that you can use it another time without having to get the Eyedropper out again, you can save your color samples in the Swatches palette. Then you can quickly choose those exact colors again any time you want. See the next section for directions on how to do this.

The Color Swatches palette holds several little preloaded libraries of sample colors for you to use in picking a color. Go to Window → Color Swatches to call up the Color Swatches palette. You can park the Color Swatches palette in the Palette bin just like any other palette, if you like, or leave it floating on your desktop. When you’re ready to choose a color, just click the swatch you want, and it appears in the Foreground color square or the color box of the tool you’re using.

The Color Swatches palette is very handy when you want to keep certain color choices at your fingertips. For instance, you can put your logo colors into it, and then you always have those colors available for any graphics or ads you create in Elements.

Elements starts you off with several different libraries (groups) of Color Swatches. Click the pull-down menu on the Swatches palette to see them all. A swatch you create appears at the bottom of the current library, and you can save it there, or you can create your own swatch libraries if you’d rather do that.

Using the Color Swatches to select your Foreground or Background color is as easy as using the Eyedropper tool. Figure 7-20 shows you how.

To use the Color Swatches palette:

Figure 7-20. When you move your cursor over the Color Swatches palette, it changes to an eyedropper. Click to select a color. If you’re using a preloaded palette you’ll see color name labels as you move over each square. If you use the swatches a lot, choose “Place in Palette Bin when closed” from the More menu so the Swatches palette is always there.

You can also change the way the Color Swatches palette displays swatch information, as shown in Figure 7-21.

Figure 7-21. On the Color Swatches palette, click the More button → Small List, and depending on the collection you’re using, you can see the names or hex numbers for each color (in addition to a small thumbnail of the color). Some of the tools, like the Type tools, have Options buttons for their swatches viewer instead of the palette’s More button.

Although it sounds like the last thing you’d ever want to do to a photo, Unsharp Mask reigned as the Supreme Sharpener for many generations of image correction, despite the fact that it has the most counterintuitive name in all of Elements.

To be fair, it’s not Adobe’s fault. Unsharp Mask is an old darkroom term, and it actually does make sense if you know how our film ancestors used to improve a picture’s focus. (Its name refers to a complicated darkroom technique that involved making a blurred copy of the photo at one point in the process.)

For several versions of Elements, Unsharp Mask ranked right up there with Levels as a contender for most useful tool in Elements, and some people still think it’s the best way to sharpen a photo. Figure 7-22 shows how much a little Unsharp Mask can do for your photos.

Figure 7-22. Left: The photo as it came from the camera. Right: The photo was treated with a dose of Unsharp Mask. Notice how much clearer the individual hairs in the dog’s coat are and how much better defined the eyes and mouth are.

To use Unsharp Mask, first finish all your other corrections and changes. Unsharp Mask (or any sharpening tool) can undermine other adjustments you make later on, so always sharpen as the very last step. A good rule to remember when sharpening is “last and once.” Repeatedly applying sharpening can degrade your image’s quality.

If you’re sharpening an image with layers, be sure the active layer has something in it. Applying sharpening to a Levels Adjustment layer, for example, won’t do anything. Also, perform any format conversions (Changing the File Format) before applying sharpening. Finally, you may want a duplicate layer for the sharpening if you want the ability to undo your changes later on. Press Ctrl+J to create the duplicate layer.

When you’re ready to apply Unsharp Mask:

The sliders for Unsharp Mask work very much like the sliders in several of the other tools:

There are many, many different schools of thought about which values to plug into each box. Whatever works for you is fine. The one thing you want to watch out for is oversharpening. Figure 7-23 tells you how to know if you’ve gone too far.

You’ll probably need to do a bit of experimenting to find out which settings work best for you. Photos you want to print usually need to be sharpened to an extent that makes them look oversharpened when viewed on your monitor. Therefore, you may want to create separate versions of your photo (one for onscreen viewing and one for printing). Version sets (Saving Your Work) in the Organizer are great for keeping track of multiple copies like this.

Unsharp Mask has been around since long before digital imaging. A lot of people (including the folks at Adobe) have been thinking that, in the computer age, there’s got to be a better way to sharpen, and now there is. The latest tool in the war on poor focus is Adjust Sharpness.

Figure 7-23. The perils of oversharpening. This lizard may have a suspicious attitude, but he didn’t have a skin condition. The flaky look comes from overapplying sharpening, and the white flecks are called artifacts. If you look very closely, oversharpening causes a halo effect around the lizard. The presence of halos is often your best clue that you’ve oversharpened an image.

The Unsharp Mask tool you learned about in the previous section helps boost a photo’s sharpness by a process something like reducing Gaussian blur (Radial Blur: Producing a sense of motion). Problem is, Gaussian blurring is rarely the cause of your picture’s poor focus, so there’s only so much Unsharp Mask can fix. In real life, blurry photos usually come from one of two causes:

Adjust Sharpness is as easy to use as Unsharp Mask, and it gives you settings to correct all three kinds of blur—Gaussian, lens, and motion. When you first open the Adjust Sharpness dialog box, its settings are almost identical to Unsharp Mask. It’s the extra things Adjust Sharpness can do that make it a more versatile tool. Here’s how to use it:

The first two settings in the Adjust Sharpness dialog box, Amount and Radius, work exactly the same way they do in Unsharp Mask. Adjust Sharpness also has a couple of additional settings of its own:

Many people who’ve used Smart Sharpening in the full-featured Photoshop swear they’ll never go back to plain Unsharp Mask. Try out Adjust Sharpness—the Elements version of Smart Sharpening—and see if you agree. To give you an idea of the difference between the two methods, Figure 7-25 shows the dog from Figure 7-22 again, only this time with Adjust Sharpness instead of Unsharp Mask.

Figure 7-25. Here’s the terrier from Figure 7-22 only this time he’s been sharpened using Adjust Sharpness. Notice how much more each hair in his coat stands out, and how much more detail you can see in his nose and mouth.

Unsharp Mask is definitely the traditional favorite, and Adjust Sharpness is the latest thing in sharpening, but there’s an alternative method that many people prefer because you do it on a dedicated layer and can back the effect off later by adjusting the layer’s opacity, if you like. Moreover, you can use this method to punch up the colors in your photo as you sharpen. It’s called High-Pass sharpening. All sharpening methods have their virtues, and you may find that you choose your technique according to the content of your photo. Try the following procedure out for yourself by downloading the photo waterlillies.jpg from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Elements also gives you a dedicated Sharpen tool. It’s a special brush that sharpens instead of adding color to the areas you drag it over; Figure 7-27 shows it in action. To get to it, go to the Blur tool or press R, and choose the Sharpen tool from the pop-out menu.

Figure 7-26. Top: The original photo. Bottom: High-Pass sharpening using Vivid Light makes the colors more vivid, but the ripples are much harder-edged than they were in the original. For high-pass sharpening, you can use any of the blend modes in the group with Overlay, except Hard Mix and Pin Light. Vivid Light can make your colors pop, but watch out for sharpening artifacts, since they’ll be more vivid, too. Overlay gives a softer effect.

The Sharpen tool has some of the same Options bar settings as the Brush tool (see Picking and Using a Basic Brush for more about brush settings). It also has a couple of settings of its very own:

Figure 7-27. The Sharpen tool isn’t meant to sharpen an entire photo, but it’s great for detail sharpening. Here, it’s being used to bring out the detail in the front strand of beads. (The red arrow helps you find the cursor.) Approach this tool with caution; it’s very easy to overdo things with it. One pass too many or a too-high setting, and you start seeing artifacts right away.