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Photoshop Elements 12 The book that should have been in the box® Barbara Brundage Beijing | Cambridge | Farnham | Köln | Sebastopol | Tokyo
Photoshop Elements 12: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage Copyright © 2013 Barbara Brundage. All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.
Contents The Missing Credits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Why Photoshop Elements?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii What You Can Do with Elements 12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv What’s New in Elements 12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Part Two: Elemental Elements CHAPTER 4: The Quick Fix. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 The Quick Fix Window. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Editing Your Photos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Other Fast Fixes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Recomposing Photos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 Color Curves: Enhancing Tone and Contrast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 Making Colors More Vibrant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Changing an Object’s Color. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 Special Effects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 14: Text in Elements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473 Adding Text to an Image. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473 Warping Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482 Adding Special Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 Type Masks: Setting an Image in Text. . . . .
Part Seven: APPENDIX A: Appendixes Installation and Troubleshooting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 595 Installing Elements in Windows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597 Installing Elements on a Mac. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 598 Scratch Disks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600 Troubleshooting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER Finding Your Way Around Elements 1 P hotoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to digital images. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove demonic red-eye stares, or distort the facial features of people who’ve been mean to you. The downside is that all those options can make it tough to find your way around Elements, especially if you’re new to the program. This chapter helps get you oriented.
GETTING STARTED UP TO SPEED Where the Heck Did Elements Go? If you’ve installed Elements but can’t figure out how to launch it, no problem. Windows automatically creates a shortcut to Elements on your desktop when you install it. (If you need help installing Elements, turn to Appendix A.) You can also go to the Start menu and then click the Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 icon. If you don’t see Elements in the Start menu, then click the arrow next to All Programs, and you should see it in the pop-up menu.
• Photo Editor button. Click this to start the Editor, which lets you modify images. See page 8 for more about this part of Elements. GETTING STARTED FIGURE 1-1 Elements’ Welcome screen. The images at the bottom are dynamic, meaning they change every three seconds or so, but the buttons at the top and the gear icon for the settings are always the same. It’s easy to hop back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer, which you can think of as the two halves of Elements.
ORGANIZING YOUR PHOTOS directly in the Editor and bypassing the Organizer altogether, for example—but you may feel like you’re always swimming against the current if you choose a different workflow. (The next chapter has a few hints for disabling some of Elements’ features if you find that they’re getting in your way.
ORGANIZING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-2 The Organizer lets you arrange and sort photos by the people, places, and events they represent, in addition to using keyword tags and categories. This is Media view, which is where your photos go when you first import them to the Organizer. (Adobe calls the different areas of the Organizer “views.”) FIGURE 1-3 Adobe’s Photo Downloader is yet another program you get when you install Elements.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS In Windows, the Downloader is one of your options in the Windows dialog box that you see when you connect a device. If you want to use the Downloader, then just choose it from the list. To launch the Downloader on a Mac, in the Organizer, go to File→“Get Photos and Videos”→“From Camera or Card Reader.” There’s no way to make the Downloader run automatically on a Mac—you have to go through the Organizer to start it. You can read more about the Downloader in Chapter 2 starting on page 28.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-4 The Quick Fix window. To compare your fixes with the original photo, fire up one of the two Before & After views, which you get to by clicking the View menu. NOTE In some places, Adobe refers to Quick Fix mode as “Quick Edit mode” instead. Those are simply two different names for the same thing. This book always calls it Quick Fix mode. • Guided Edit. This window can be a big help if you’re a newcomer to Elements.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-5 The main Elements editing window, which Adobe calls Expert mode. This is where you have access to all of Elements’ editing features. This screenshot shows what you see on first entering the Custom Workspace, explained in the next section (page 12). You can customize your workspace quite a bit from this starting point. Use the Quick, Guided, and Expert tabs at the top of the Elements window to switch modes.
BASIC WORKSPACE Expert mode starts out in what Adobe calls the Basic Workspace, a design that it hoped would be less confusing to beginners (Figure 1-6). On the left side of the screen is a double-columned toolbox. When you open a photo, a small thumbnail version of it appears in the area near the bottom of the window. This area is called the Photo Bin. However, what you see in this area changes depending on what you’re doing.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS time or resize them. To switch to another panel, you click its button at the bottom of the screen and the previous panel disappears. But the Editor has many more panels than just those four. If you need one of the others, like say the History panel, you bring it up by clicking the More button in the window’s lower-right corner. This brings up all of Elements’ other panels in one floating group, and you click the tab of the panel you want to bring it to the front.
