Introduction

Welcome to Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s powerful, easy-to-use, image-editing software. Photoshop Elements gives hobbyists, professional photographers, and artists many of the same tools and features found in Adobe Photoshop (long the industry standard), but packaged in a more accessible, intuitive workspace.

Photoshop Elements’ friendly user interface, combined with its bargain-basement price, has made it an instant hit with the new wave of amateur digital photographers lured by the recent proliferation of sophisticated, low-cost digital cameras.

Photoshop Elements makes it easy to retouch your digital photos; apply special effects, filters, and styles; prepare images for the Web; and even create wide-screen panoramas from a series of individual photos. And Photoshop Elements provides several features geared specifically to the beginning user. Of particular note are the Quick and Guided photo editing controls that make complex image corrections easy to apply.

In the next few pages, I’ll cover some of Photoshop Elements’ key features (both old and new) and share a few thoughts to help you get the most from this book. Then you can be on your way to mastering Photoshop Elements’ simple, fun, and sophisticated image-editing tools.

What’s New in Photoshop Elements 11

For most of its existence, Elements has been “Photoshop Light,” a scaled-back version of Adobe’s image-editing behemoth. Over time, Adobe has retooled Elements to be a powerful asset for digital photographers.

Photoshop Elements 11 continues Adobe’s quest to make an image editing application that responds to people’s real-world needs. With this revision, the company has dramatically overhauled the entire application. Over the years, Elements has taken the basic Photoshop structure and bolted features and interfaces onto its frame. Now, items are placed in more natural locations—beginners won’t be intimidated by lots of floating palettes, for example (but experienced editors can bring them back).

After all, there’s a lot of power in being able to apply adjustment layers and clipping masks and filters, but that isn’t always helpful when your goal is to just improve the exposure in a too-dark photo—and you don’t have the time to learn all the science behind the tools.

The Organizer is the Elements component that lets you manage your photo library—a library that, if yours is like mine, grows larger every year. To help you locate photos, the Organizer now includes an advanced search mode that lets you winnow results based on keywords, people, places, and events. The Map mode, which disappeared in Photoshop Elements 10 due to technical issues, is back as the Places view, and is much improved (and also now available on the Mac for the first time).

Adobe is also in the process of phasing out its Photoshop.com service, which no longer appears in the Organizer, in favor of Revel, a way to share photos among computers and mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone.

The Editor, the component of Elements where you do the actual editing, gains the new interface and new guided edits like a Vignette Edit and Tilt-Shift Edit. A ton of little details and performance improvements have been worked into the corners, too, such as operations that a previewed in real time (instead of requiring that you remember to select a Preview checkbox), Exposure and Vibrance adjustment controls in the Quick edit mode, and a way to run Photoshop actions without digging deep into your computer’s folder structure, as in the past.

Overall, Photoshop Elements has received not only a refreshed interface geared toward helping all levels of users, but also benefited from quite a bit of internal work that should make photo organizing and editing smoother and faster.

How to Use This Book

This Visual QuickStart Guide, like others in the series, is a task-based reference. Each chapter focuses on a specific area of the application and presents it in a series of concise, illustrated steps. I encourage you to follow along using your own images. I’ve also made 20 sample images available for download at peachpit.com/elements11vqs. After you complete the process for registering your book, look for the “Access Bonus Content” text next to the book title in the Registered Products tab. I believe the best way to learn is by doing, and this Visual QuickStart Guide is the perfect vehicle for that style of learning.

This book is meant to be a reference work, and although it’s not expected that you’ll read through it in sequence from front to back, I’ve made an attempt to order the chapters in a logical fashion.

The first chapter speeds through five steps to import, edit, and share your digital photos. The next chapter takes you on a tour of the work area to make sure we’re all on the same page. From there you dive into importing pictures and managing your photo library using the Organizer. Then you explore cropping and straightening, making selections, working with layers, adjusting lighting and color, retouching and correcting images, applying effects, painting, and adding text. Next, you move along to learn a variety of techniques for saving, printing, and sharing images, including special formatting options for distributing images over the Web.

This book is suitable for the beginner just starting in digital photography and image creation, as well as hobbyists, photo enthusiasts, intermediate-level photographers, illustrators, and designers.

Sharing Space with Windows and Mac OS X

Photoshop Elements is almost exactly the same on Windows as it is under Mac OS X, which is why this book covers both platforms. In the few places where a feature is found in one environment but not the other, or if the steps are different for each, I make it clear which version is being discussed.

You’ll also see that the screenshots are a mix of Windows and Mac—but despite obvious cosmetic differences such as title bars and menu bars, everything pretty much tracks the same within the user interface itself.

I also frequently mention keyboard shortcuts, which are faster methods of accessing commands compared to choosing items from menus. Keyboard shortcuts are great time-savers and prevent you from having to constantly refocus your energy and attention as you jump from image window to menu bar and back again.

When this book introduces a command, the keyboard shortcut is frequently also listed, with the Windows version appearing first and the Mac version trailing after a forward-slash. For example, the keyboard shortcut for the Copy command is displayed as “Ctrl+C/Command-C.”

You’ll find a complete list of Photoshop Elements’ keyboard shortcuts in the appendices.