Introduction - Photoshop Elements 9: The Missing Manual [Book]
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Please try again later. Verified Purchase. The guide is written in broken grammatically incorrect English, clearly not a language the author is comfortable with at all.
Most of the advice is pointless- " Image are faded black and white, some of them too blurry to read. I wish I never bought it. This is a very powerful photo editing program. It contains everything I need to work on my home photo library. Matt Vic must be a pseudonym for some guy in a call center in India. Save yourself time and frustration and buy something else. One person found this helpful. I like that this guide has words and illustrations.
I just hope I can apply it when I use the more advanced functions. See all reviews. Top reviews from other countries. I bought this book for Christmas and looking into it online I decided to buy. The colour photographs looked good and everything looked clear.
It did not say everything was in black and white. There is NO colour at all absolutely everything is in black and white apart from the cover. Even the photograph on the cover is not good quality. More like a rough proof copy. The black and white photographs are exceptionally poor quality and the print on them is very poor too. Worst I've seen in my life for a published book. Ever worked on a photo for hours to get a distinctive effect just right? Now you can use that same technology in Elements.
Elements 9 includes some great new projects in Guided Edit. Touch Sensitivity. If you have a Windows laptop with a touch-sensitive screen, you can use all the usual flicking, pinching, and twisting gestures right on your screen to adjust your images. On either platform, you can also use a finger-sensitive tablet like the Wacom Bamboo Touch. Windows 7 special features. New Create workflow Photo Collages.
Scriptability Beyond This Book. This feature is beyond the scope of this book, but if you know Visual Basic Windows or AppleScript Macs , you can use new tools to write scripts to automate tasks that involve Elements. Product Improvement. In this age of connected computing, Adobe wants lots of feedback from you about how you use Elements to help them design future versions of the program.
You could easily get confused about the differences between Elements and the full version of Adobe Photoshop. Because Elements is so much less expensive, and because many of its more advanced controls are tucked away, a lot of Photoshop aficionados tend to view Elements as some kind of toy version of their program. Your inkjet printer also uses those ink colors to print, but it expects you to give it an RGB file, which is what Elements creates.
The same holds true for a handful of other Elements tools. If you use Elements, then you have to look for another program to help out with that.
And you also get Guided Edit mode Getting Help , which provides a step-by-step walkthrough of some popular editing tasks, like sharpening your photo or cropping it to fit on standard photo paper. The very best way to learn Elements is just to dive right in and play with it. Try all the different filters to see what they do.
Add a filter on top of another filter. Click around on all the different tools and try them. Get crazy—you can stack up as many filters, effects, and Layer styles as you want without crashing the program. Elements is a cool program and lots of fun to use, but figuring out how to make it do what you want is another matter. The Help files that ship with Elements are sometimes incomplete, but you can download a more polished version from the Adobe Elements support pages at www.
That approach is as useful to people who are advanced photographers as it is to those who are just getting started with their first digital cameras. This book periodically recommends other books, covering topics too specialized or tangential for a manual about Elements. For example, pop-out menus are more likely to have a white background on a Mac instead of a dark one. Also, most of the keyboard shortcuts you use to run commands are different in Windows and on Macs; The Very Basics explains how those shortcuts are listed in this book.
This book is divided into seven parts, each focusing on a certain kind of task you may want to do in Elements:. Part One: Introduction to Elements. The first part of this book helps you get started with the program. Chapter 2 covers how to get photos into Elements, the basics of organizing them, and how to open files and create new images from scratch.
Chapter 3 explains how to rotate and crop photos, and includes a primer on that most important digital imaging concept—resolution. Part Two: Elemental Elements. Chapter 4 shows how to use the Quick Fix window to dramatically improve your photos. Part Three: Retouching. Having Elements is like having a darkroom on your computer. Chapter 8 covers topics unique to people who use digital cameras, like Raw conversion and batch-processing photos.
Chapter 10 shows you how to convert color photos to black and white, and how to tint and colorize black-and-white photos. Part Four: Artistic Elements.
This part covers the fun stuff: painting on your photos and drawing shapes Chapter 12 , using filters and effects to create a more artistic look Chapter 13 , and adding text to images Chapter Part Five: Sharing Your Images. Part Six: Additional Elements. You can get hundreds of plug-ins and additional styles, brushes, and other nifty tools to customize your copy of Elements and increase its abilities; the Internet and your local bookstore are chock full of additional info.
Chapter 19 offers a look at some of these resources, as well as information about using a graphics tablet with Elements, and suggests some places to turn after you finish this book. Part Seven: Appendix. What you see in the right part of the window changes occasionally, so it may not be exactly the same as this illustration.
The bottom of the screen always has links for signing into your Photoshop. If you do that, the screen goes away—but so does Elements. The button looks like a white square with smaller squares on it. Whichever method you use, your photo s appear in the Editor so you can work on them. You can also just click the Editor or the Organizer icon in the Windows taskbar or the Mac Dock to switch from one to the other. Adobe built Elements around the assumption that most people work on their photos in the following way: First, you bring photos into the Organizer to sort and keep track of them.
