Dodging and burning is a technique borrowed from the darkroom of traditional film photography, where various areas of the image are lightened and darkened. In this lesson you'll see how to reproduce this technique for your digital photos.
Before you dive into working on your images in Photoshop Elements, it will be helpful to have a solid understanding of how Elements works and how to structure your workflow. In this chapter you'll get an overview of Elements and see some of its best features in action.
Getting Started
In this section you'll get an overview of Photoshop Elements and learn how to configure it to best suit your workflow.
Introduction to Adobe Photoshop Elements
In this lesson we'll take an overall look at Elements and you'll get a guided tour of the Organizer and Editor.
The Welcome screen in Elements isn't just there to be polite - it actually provides access to a variety of services. These include a free service to back up your images online, as you'll see in this lesson.
Elements makes color management easy for you, only requiring you to make a single decision about how you want the colors optimized in your images. In this lesson we'll explore all the options that are available.
The Elements Editor has a wide variety of preference settings you can choose from. In this lesson we'll take a look at all of the sections of the Preferences dialog and discuss how to choose the best settings for your personal working style.
In this section you'll get a quick look at some of the great features and possibilities in Elements.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 Jumpstart
Ranking your images makes it much easier to find your best photos later. In this lesson we'll take a quick look at a process you can use to rank your images.
In this lesson we'll take a look at a basic workflow for optimizing the appearance of an image, which will serve as a solid foundation for future work on your photographic images.
Photographer Michael Orton created a soft, dreamy effect that has become very popular, and in this lesson you'll see how you can apply this effect to any image in very little time.
One of the great strengths of Photoshop Elements is its ability to help you keep your images organized. In this chapter we'll explore the many ways the Elements Organizer makes it easier for you manage your growing library of photos.
Organizing Your Images
In this section you'll learn some of the basics of the Elements Organizer and get started using it to manage your photos.
Getting Started with the Organizer
Before you can manage your images in the Elements Organizer, you need to import them into a catalog. In this lesson you'll learn how to import images from existing files and folders on your computer.
The Organizer allows you to import images directly from your digital camera, so you can both download the images from the camera and import them into your catalog in one efficient step. In this lesson you'll see how it's done.
Your photos represent cherished memories, so you most certainly want to keep them safe. This lesson will show you how to back up your entire catalog for safekeeping.
In this section you'll see the various ways in which the Organizer allows you to sort through your images, providing a flexible way to locate and review your photos.
Basics of Image Organization
In this lesson you'll get an overview of the basic process of viewing and selecting your images in the Organizer. This is a significant part of how you'll work in the Organizer, so these basic skills will serve you well.
Sometimes you will want to rotate an image, either because your camera wasn't able to automatically set the orientation or just for creative reasons. This lesson will show you just how easy it is to rotate an image in 90-degree increments.
With Elements, you can apply ratings to your photos using a 5-star rating system. This video shows you how to apply ratings to your favorite images so you can find them more easily.
The Elements Organizer allows you to add captions to your photos to help you remember particular details about them and share that information later. In this lesson you'll see how easy it is to add a caption to any photo.
The albums feature in Elements enables you to group images together in any way you'd like so that you can find photos more easily. In this lesson you'll learn how to create albums and add photos to them.
In this section we'll take a look at some of the more advanced features the Elements Organizer offers to help you manage your digital photos.
Advanced Organization
The filenames assigned to photos by the digital camera aren't exactly helpful, since they don't relate to the contents of the photo. In this lesson you'll learn how to rename images so they have filenames that are meaningful to you.
The Organizer allows you to hide images that you might otherwise delete, allowing you to have an extra layer of protection in case you decide you really do want one of those photos after all. In this lesson you'll see how to hide photos from view in the Organizer.
In this lesson you'll see how easy it is to correct the date and time of capture for your digital photos. This can come in handy in certain situations, such as when you've forgotten to update the time zone of your digital camera while traveling.
Stacking photos can help keep similar or related images together, and also helps to reduce clutter when browsing photos. In this lesson you'll see how to put image stacks to use in your workflow.
Full Screen mode enables you to get a larger view of your images and update information about them at the same time. In this lesson you'll see how to put Full Screen mode to use when working with your photos.
The Auto Analyzer in the Elements Organizer can identify images based on a variety of criteria. Among other things, it enables you to quickly locate images that might need a little work, or even those that might be the best images in a given group of photos.
In this lesson we'll explore Photoshop Elements' ability to identify people in your photos, which provides a powerful tool for organizing photos of family, friends, and even customers.
