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Getting to Know the Work Area

In This Chapter

▶ Opening Photoshop Elements

▶ Understanding the Elements workspace

▶ Changing workspace views

▶ Working with the Project Bin

▶ Using Options menus

▶ Using the Undo History panel

▶ Accessing Help documents

▶ Using keyboard shortcuts

hen you first launch Photoshop Elements, you arrive at a

Welcome screen. The Welcome screen offers to open

different editing modes and to help you start special

Elements tasks.

When it comes to editing a photograph, you find

quite a collection of tools, panels, buttons, and

options in the Photoshop Elements Edit mode. Just

a quick glance at the Elements workspace when

you enter Edit Full mode shows you some of the

power that Elements offers with just a click of your

mouse button. With all the possibilities, navigating

the Elements workspaces and engaging in an editing

session can be intimidating. To ease your introduc-

tion to the many options for editing your pictures, we

break them down for you in this chapter.

Elements has several work areas, and we start off by introduc-

ing you to the Welcome screen. Then, we move on to the mode

you’ll likely use frequently: Edit Full mode. In this mode, you can be

creative with all the tools and features Photoshop Elements is known for,

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

Summary of content (20 pages)

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AL Getting to Know the Work Area In This Chapter RI ▶ Opening Photoshop Elements TE ▶ Understanding the Elements workspace ▶ Changing workspace views MA ▶ Working with the Project Bin ▶ Using Options menus ▶ Using the Undo History panel D ▶ Accessing Help documents TE ▶ Using keyboard shortcuts W RI GH hen you first launch Photoshop Elements, you arrive at a Welcome screen. The Welcome screen offers to open different editing modes and to help you start special Elements tasks.
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10 Part I: Getting Started such as filters, drawing tools, layers, and more. We then introduce other work areas and tools you may not be as familiar with: Edit Quick mode for making common corrections to photos; Creation mode for collecting your photos into creations, such as calendars; and the Project Bin for navigating among all your open images.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area ✓ Edit: If you need to edit a photo, click the Edit button to access options for using either the Quick Fix mode to do some quick editing tasks or Edit Full mode, in which you can do the extraordinary editing jobs. ✓ Learn More (Windows): Click the Learn More button to get help information from Adobe’s Web site. If you know what you want to do in Elements, go ahead and click the appropriate button.
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12 Part I: Getting Started Close Maximize Minimize Tools panel Arrange System Welcome Adobe ID Log-on Menu bar Filenames Options bar Project Bin Create panel Close file Image window Organizer Share panel Panel bin Figure 1-3: The Photoshop Elements workspace appears when you open a file in Edit Full mode. Examining the image window Not surprisingly, the image window’s tools and features are most useful when an image is open in the window.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area 2. Move around your hard drive by using methods you know to open folders and then select a picture. If you haven’t yet downloaded digital camera images or acquired scanned photos and want an image to experiment with, you can use an image found in your Pictures folder that was installed with your operating system. Elements installs some nice sample images with the application installation.
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14 Part I: Getting Started ✓ Magnification box: Shows you at a glance how much you’ve zoomed in or out. ✓ Information box: Shows you a readout for a particular tidbit of information. You can choose what information you want to see in this area by selecting one of the options from the pop-up menu, which we discuss in more detail later in this section. When you’re working on an image in Elements, you always want to know the physical image size, the image resolution, and the color mode.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area ✓ Scratch Sizes: Displays the amount of memory on your hard drive that’s consumed by all documents open in Elements. For example, 20M/200M indicates that the open documents consume 20 megabytes and that a total of 200 megabytes are available for Elements to edit your images. When you add more content to a file, such as new layers, the first figure grows while the second figure remains static.
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16 Part I: Getting Started ✓ Edit: The old-fashioned Copy, Cut, and Paste commands are located on this menu. Additionally, you have some important application settings commands on the menu, including Preferences (Windows), which we cover in more detail in Chapter 2. ✓ Image: You use the Image menu most often when you want to effect changes to the entire image, such as changing a color mode or cropping, rotating, and resizing the image. For details about sizing and color modes, check out Chapter 3.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area ✓ Help: We hope that you get all the help you need right here in this book; but just in case we miss something (or your neighbor has borrowed it, fine book that it is), you have some interactive help right at your mousetip on the Help menu. The menu also offers links to the Adobe Web site for more information and a little assistance, courtesy of the tutorials accessible from this menu.
