Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

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Photoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your 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 when you're new to the program.

This chapter helps get you oriented in Elements. You'll learn about what to expect when you start up the program and how to use Elements to fix your photos with just a couple of keystrokes. Along the way, you'll find out about some of Elements' basic controls and how to get hold of the program's Help files if you need them.

This book covers Photoshop Elements 5. If you're not sure which version of Elements you have, the easiest way to find out is to look at the program's icon (the file you click to launch Elements).

You can use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. But Elements 5 is a pretty big update, so you'll find many new features, like Color Curves (Section 9.3) and Black-and-White conversion (Section 10.1), that won't be in your version of the program. There are Missing Manuals for Elements 3 and 4, too, and you may prefer to track down the right book for your version of Elements.

When you launch Elements for the first time, you get a veritable smorgasbord of options, all neatly laid out for you in the Welcome screen (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1: The Elements Welcome screen gives you five main activities to choose from (there's also a Tutorials link in the upper-right corner). Hold your cursor over any of these options for more details about each choice. You can't bypass the Welcome screen just by clicking the Close button. When you do, the screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, you've got options: The box in Section 1.2 tells you how to permanently get rid of the Welcome screen.

Interestingly, the Welcome screen isn't actually Elements. It's a launching pad that, depending on the button you click, starts up one of two different programs:

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When you launch Elements for the first time, you get a veritable smorgasbord of options, all neatly laid out for you in the Welcome screen (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1: The Elements Welcome screen gives you five main activities to choose from (there's also a Tutorials link in the upper-right corner). Hold your cursor over any of these options for more details about each choice. You can't bypass the Welcome screen just by clicking the Close button. When you do, the screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, you've got options: The box in Section 1.2 tells you how to permanently get rid of the Welcome screen.

Interestingly, the Welcome screen isn't actually Elements. It's a launching pad that, depending on the button you click, starts up one of two different programs:

The Organizer, which lets you store and organize your image files.
The Editor, which lets you edit your images.

It's quite easy to get back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you might call the two different faces of Elements—and you probably won't do much in one without eventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they still function as two separate programs. In any case, the Welcome screen offers you no less than five choices for how to get into Elements:

Product Overview offers a round-up of all the features inside Elements.
View and Organize Photos takes you to the Organizer, where you can store and sort all your images.
Quickly Fix Photos brings you to the wonderful Quick Fix window (which is actually part of the Editor) where you can perform amazing color corrections with just a click.
Edit and Enhance Photos takes you to the Editor, which is the digital darkroom/ art studio where you can perform your most extensive edits.
Make Photo Creations

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The Organizer is where your photos come into Elements and go out again (when it's time to print or email them). The Organizer stores and catalogs your photos, and you automatically come back to it for any activities that involve sharing your photos, like printing a photo package or making a slideshow. The Organizer's main window (Figure 1-2) is sometimes called the Photo Browser. It lets you view your photos, sort them into collections, and assign keyword labels to them.

The Organizer has lots of really cool features you'll learn about throughout this book when they're relevant to the image-editing task at hand. The next chapter shows you how to use the Organizer to import and organize your photos, and Appendix A covers all the Organizer's different menu options.

Figure 1-2: The Photo Browser is your main Organizer workspace. Click the Edit button, as shown in the illustration, to go to either the Quick Fix or Full Edit. Click the Create button to the left of the Edit button, and you can choose to start all kinds of new projects with your photos. The Organizer also gives you another way to look at your photos, Date View, which is explained in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3: Date View is a fun feature that lets you see your photos organized by the date you brought them into the Organizer. It's even laid out like a calendar. In the upper-right corner of the window you can play a little slideshow of all the pictures you took on a particular day. If you find a photo you want to edit or use in a project, then click the little binoculars (where the cursor is in the photo) to see that photo's location in the Photo Browser window. When you want to go back to the Browser without selecting any photos, just click the Photo Browser button at the bottom of the window.

Actually, Elements has one other component, which you may have seen already if you've plugged your camera into your computer after you installed Elements: the Photo Downloader (Figure 1-4).