TIP You can hide everything in the Editor except for your images and the menu bar: no tools, panels, or anything else cluttering up your screen. This is handy when you want a good, undistracted look at what you’ve done to a photo. To do that, just press the Tab key; to bring everything back into view, press Tab again. (This also works in the Basic Workspace.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS the Organizer, or any albums (page 52) you’ve made. This menu even lets you send files from the Organizer to the bin without actually opening them. Simply click photos to select them in the Organizer, and then come back over to the Editor, and switch this menu to “Show Files selected in Organizer”; you’ll see the photos you selected in the Organizer waiting for you in the bin. Double-click one to open it for editing.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-8 Two different ways of working with the same images, panels, and tools. You can use any arrangement that suits you. (These figures show the Mac version of Elements, in which the main menu bar is up at the top of the screen, out of the picture here. In Windows, it sticks to the top of the workspace.) Top: The panels in the standard Custom Workspace arrangement, with the images in tabs. Bottom: This figure shows how you can customize your panels.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-9 You can free up lots of space by collapsing panels accordion-style once they’re out of the bin. Top: A full-sized panel. Bottom: A panel collapsed by double-clicking its tab (where the cursor is here). Be sure to double-click the name of the panel, not in the blank area to the right of the tab. FIGURE 1-10 You can combine two or more panels once you’ve dragged them out of the Panel Bin. Top: Here, the Histogram panel is being combined with the Layers panel.
The first time you call up one of the panels that’s not initially displayed in the Custom Workspace (by selecting its name in either the Window menu or the menu that appears when you click the down arrow on the right side of the More button), you get the same floating panel group that you get in the Basic Workspace (page 11). Luckily, you can fix this in a jiffy. Just pull the panels you want loose from the clump.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS the main Editor window. When you do this, the blue line appears along that edge. Let go of the panel, and the Panel Bin returns, with your panel in it. All this panel organizing isn’t as complicated as it sounds, and it’s easier to learn by doing than by reading about it. So try dragging some panels around in the Custom Workspace.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-11 The mighty Tools panel. It’s divided into six categories (View, Select, Enhance, Draw, Modify, and Color) to make it easier to find what you want. (If you don’t see these category labels, see Figure 1-12 to learn why that is.) Because some tools are grouped together in the same slot (indicated by little arrows next to the tools’ icons, shown in Figure 1-12), you can’t ever see all the tools at once.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS FIGURE 1-12 When you put your cursor over a section of the toolbox that has subtools nested with the visible tools, you see these minute arrows next to the tool icons. Here, for example, you can see that all the tools in the Enhance section except the Red Eye tool have more tools grouped with them.
TIP You can save time by activating tools with their keyboard shortcuts rather than by clicking their icons, since that way you don’t have to interrupt what you’re doing to trek over to the Tools panel. To see a tool’s shortcut key, put your cursor over its icon; a label pops up indicating the shortcut key (it’s the letter in parentheses to the right of the tool’s name). To activate the tool, just press the appropriate key.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS removing blemishes. It also includes some features that are useful even if you’re an old hand at Elements, like the High Key and Low Key edits (page 453). Guided Edit is really easy to use. FIGURE 1-14 Guided Edit gives you step-by-step help with basic photo editing. Just use the tools that appear in the right-hand panel once you choose an activity. As with Quick Fix, you can change to a Before & After by using the View menu (circled) to select the one you want. 1. Go to Guided Edit.
4. Make your adjustments. Simply move the panel’s sliders and click its buttons till you like what you see. If you need to adjust your view of the photo while you work on it, use the Hand (page 101) and Zoom (page 99) tools that appear in a little toolbox on the left side of the Guided Edit window. EDITING YOUR PHOTOS If you want to start over, click the Reset Panel button, circled in Figure 1-15. If you change your mind about the whole project, click Cancel at the bottom of the panel.
EDITING YOUR PHOTOS If you want to redo what you just undid, press Ctrl+Y/z-Y. These keyboard shortcuts are great for toggling changes on and off while you decide whether you want to keep them. The Undo/Redo keystrokes work in both the Organizer and the Editor. NOTE If you don’t like Ctrl+Z/z-Z and Ctrl+Y/z-Y, you have a bit of control over the key combinations you use for Undo and Redo. Go to Edit→Preferences→General/Photoshop Elements Editor→Preferences→General.
and loads of disk space. If Elements runs slowly on your machine, then reducing the History States setting to, say, 20 may speed things up a bit. EDITING YOUR PHOTOS THE ONE RULE OF ELEMENTS As you’re beginning to see, Elements lets you work in lots of different ways. What’s more, most people who use the program approach projects in different ways; what works for your neighbor with her pictures may be quite different from how you’d work on the very same shots.
GETTING STARTED IN A HURRY Getting Started in a Hurry If you’re the impatient type and you’re starting to squirm because you want to be up and doing something to your photos, here’s the quickest way to get started in Elements: Adjust an image’s brightness and color balance all in one step. 1. In the Editor’s Expert mode or the Quick Fix window, open a photo. Press Ctrl+O/z-O and navigate to the image you want, and then click Open. 2. Press Alt+Ctrl+M/Option-z-M.
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