Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
2.
Probably the most common exposure problem in photography is having things too dark in the shadows. Elements 3 has a wonderful tool for fixing this problem. Select Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Shadows/Highlights and set the Lighten Shadows: to 50%. Conversely, if the brightest areas appear washed out you can use the same tool to fix that situation. First select the too bright area with the Lasso tool and feather the selection. Then select Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Shadows/Highlights and drag the Darken Highlights to an effective setting.
4. Sharpen by Unsharpening
Almost any scanned image can benefit from a bit of sharpening. Sharpening cleans up the boundaries between colors to make things appear in sharper focus. Surprisingly, sharpening is best done in Elements and Photoshop using the Unsharp Mask filter. Beware, a little bit of sharpening goes a long way. Here are general guidelines that work well on most images. Choose Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. In the dialog box set the Amount to between 50% and 150%, set the Radius to between 1 and 2 and set the Threshold to between 3 and 20 (the higher the Threshold number, the less intense the effect is). Here's a magic formula which works well for many images: Amount85% Radius1 pixel Threshold4 levels
Click the Preview box in the dialog box off and on to see the effect. The Sharpen setting in the Quick Fix mode also applies the Unsharp Mask.
Original
5.
When your shooting in a low light situation or at a high ISO its common to get pictures that look grainy or pixilated. This is called noise in the world of digital photography. The better the digital camera the less noise youll have to deal with. Camera phones and PDAs often take noisy images. No program can remove all of the noise but Elements does a pretty good job. Select Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise. The default settings often work well, but if you need a bit more power try dragging the Reduce Color Noise slider up to 25% or so.
71
73
75
77
29.
Lets say you find an image on the Web and want to borrow it and modify it in Elements. How do you proceed? There are several methods. The most common one is to right-click on the image in your web browser (Mac= Control-click) and then save the file. Now you can use File>Open within Elements to edit it. Another way is to right-click on the image and copy the image. Then in Elements choose File>New File>From Clipboard. Images that you get from the web are often low resolution, so you will usually will not be able to make them larger or print them out well. By the way if you want to use your Elements images in PowerPoint, Word, on the Web or in other programs, its best to resize them in Elements rather than in the other programs. This is for two reasons. First, Elements has a very sophisticated method for resizing. Second, just making the image smaller in those other programs will not decrease their file size, whereas doing it in Elements will. If all else fails theres another way to capture anything on your computer screen into Elements, take a screen shot. To do this in Windows, just get whatever you want to capture displayed on the screen and press the Print Screen key on your keyboard (Print Scrn). Switch to Elements and select the good old File>New File>From Clipboard command. On a Macintosh you hold down Command-Option-3 on the keyboard. This will make a PDF file on your desktop. Just use File>Open in Elements to then open that file. Once you are in Elements you will want to crop the image to get rid of the extraneous stuff. You might recall that in the tutorial we got fancy with the Paste Into command. You use this to fill one area of an image with what youve copied from another. We filled the letters in the word book with the actual picture of books, but you could also do this to fill an area with a texture. Simply select an area in the first image and choose Edit>Copy. Switch to the second image and select the area you want filled and then choose Edit>Paste Into.
The Elements tutorial, the tips in this chapter and the questions and answers in the previous chapter should have given you a pretty good grounding in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Now you need practice and experimentation to sharpen your skills.