Figure 1-4: The Adobe Photo Downloader is yet another program that you get when you install Elements. Its role in life is to pull your photos from your camera (or other storage device) into the Organizer. The Downloader runs even if Elements isn't currently open (although, as you'll learn in the box in Section 2.2, you can disable the Downloader if you don't like it). After the Downloader does its thing, you end up in the Organizer.

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In addition to the Organizer, the other main component of Elements is what Adobe calls the Editor (Figure 1-5). This is the fun part of Elements, 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, if you like.

Figure 1-5: The main Elements editing window, which Adobe calls Full Edit. In previous versions of Elements it was known as the Standard Editor, something you might want to remember in case you ever try any tutorials written for Elements 3 or 4.

You can operate the Editor in either of two different modes:

Quick Fix. For many beginners, the Quick Fix (Figure 1-6) ends up as your main workspace. Adobe has gathered together the basic tools you need to improve most photos, and it's the one place in Elements where you can have a before-and-after view while you work. Chapter 4 discusses using Quick Fix in detail.

Figure 1-6: The Quick Fix window is the only place in Elements where you can see a before-and-after view of your photo as you work. Use the navigation buttons at the top of the screen (circled) to navigate from Full Edit to the Quick Fix window and back again.
Full Edit. The Full Edit window gives you access to Elements' most sophisticated tools. You have far more ways to work on your photo in Full Edit than in Quick Fix, and if you're fussy, it's where you'll do most of your retouching work. Most of the Quick Fix commands are also available via menus in the Full Edit window.

The rest of this chapter covers some of the basic concepts and key tools you'll come across in the Editor.

If you leave a photo open in the Editor, when you switch back to the Organizer, you see a red band with a padlock across the photo's Organizer thumbnail as a reminder. To get rid of the lock and free up your image for Organizer projects, go back to the Editor and close the photo there.

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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 the brightness and color balance all in one step.

While you're in the Editor, open a photo.
Press Ctrl+O and navigate to the image you want, and then click Open.
Press Alt+Ctrl+M.
You've just applied Elements' Auto Smart Fix tool (Figure 1-17).

Voilà! You should see quite a difference in your photo, unless the exposure, lighting, and contrast were almost perfect before. The Auto Smart Fix tool is one of the many easy-to-use features in Elements. (Of course, you may not like what just happened to your photo, but that's why you bought this book.)

If you're the really impatient type, you can jump right to Chapter 4 to learn about using the Quick Fix commands. But it's worth taking the time to read the next two chapters so you understand which file formats to choose and how to make some basic adjustments to your images, like rotating and cropping them.

Figure 1-17: Auto Smart Fix is the easiest, quickest way to improve the quality of your photos.
Top left: The original, unedited picture.
Top right: Auto Smart Fix makes quite a difference, but the colors are still slightly off.
Bottom: By using some of the other tools you'll learn about in this book (like Auto Contrast and Adjust Sharpness), you can make things look even better.

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Now that you've had a look around Elements, it's time to start learning how to get photos into the program, and also how to keep track of where these photos are stored. As a digital photographer, you may no longer be facing shoeboxes stuffed with prints, but you've still got to face the menace of photos piling up on your hard drive. Fortunately, Elements gives you some great tools for organizing your collection and quickly finding individual pictures.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to import your photos from cameras, digital card readers, and scanners. You'll also find out how to import individual frames from videos, how to open files that are already on your computer, and how to create a new file from scratch. After that, you'll learn how to use the Organizer to sort and find your pictures once they're in Elements. Finally, you'll learn how to save the work you create in Elements and how to make backups.

Elements gives you lots of different ways to get photos from camera to computer, but the simplest tool is the Adobe Photo Downloader. If you don't like the Downloader, read on. Later in this section, you'll learn about other ways to import your photos.

Take a moment to carefully read the instructions from your camera manufacturer. These directions should always take precedence over anything you read here that suggests doing something differently.

You may have already made the acquaintance of the Photo Downloader, since it automatically appears (Figure 2-1) whenever you connect a camera or card reader to your PC—even if Elements isn't running. The Downloader's job is pretty straightforward: to shepherd your photos as they make the trip to your PC and to make sure Elements knows where your new images are stored. Your job is to help it along by adjusting the following settings.