The Welcome screen can also serve as your connecting point for signing onto Photoshop. After you create your Photoshop. To directly launch the Editor or the Organizer, you just need to create a desktop shortcut. Right-click it, and then choose Create Shortcut. Windows adds a direct shortcut to the component of your choice, right on the desktop. In the future, double-click this shortcut to launch your preferred part of Elements.
You can make shortcuts for both the Editor and the Organizer, if you like. In Windows 7, you can keep either part of the program in the Taskbar at the bottom of your screen. If you really want to see what all this Welcome screen business is about, Figure explains how.
The Welcome screen itself is exactly the same on both Windows computers and Macs. Double-click the one with the curved black arrow on it circled here to bring up the Welcome Screen.
The Organizer catalogs and keeps track of your photos, and you automatically come back to it for many activities that involve sharing your photos, like emailing them Emailing Photos or creating an online gallery of them Online Albums. In some previous versions of Elements it was called the Photo Browser , so you may hear that term, too.
In Windows, the Downloader appears as one of your options in the regular 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. Its job is to pull photos from your camera or other storage device into the Organizer. After the Downloader does its thing, you end up in the Organizer.
You can read more about the Downloader in Chapter 2. If you plan to use the Organizer to catalog photos and assign keywords to them, then reading the section on the Downloader The Photo Downloader can help you avoid hair-pulling moments.
Adobe also gives you easy access to its Photoshop. With a Photoshop. Create your own website. You can make beautiful online albums that display your photos in elaborate slideshows—all accessible via your own personal Photoshop. They can even download your photos or order prints, if you choose to let them see Online Albums. Windows automatically creates a shortcut to Elements on your desktop when you install the program.
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 9. The Media Browser is your main Organizer workspace. Click the Create tab in the upper right and you can choose to start all kinds of new projects with your photos, or click the Share tab for ways to let other people view your images.
Click the arrow to the right of the Fix tab circled for a menu that gives you a choice of going to Quick Fix, Guided Edit, or Full Edit. The Fix tab gives you access to some quick fixes right in the Organizer, too. The Organizer also gives you another way to look at your photos, Date view, which is explained in Chapter 2.
Automatically back up and sync your photos. Worrywarts and travelers, prepare to be amazed: You can set Elements to sync the photos from your computer to storage space on Photoshop. See Online Syncing and Backups for more about how to use this nifty feature.
Access your photos from other computers. Download lots of extra goodies. The Content panel Working with the Content and Favorites Panels displays thumbnails for additional backgrounds, frames, graphics, and so on, that you can download right from Photoshop.
Get lots of great free advice. Call up the Photoshop Inspiration Browser The Inspiration Browser , and you can choose from a whole range of helpful tutorials for all sorts of Elements tasks and projects. These Photoshop. See Sharing a New Album for more about the regional differences.
You automatically get your Photoshop. In the window that opens, fill in your information to create your Adobe ID. When you click Create Account, you get a message if the web address you chose is already in use.
Finally, for security purposes, you need to enter the text you see in a box on the sign-up screen. Click the Create Account button. Adobe tells you if it finds any errors in what you submitted and gives you a chance to go back and fix them.
You need to click the link within 24 hours of creating your account, or you may have to start the whole process again. Once you have an account, you can get to it by clicking Sign In at the top of the Editor or Organizer.
You can also look at the bottom of the Welcome screen to see how much free space you have left, as shown in Figure Once you sign into your Photoshop.
You also see a link to your personalized web address a helpful reminder. A free Photoshop. You can also upgrade to a paid account called Plus , which gives you more of everything: more template designs for Online Albums, more downloads from the Content panel, more tutorials, and more storage space 20— GB depending on what level membership you choose.
Once you sign into your account, Elements logs you in automatically every time you launch the program. The Editor Figure is the other main component of Elements. This is the fun part of the program, where you get to edit, adjust, transform, and generally glamorize your photos, and where you can create original artwork from scratch with the drawing tools and shapes.
The main Elements editing window, which Adobe calls Full Edit. In some previous versions of Elements it was known as the Standard Editor, so keep that in mind if you ever try any tutorials written for Elements 3 or 4. You can operate the Editor in any of three different modes:. Full Edit. Most of the Quick Fix commands are also available via menus in the Full Edit window.
Quick Fix. For many Elements beginners, Quick Fix Figure ends up being their main workspace. Chapter 4 gives you all the details on using Quick Fix. Guided Edit. It provides step-by-step walkthroughs of popular projects such as cropping your photos and removing blemishes from them. In Elements 9, it also hosts some fun special effects and workflows for more advanced users, too see Special Effects in Guided Edit. To get rid of the lock and free up your image for Organizer projects, go back to the Editor and close the photo there.
The Quick Fix window. Use the tabs at the top right of the screen to navigate from Full Edit to the Quick Fix window and to Guided Edit, if you like and back again. When you first open the Editor, you may be dismayed at how cluttered it looks. You can leave everything the way it is if you like a cozy area with everything at hand. Or, if you want a Zen-like empty workspace with nothing visible but your photo, you can move, hide, and turn off almost everything.