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18 Part I: Getting Started in the section “Selecting tool options from the Options bar,” later in the chapter) for fine-tuning your tool instruments. More often than not, clicking a tool on the Tools panel is your first step in most editing operations. V Z H I By default, the Tools panel opens as a single row of M tools down the left side of the Elements window. You can change the view to a double row of tools by clicking the right-pointing double chevron.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area The tools are varied, and you may find that you don’t use all the tools in the Tools panel in your workflow. Rather than describe the tool functions here, we address the tools in the rest of this book as they pertain to the respective Elements tasks. Selecting tool options from the Options bar Figure 1-9: Click and hold the mouse button on a tool that has a tiny arrowhead to open a pop-up toolbar.
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20 Part I: Getting Started By default, you find the panel buttons for Edit Full (while in Edit Full mode), Create, and Share with the panels expanded, as shown in Figure 1-11. You can use these panels as we explain in the following list: Figure 1-11: The default view shows panels expanded. ✓ Edit Full: Gain quick access to editing tasks. From a drop-down menu, you can toggle editing modes. While you’re in Edit Full mode, you see the button appearing as Edit Full.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area Juggling all your interface options With all the settings you can use for any given tool, trying to find the option for the edit you want to make can become downright frustrating. To help simplify the process of using tools and selecting options for the tools, here’s what you might do in your normal workflow: 1. Select a tool on the Tools panel.
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22 Part I: Getting Started Using Edit Quick mode Edit Quick mode is designed to provide you with just those tools that you need to prepare a picture for its intended destination, whether it’s printing, onscreen viewing, or one of the other organizing items. Use this mode to make your pictures look good. You don’t find tools for adding text, painting with brushes, or applying gradients in Edit Quick mode.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area Here are several differences between Edit Full mode and Edit Quick mode: ✓ Completely different sets of panels are docked in the Panels Bin. All the panels in Edit Quick mode are related to adjusting brightness controls, and they’re designed to improve the overall appearance of your pictures. In addition, all the Windows menu commands for accessing panels are grayed out.
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24 Part I: Getting Started As you can see in Figure 1-14, the Panels Bin changed to reflect options available for many different creation tasks. We cover each option available in the various creation panels in greater detail in Chapter 15. Using Options Menus Each panel in the Panel Bin and the Project Bin contains an Options menu. Click the icon in the top-right corner in a panel and you find menu commands related to the respective panel.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area Creating different views of an image What? Different views of the same picture, you say? Yes, indeed. You might create a new view when you want to zoom in on an area for some precise editing and then want to switch back to a wider view. Here’s how you do it: 1. Double-click a thumbnail image in the Project Bin. You must have a photo open in Edit Full mode. The photo you doubleclick in the Project Bin appears in the image window as the active document. 2.
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26 Part I: Getting Started Using Bin Actions A nice feature in Elements is the Bin Actions menu at the top of the Project Bin (Windows) or the Options menu on the far top right side of the bin (Macintosh). Click Bin Actions (Windows) or open the Options menu (Macintosh) to start a new creation, share photos, print all the files open in the Bin, and save the Bin files as an album. To the left of the Bin Actions menu, you can find another feature for viewing files in Elements.
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Chapter 1: Getting to Know the Work Area If Elements slows down and you’re moving along at a snail’s pace, choose Edit➪Clear➪Undo History or choose Clear Undo History from the panel’s Options menu. Elements flushes all the recorded history and frees up some precious memory that often enables you to work faster. You can also use Edit➪Clear Clipboard or Edit➪Clear➪All to eliminate Clipboard data from memory.
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28 Part I: Getting Started Rather than accumulate a library of Elements books, all you need to do is look within Elements to find valuable help information quickly and easily. If you’re stuck on understanding a feature, ample help documents are only a mouse click away and can help you overcome some frustrating moments. Using Help Your first stop in exploring the helpful information Elements provides is on the Help menu.