Matching Photo Styles

Now that I’ve given you some special effects you can apply to your images, I’ll show you a feature in Elements that lets you match the style of one photo to another. For example, let’s say you see a photo that has a really cool color treatment. Well, you can use the Photomerge Style Match feature to take the “look” from that photo and apply it to your own. Here’s how it works:

Step One:

Open the photo you’d like to add an effect to, then click on Guided at the top of the Edit tab and scroll down to the Photomerge palette. Go ahead and click on Style Match to begin.

SCOTT KELBY

Step Two:

The next screen is fairly consistent with the other Photomerge features in Elements. On the left you pick a source image, and on the right is your final image. In this case, we need to choose the image that we want to style our photo (the photo on the right) after. Elements comes with a few style images already, and you’ll find them in the Style Bin at the bottom of the window.

Step Three:

You can also add your own style images. Let’s say you have a cool sepia-tinted photo that you’d like to use. Just click on the small green plus icon at the top left of the Style Bin. Then, choose where you’d like to import the photo from (it could be the Organizer, or any place on your hard drive). Once you’ve imported the photo, it shows up at the end of the Style Bin images.

Step Four:

After you’ve decided which photo you want to style your photo after, drag it from the Style Bin to the left side of the window under Style Image (I used one of the black-and-white included photos in my example). You’ll also see the image on the right change to include some style elements from this photo. Note: If you want to see your After photo larger, just click on the View pop-up menu at the bottom left of the preview area, and choose After Only, then zoom in with the Zoom tool or the pop-up menu at the bottom right of the preview area.

Step Five:

Now, you may be totally happy with the way your photo looks. If so, just click Done. But if you want to experiment a little, Elements has some settings on the right side that’ll let you change the look and feel of your photo. For starters, the first thing I always do is turn on the Transfer Tones checkbox at the bottom. I know it’s at the bottom, so you typically don’t think to start there, but it’s one of the key settings for me whenever I’m using this feature (especially if your style image is black and white or sepia).

Step Six:

Next, we’ll move to the top to the Style Intensity slider. This one is like an opacity slider. In our black-and-white example, reducing the intensity leaves us with a semi-saturated photo. As you move it all the way to the left, the style image eventually has no effect on the final.

Step Seven:

The next slider, Style Clarity, works like a contrast slider. The further you move it toward the right the more contrasty the photo becomes. If you move it too far to the left, then the photo becomes kinda flat and loses a lot of the snap that it had before (which is why I rarely move it to the left).

Step Eight:

Enhance Details is like an ultra-contrast/sharpening slider. It takes whatever was dark and pushes it toward black. Then it takes whatever was lighter, and pushes it toward white. Be careful with this one, though. It tends to have some really strong effects, even if you just move it in small amounts (as seen here).

Step Nine:

Below the sliders are two icons: Style Eraser and Style Painter. Click the Style Eraser if you want to erase the style from a specific area of the photo. Then click Style Painter if you wanted to paint it back in. These are brushes just like what you have in Full Edit mode, so make sure your brush Mode is set to Normal in the Options Bar. When you’re done, just click the Done button at the bottom and then click Full at the top of the Edit tab to return to Full Edit mode. At that point your photo is on a layer just like any other photo and you’re free to edit and retouch like usual.