Photoshop Elements is now in its 8th version. The product has matured as a tool for both professional and amateur photographers who want to edit, improve, manage, manipulate, and organize photos and other media. Considering the power of the program and impressive features, Elements remains one of the best values for your money among computer software applications.
Why should you buy Photoshop Elements (and, ultimately, this book)? The range of people who can benefit from using Elements is wide and includes a vast audience. From beginning image editors to intermediate users to more advanced amateurs and professionals, Elements has something for everyone. We'll even stick our necks out a little and suggest that many Photoshop users can benefit greatly by adding Elements to their software tool cabinets. Why? Because Elements offers some wonderful creation and sharing tools that Photoshop hasn't yet dreamed of supporting. For example, in Photoshop Elements 8, you can create postcards, greeting cards, and photo albums with just a few mouse clicks. You can place orders with online service centers that professionally print your photo creations.
To set your frame of mind to thinking in Photoshop Elements terms, don't think of the program as a scaled-down version of Adobe Photoshop; those days are gone. Consider the following:
If you're a digital photographer and you shoot your pictures in JPEG or Camera Raw format, Elements has the tools for you to open, edit, and massage your pictures into professional images.
If you worry about color profile embedding, Elements can handle the task for you, as we explain in Chapter 4 where we talk about Camera Raw, and in Chapter 14 where we talk about color profiling and printing. For the professional, Photoshop Elements has just about everything you need to create final images for color printing and commercial printing.
If you're a beginner or an intermediate user, you'll find some of the Photoshop Elements quick-fix operations a breeze to use to help you enhance your images, as we explain in Chapters 9 and 10.
If you like to print homemade greeting cards and photo albums — whether you're a beginner, an intermediate user, or a professional user — Elements provides you with easy-to-follow steps to package your creations, as we cover in Chapters 15 and 16. In addition, the wonderful sharing services available are your gateway to keeping family, friends, and clients connected to your photos, as we explain in Chapter 16.
This book is an effort to provide, in about 400 pages, as much of a comprehensive view of a wildly feature-rich program as we can. Additionally this book is written for a cross-platform audience. If you're a Macintosh user, you'll find all you need to work on Elements 8 for the Macintosh.
There's a lot to Elements, and we try to offer you as much as possible within our limited amount of space. We begged for more pages, but alas, our publisher wants to get this book in your hands in full color and with an attractive price tag. Therefore, even though we may skip over a few little things, all you need to know about using Photoshop Elements for designing images for print, sharing, Web hosting, versatile packaging, e-mailing, and more is covered in the pages ahead.
As we said, Photoshop Elements has something for just about everyone. Hence, we know that our audience is large and that not everyone will use every tool, command, or method described in this book. Therefore, we added a lot of cross-references in the text, in case you want to jump around. You can go to just about any chapter and start reading; and, if some concept needs more explanation, we point you in the right direction for getting some background when it's necessary.
Throughout this book, we point you to menus where commands are accessed frequently. A couple of things to remember are the references for where to go when we detail steps in a procedure. For accessing a menu command, you may see a sentence like this one:
Choose File
When you see commands like this one mentioned, we're asking you to click the File menu to open the drop-down menu, click the menu command labeled Get Photos, and then choose the command From Files and Folders from the submenu that appears.
Another convention we use refers to context menus. A context menu jumps up at your cursor position and shows you a menu similar to the menu you select at the top of the Elements workspace. To open a context menu, right-click the mouse (Shift-click on the Mac).
A third item relates to using keystrokes on your keyboard. When we mention that some keys need to be pressed on your keyboard, the text is described like this:
Press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S (Option+Shift+
In this case, you hold down the Alt key on Windows or the Option key on the Macintosh, the Shift key, and the Control key on Windows or the
This book is divided into logical parts where related features are nested together in chapters within six different parts of the book.
Part I: Getting Started
If you just bought a digital camera and you're new to image editing in a program such as Photoshop Elements, you're probably tempted to jump into fixing and editing your pictures. The essentials usually aren't the most exciting part of any program or book. That's true with this book, too: The more mundane issues related to understanding some basics are assembled in the first three chapters. Although some bits of information aren't as exciting as in many other chapters, you must understand them before you start editing images. Be sure to review the first three chapters before you dive into the other chapters.