In this section we'll explore a few ways you can locate specific photos using special features of the Elements Organizer.
Finding Your Photos
The Date view in the Organizer enables you to efficiently sort through images using a calendar interface that is immediately familiar and intuitive. In this lesson you'll see how to put this great viewing option to use.
One way to locate images in Elements is to conduct a search based on specific metadata. In this video you'll learn how to search for images by keyword, rating, file type, and more.
For a variety of reasons you might find that you have duplicate copies of some of your photos, which is a waste of hard drive space. In this lesson you'll learn how to clean up those duplicates with the duplicate photo search in the Elements Organizer.
The Elements Editor offers some very powerful tools for optimizing the appearance of your photos. In this chapter we'll take a look at some of the more basic adjustments to help get you started.
Getting Started with Adjustments
This section will introduce you to the Elements Editor and show you the basics of working with your images.
Working with Your Images
The Organizer is a great tool for managing your photo catalog, but you can also use it to apply basic adjustments, such as cropping and removing red-eye. In this lesson, you'll learn how to make the most of the one-click automated photo-fixing options available in the Elements Organizer application.
The Organizer is an invaluable tool for organizing your images, enabling you to locate a particular photo with relative ease. In this lesson you'll discover how to open an image in the Editor once you've located it in the Organizer.
Whether for the purpose of evaluating the quality of an image or to enable you to work on fine details, you'll need to be able to zoom and pan around your images. You'll learn these useful skills in this lesson.
In this section we'll look at how you can take advantage of the RAW capture option if one is offered by your digital camera. This enables you to maximize image quality when working with these images in Elements.
Working with Camera Raw
In this lesson you'll learn how to use Adobe Camera Raw to convert an image from a RAW file format into an actual image file ready to be optimized in the Editor.
In situations where multiple photos were captured in RAW under similar conditions, you can process all those images at once in Adobe Camera Raw. This lesson will show you how to make it happen.
With the Black and White High Contrast tool, you can create gorgeous black-and-white effects by removing color from select portions of an image. This lesson teaches you how to work with this powerful automated tool.
Even if you never make a mistake, you may want to undo a task in order to evaluate the before and after versions of a particular effect. In this lesson you'll learn the various options for undoing a task and then redoing it if you decide not to undo after all.
In this chapter we'll take a look at basic methods for optimizing tone and color in your digital photos to make them look their best.
Making Adjustments in Full Edit Mode
The Straighten and Crop tools allow you to correct an image that is slightly crooked, as well to fine-tune the composition for aesthetic reasons. In this lesson you'll see how to put these tools to use.
It can be particularly important to ensure accurate color when dealing with photographs of people, and this lesson will show you how easy it is to ensure great skin tones in any image.
The Hue/Saturation adjustment is remarkably powerful for optimizing the color in your images, or even for making a creative interpretation. This lesson will demonstrate just how much you can really do with this great tool.
With the Levels adjustment you're able to enhance overall brightness and contrast in a photo with a high degree of control, and in this lesson you'll learn to put it to use.
When high contrast in a scene causes details to be hidden, you can often greatly improve your results using Shadows/Highlights adjustments, which you'll learn to use in this lesson.
When you want to maximize the degree of control you are able to exercise over the tonality of an image, the Color Curves adjustment is the solution. In this lesson you'll learn to put Color Curves to use to optimize your photos.
Dodging and burning is a technique borrowed from the darkroom of traditional film photography, where various areas of the image are lightened and darkened. In this lesson you'll see how to reproduce this technique for your digital photos.
Many photographers enjoy creating black-and-white interpretations of color photos, and Elements allows you to control the conversion with great flexibility. In this lesson you'll learn to make the most of a black-and-white conversion.
A warm, brown sepia-tone effect is a popular way to add a bit of color to a black-and-white image. In this lesson you'll discover not only how to create a sepia-tone effect, but also how to apply a tint to an image using any color of the rainbow.
When blemishes or other unwanted elements are detracting from an image, it's time for some retouching. The retouching techniques demonstrated in this section will help you get the best results possible.
Retouching
Red-eye is a common problem when you use a flash while photographing people. Fortunately, Elements offers multiple ways to fix red-eye in an image, as you'll see in this lesson.
When there's a distracting element in an image, you can remove the offending object with the Clone Stamp tool. This lesson will show you how it's done.
The Content-Aware option for the Spot Healing Brush is invaluable for cleaning up blemishes large and small, and in this lesson you'll see how to put it to use.
