i. Introduction

Welcome to Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s powerful, easy-to-use, image-editing software. Photoshop Elements gives hobbyists, as well as 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, lowcost digital cameras and scanners.

Photoshop Elements 8 provides new tools and enhancements that not only help stretch the bounds of your creativity, but also help to make your quick photo corrections and creative retouching even simpler and more fun than before.

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.

Introducing Photoshop Elements

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.

What’s new in version 8

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 8 continues Adobe’s quest to make an image editing application that responds to people’s real-world needs. 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, for example, 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 new Photomerge Exposure tool was designed just for that purpose. Taking technology developed for the Photomerge Group Shot in Photoshop Elements 6.0, this feature combines two or more pictures of varying exposures—a person in the foreground is lit well but the sky behind them is blown out, or the sky looks good but the person is just a dark blob—and blends them into a photo that is evenly exposed.

The Photomerge Scene Cleaner lets you easily and cleanly remove objects (such as the errant tourist walking into frame). The Smart Brush tool lets you paint an area and apply preset effects to it. For example, punch up drab skies with the Blue Skies tool—without first making a selection, creating an adjustment layer, tweaking the settings, and so on.

The Recompose Tool also tackles something you may run into often: people or objects that are oddly spaced within the photo frame. As a friend of mine said, “This can make it look as if my kids like each other” instead of having them standing a few feet apart in every shot. You scrunch the image as if you’re resizing it, and Elements smartly compresses areas where you won’t notice a change.

For managing your photo library, Photoshop Elements 8.0 includes a full version of Adobe Bridge CS4, the asset manager included with the Adobe Creative Suite 4. (Elements 6.0—the previous version for Mac—also included Bridge, but that incarnation was limited compared to the full version that shipped with the Photoshop and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite.) Also included is an unrestricted version of Adobe Camera Raw for processing images shot in Raw format.

If you’ve worked with Photoshop Elements in the past, you should feel right at home in version 8.0.

Personalizing Photoshop Elements

Because no two users work quite the same way, Photoshop Elements gives you the freedom to customize its tools and palettes to suit your own personal work habits, expertise, and aesthetic. You can create favorite sets of brush types, swatch libraries, and patterned fills, and you can set preferences for save options, transparency, ruler units, and grid color. Slightly more advanced options help you to set the ways the program manages memory, and the ways it works with your monitor and printer to display and print color. Additionally, since it supports Adobe’s plug-in file format, Photoshop Elements can be a constantly changing and evolving tool, as you add new plug-ins for everything from custom filter effects to digital camera image browsers.

Setting preferences

Preferences are settings that let you control and modify the way Photoshop Elements looks, works, and behaves. The Preferences dialog is divided into a series of windows, each one focusing on a specific aspect of the application: general display properties, file saving options, cursor display and behavior, transparency settings, rulers and units of measurement, grid appearance and behavior, cache levels for managing memory, display settings for the file browser, and more. You can change preferences at any time by choosing Preferences from the Photoshop Elements menu.

About presets

Presets are collections of brush styles, swatch colors, gradient fills, and patterns organized into sets, or libraries. At any time during your work session, you can load different preset libraries using either the Preset Manager or the palette menus on the options bar or Swatches palette.

About plug-ins

Photoshop Elements makes great use of Adobe’s extendable plug-ins format. Plug-in modules are little software programs that add functionality to the main application. For instance, the different filters and effects you access from Photoshop Elements’ Filter menu are all plug-in modules. Plug-ins are stored inside a Plug-ins folder, where additional plug-ins can be added at any time.

Plug-ins are worth special mention because you aren’t limited to just those included with Photoshop Elements. In cooperation with Adobe, developers of both software and hardware have created compatible plug-ins that install and run seamlessly with Photoshop Elements. If you’ve recently purchased a digital camera or scanner, its browser or scanning software may very well include plug-ins to help the devices communicate with Photoshop Elements.

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 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 takes you on a tour of the work area and provides a foundation for the basics of importing photos and image editing. From there you dive into managing your photo library using Bridge CS4. Then you explore color, selections, layers, effects, painting, and typography, and then learn a variety of techniques for saving and printing 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.

Keyboard shortcuts

Many of the commands accessed from Photoshop Elements’ menu bar have a keyboard equivalent (or shortcut) that appears beside each command name in the menu. 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 also listed. For example, the keyboard shortcut for the Copy command is displayed as Command-C. (The Command key is marked with a or symbol—or both, depending on the model of Mac.) You’ll find a complete list of Photoshop Elements’ keyboard shortcuts in the appendix.