Probably the most popular Elements accessory is a graphics tablet, which lets you draw and paint with a pen-like stylus instead of a mouse. A tablet is like a souped-up substitute for a mouse: you control your onscreen cursor by drawing directly on the tablet’s surface—an action that many artists find offers them greater control. If trying to use the Lasso tool with a mouse makes you feel like you’re trying to write on a mirror with a bar of soap, then a graphics tablet is for you.

Most tablets work like the one shown in Figure 19-1. You use the special pen on the tablet just as you would a mouse on a mousepad; any changes you make appear right on your monitor.

Figure 19-1. A Wacom Graphire tablet in action. This tablet is 6 x 8, a bit larger than the smallest size available (4 x 5). The working area is inside the rectangle on the tablet surface. For basic photo retouching, a small size is usually fine once you get used to it. If you want to do more drawing and you generally use sweeping strokes when you draw, then you may want a larger tablet.

For most people, it’s much easier to control fine motions with a tablet’s pen than with a mouse. Moreover, when you use a tablet, many of the brushes and tools in Elements become pressure sensitive—the harder you press, the darker and wider the line becomes. The tablet pen lets you create much more realistic paint strokes, as shown in Figure 19-2.

Figure 19-2. Two almost identical paint strokes, starting with fairly hard pressure and then easing up. Both were made using the identical brush and color in Elements. The only difference is that the stroke on the left was drawn with a mouse, and the one on the right came from a tablet. You can see what a difference the pressure sensitivity makes.

When using the Brush tool, you’ll see Tablet Options (it’s a tiny black triangle) just to the right of the Airbrush setting in the Options bar. Many brushes and tools are automatically pressure sensitive when you hook up a tablet. You can choose whether to let the pressure control the size, opacity, roundness, hue jitter, and scatter for your brushes. (See Picking and Using a Basic Brush for more about Brush settings.)

With a tablet, you can also create hand-drawn line art—even if you don’t have an artistic bone in your body—by placing a picture of what you want to draw on the surface of the tablet and tracing the outline. Also, if you find constant mousing troublesome, you may have fewer hand problems when using a tablet’s pen. Most tablets come with a wireless mouse, which works only on the surface of the tablet. Or you can use your regular mouse on a mousepad or your desk the way you always do, if you like to switch back and forth between the stylus and a mouse.

Tablet prices now start at less than a hundred dollars, a big drop from what they used to cost. There are lots of different models, and their features vary widely. Sophisticated tablets offer more levels of sensitivity and respond when you change the angle at which you hold the stylus.

Wacom, one of the big tablet manufacturers, has some pretty nifty tablet demos on its Web site (www.wacom.com), if you click on the various product tours. You can’t actually simulate what it’s like to use a tablet, but the animations give you a good idea of what your life would be like if you went the tablet route.

You have to spend some money if you want a graphics tablet, but there’s a ton of free stuff—tutorials, brushes, textures, and Layer styles, for example—available online that you can add to Elements. Most of these add-ons say they work with Photoshop, but since Elements is based on Photoshop, you can use most of them in Elements, too.

Here are some popular places to go treasure hunting:

If you’re willing to pay a little bit, you’ve got even more choices. You can find everything from more elaborate ways to sharpen photos to really cool collections of special edges and visual effects. Prices range from donationware (pay if you like it) to some quite expensive and sophisticated plug-ins that cost hundreds of dollars. You can also buy books like the Wow! series (Peachpit Press), which have loads of illustrations showing the styles available on the included CD.

With so many goodies available, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed trying to keep track of everything you’ve added to Elements. Your best bet is to make backup copies of anything you download so you’ll have it if you ever need to reinstall Elements.

Elements also includes a Preset Manager (Figure 19-3) that can help manage certain kinds of downloads. Go to Edit → Preset Manager to launch it.

Figure 19-3. The Elements Preset Manager offers a place to see all your brushes, swatches, gradients, and patterns in one place. You can use it to switch which groups are loaded, to add or remove items, and so on—the same way you do in the main brush window.

You can do an enormous amount with Elements, but some people do need the full version of Photoshop. For example, if you want the ability to write your own actions (little scripts, like macros, that automate certain things in Photoshop) or if you have to work extensively in CMYK mode, then you need Photoshop.

CMYK is the color mode used for commercial printing—it stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK, which are the colors professional printers use. When you send a file to a print shop, the printer usually tells you it needs to be a CMYK file. You can’t convert files to CMYK in Elements. If you need CMYK files on a regular basis, it’s worth the extra price of Photoshop to avoid the aggravation. If you only occasionally need CMYK, you might just ask your printer about converting the file for you for an additional charge.

In Photoshop you get more of everything: more choices, more tools, more settings, more types of adjustment layers, and so on.

You can do thousands of interesting things with Elements that are beyond the scope of this book. If you install the Photoshop Inspiration Browser, you have access to dozens of interesting tutorials right from Elements. Also, bookstores have loads of titles on Elements and Photoshop, and a lot of procedures are common to both programs. All kinds of specialized books on everything from color management to making selections to scrapbooking are available.

In addition, you’ll find hundreds of tutorial sites on the Web. Besides those mentioned earlier in the chapter, other popular sites include:

If you search Google, you’re sure to find a tutorial for any project you have in mind, although many of them are written for full Photoshop. In most cases, you can adapt them for Elements. If you get stuck or need help with any other aspect of Elements, there’s a very active online community that’s sure to have an answer for you. Besides the sites already mentioned, try:

Many sites are devoted to scrapbooking using Elements. A good place to start is Scrapper’s Guide (www.scrappersguide.com), a commercial site run by Linda Sattgast.

No matter what you’re looking for—add-ons, tutorials, communities—try a Google search, and you’re sure to find a site that has what you want.

There’s no question about it: Once you get familiar with Elements, it’s addictive. Lots of other folks have found out how much fun this program is, and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding the answer to any question you have.

The only limit to what you can do with Elements is your imagination. Enjoy!