When low light levels require you to increase the ISO setting on your camera, you'll often get noise in the image. This lesson will show you how to use the noise reduction capabilities of Elements to clean up those noisy images.
Distortion in an image can be caused by issues with the lens being used to take the picture or by your position relative to the subject. Whatever the cause, this lesson will show you how to apply corrections for such distortion.
When the scene didn't come together exactly as you might have liked, you can use the Recompose tool to adjust the composition, keeping important elements while allowing unwanted elements to disappear or be minimized. In this lesson you'll see just how powerful this feature is.
Selections and layer masks enable you to apply adjustments that only affect a specific area of an image, and even to blend multiple images together. This chapter will focus on this incredibly powerful capability of Elements.
Selections and Layer Masks
Selections allow you to identify a specific area of an image that you want to affect in some way. In this section we'll take a look at the various selection tools in Elements.
Making Selections
The Quick Selection tool truly lives up to its name, enabling you to create selections very quickly, as you'll see in this lesson.
The Lasso tool allows you to make selections of any shape you'd like, since it allows you to draw selections free-hand. As you'll see in this lesson, the Lasso tool is especially helpful for cleaning up existing selections that are less than perfect.
In this lesson we'll explore the Selection Brush tool, which is especially helpful for adding to or subtracting from existing selections in order to ensure the best result possible.
The Refine Edge command allows you to fine-tune the edge of a selection to help ensure the best results when you put that selection to use. This lesson will show you how it's done.
In this section, you will learn how to edit images nondestructively by using layers and masks.
Working with Layer Masks
The Smart Brush tool almost seems like a bit of magic, helping you apply very targeted adjustments in a relatively automatic way. This lesson will show you how to put this tool to use in applying a variety of corrections.
There is no better way to work nondestructively than through the use of adjustment layers and their companion masks. By painting in an adjustment layer mask with the Brush tool, you can control where the adjustment is applied in the image, as you'll see in this lesson.
We tend to view the world as a wide landscape, and sometimes your photos need to reflect that. In this lesson you'll learn how to create a panoramic image assembled from a series of individual photos.
When using layer masks, you'll be creating images with multiple layers. In this lesson you'll learn how to save an image with layers intact so you can return to those layers later in order to fine-tune the image.
In this chapter you'll see some of the many ways you can apply a creative touch to your digital photos with the help of Elements.
Adding a Creative Touch
With Photomerge Style Match you can change the appearance of one image to match the appearance of another image. This lesson will guide you through the process.
Photographers often use a narrow depth of field in order to emphasize a subject, and in this lesson you'll see how to use a Guided Edit effect to achieve narrow depth of field for an image that has a wide range of focus.
Elements contains a Type tool that enables you to create editable text layers. In this video, you'll learn how to use the Type tool to add custom text to your photo creations.
In this lesson you'll learn how to have text follow the shape of a path you've defined, which adds a whole new level of creativity to the use of text with photos.
In addition to being used for purposes of applying adjustments to specific areas of an image, selections can also be used as a shape for text to flow around, as you'll see in this lesson.
The Filter Gallery enables you to combine various filter effects, and you're sure to enjoy using it, whether you prefer a subtle effect or a dramatic transformation of your image. You'll see how to put it to use in this lesson.
The Filter Gallery is useful for more than just applying effects to an image. In this lesson you'll see how to use the Filter Gallery to add a creative border.
In this lesson we'll take a look at a very cool Guided Edit feature that enables you to simulate the appearance of multiple photo prints within a single image.
As you get more creative working with your images you may want to create (and therefore save) multiple versions of a particular image. This lesson will show you how it's done.
Half the fun of taking photos and creating photo projects is sharing them with your family and friends. In this chapter we'll explore a variety of options for sharing your images with Elements.
Sharing Your Photos
This lesson will guide you through the process of preparing an image for output, including steps for resizing and sharpening the image.
With the Picture Package feature, you can combine multiple print sizes of a photo into a separate file for printing. This tutorial explains how to choose options from the Picture Package dialog box and generate the file.
When saving an image for Web display, you must optimize its file size. The smaller the file size, the faster the image will load into a browser. In this video, you'll learn how to do this by choosing options from the Save for Web dialog box.
One of the most common ways to share photos is to send them as email attachments. In this lesson you'll learn how you can use Elements to easily send images via email.
PDF slideshows are a great interactive way to share your favorite images. This lesson explains how to generate an optimized PDF slideshow that you can easily share with others.
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