In Part I, we talk about the tools, menus, commands, preferences, workspaces, and features that help you move around easily in the program. The more you pick up in the preliminary chapters, the more easily you can adapt to the Elements way of working.
Part II: Getting Organized
In Part II, we talk about getting photos in Elements, organizing your files, searching for files, and grouping your photos, and we give you much more information related to the Photoshop Elements Organizer (Windows) or Adobe Bridge (Macintosh). The Organizer is your central workplace for Windows users or Adobe Bridge on the Macintosh, and knowing a great deal about using the Organizer window/Adobe Bridge helps you move around much faster in the program.
Part III: Selecting and Correcting Photos
Part III relates to creating and manipulating selections. There's a lot to making selections in photos, but after you figure it out (by reading Chapter 7), you can cut out a figure in a picture and drop it into another picture, drop different backgrounds into pictures, or isolate an area that needs some brightness and contrast adjustment. In Chapter 8, we talk about layers and how to create and manage them in Elements. In many other chapters, we refer you to Chapter 8 because you need to work with layers for many other tasks you do in Elements.
In Chapter 9, we talk about fixing image flaws and problems. That picture you took with your digital camera may be underexposed or overexposed, or it may need some work to remove dust and scratches. Maybe it needs a little sharpening, or another imperfection requires editing. All the know-how and how-tos are in this chapter.
In Chapter 10, we cover how to correct color problems, brightness, and contrast. We show you ways to quickly fix photos, as well as some methods for custom image corrections.
Part IV: Exploring Your Inner Artist
This part is designed to bring out the artist in you. Considering the easy application of Elements filter effects, you can turn a photo image into a drawing or apply a huge number of different effects to change the look of your image.
In Chapter 12, we talk about drawing and painting so that you can let your artistic expression run wild. We follow up in Chapter 13 by talking about adding text to photos so that you can create your own layouts, posters, cards, and more.
Part V: Printing, Creating, and Sharing
One critical chapter in this book is Chapter 14, in which we talk about printing your pictures. If your prints don't look the way they do on your monitor, you need to read and reread this chapter.
If screen viewing is of interest to you, we cover a number of different options for viewing your pictures onscreen in Chapter 15. For slide shows, Web-hosted images, animated images, photo viewing on your TV, and even creating movie files, this chapter shows you the many ways you can view your Elements images onscreen.
We wrap up this part with Chapter 16, in which we describe how to make creations and share files by using various online services. You have a number of different options for making creations to share or print.
Part VI: The Part of Tens
The last part of the book contains the Part of Tens chapters. We offer ten tips for composing better images and give you ten more project ideas to try with Elements.
In the margins throughout this book, you see icons indicating that something important is stated in the respective text.
Note
This icon informs you that the item discussed is a new feature in Photoshop Elements 8.
Tip
A Tip tells you about an alternative method for a procedure by giving you a shortcut, a workaround, or some other type of helpful information related to working on tasks in the section being discussed.
Warning
Pay particular attention when you see the Warning icon. This icon indicates possible side-effects you might encounter when performing certain operations in Elements.
Note
This icon is a heads-up for something you may want to commit to memory. Usually, it tells you about a shortcut for a repetitive task, where remembering a procedure can save you time.
Note
Elements is a computer program, after all. No matter how hard we try to simplify our explanation of features, we can't entirely avoid the technical information. If we think that a topic is complex, we use this icon to alert you that we're moving into a complex subject. You won't see many of these icons in the book because we try our best to give you the details in nontechnical terms.
As we say earlier in the Introduction, the first part of this book serves as a foundation for all the other chapters. Try to spend a little time reading through the three chapters in Part I. After that, feel free to jump around and pay special attention to the cross-referenced chapters, in case you get stuck on a concept.
When you need a little extra help, refer to Chapter 1, where we talk about using the online help documents available in Elements.
If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or complaints, go to
http://support.wiley.com
We hope you have much success and enjoyment in using Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, and it's our sincere wish that the pages ahead provide you with an informative and helpful view of the program.