Figure 2-1: When the Elements 5 Downloader first launches, you see this dialog box, which lets you choose where your photos go and what names they're given (say goodbye to names like IMG_0327.JPG). To start, choose your camera or card reader from the list of devices. If you want to browse through your photos to decide which ones to import, click Advanced Dialog, where you can pick and choose which photos to grab and fine-tune other settings.

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Elements gives you lots of different ways to get photos from camera to computer, but the simplest tool is the Adobe Photo Downloader. If you don't like the Downloader, read on. Later in this section, you'll learn about other ways to import your photos.

Take a moment to carefully read the instructions from your camera manufacturer. These directions should always take precedence over anything you read here that suggests doing something differently.

You may have already made the acquaintance of the Photo Downloader, since it automatically appears (Figure 2-1) whenever you connect a camera or card reader to your PC—even if Elements isn't running. The Downloader's job is pretty straightforward: to shepherd your photos as they make the trip to your PC and to make sure Elements knows where your new images are stored. Your job is to help it along by adjusting the following settings.

Figure 2-1: When the Elements 5 Downloader first launches, you see this dialog box, which lets you choose where your photos go and what names they're given (say goodbye to names like IMG_0327.JPG). To start, choose your camera or card reader from the list of devices. If you want to browse through your photos to decide which ones to import, click Advanced Dialog, where you can pick and choose which photos to grab and fine-tune other settings.

Get Photos From. Choose your camera or card reader from the list of available devices, as your first step to downloading.
Location. Your photos usually get stored in a folder named after the date you imported them. (This folder is located inside the directory C:\<your user name>\My Documents\My Pictures\Adobe\Digital Camera Photos. If you download more photos the same day, you get a second folder, with the same name with "-1" added to it.) If you want to change where your photos are headed, then click the Browse button and choose another location. You can permanently change the standard location by going to Organizer → Edit → Preferences → Camera or Card Reader. Set a new location, and from now on, the Downloader always puts your photos in the folder you chose.

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If you've got photos already stored on your computer, you have several options for opening them with Elements. If the file format is set to open in Elements, then double-click the file's icon to launch Elements and open the image. (If you want to change which files open automatically in Elements, see the box in Section 2.2.1.) You've also got a few ways to open files from within Elements:

From the Organizer, for files not yet in the Organizer. Go to File → Get Photos → From Files and Folders, or press Ctrl+Shift+G, and then select your file. The other options in the Get Photos menu (like opening files stored on a mobile phone) are covered in Section A.1.
You can also select an image that's stored in the Organizer and open it directly in the Editor. To do so, in the Organizer, click the file's thumbnail, and then press Ctrl+I, or go to Edit → Go to Full Edit. If you'd rather go to Quick Fix (see Section 4.1), choose Edit → Go to Quick Fix instead.
From the Editor. Go to File → Open or press Ctrl+O and select your file.

How do I stop Elements from opening all my files?

Many people are dismayed to discover that once they install Elements, it opens every time they double-click any kind of graphics file—whether they want the file to open in Elements or not.

You can control the file types associated with Elements by going to Edit → File Association in the Editor. Alternatively, the Windows operating system also lets you adjust which program opens when you double-click a file. First, find a file of the type you want to change. Then:

Right-click the icon of the closed file.
From the pop-up menu, choose Open With → Choose Program….
Select the program you want to use to open the file. Turn on "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" to change the program for all files of this type.

If you open a PDF file in Elements, you'll see the Import PDF dialog box (Figure 2-5), which gives you lots of options for how you want Elements to treat your file. You can choose to import whole pages or just the images on the pages, you can import multiple pages (if the PDF is more than one page), and you can choose the color mode (see Section 2.5.2) and the resolution, as well as whether or not you want anti-aliasing (see Section 5.3.2).

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Elements comes bundled with many scanners because it's the perfect software for making your scans look their best. You have two main ways of getting scans into Elements. Some scanners come with a driver plug-in, a small utility program that lets you scan directly into Elements. Look on your scanner's installation software for information about Elements compatibility or check the manufacturer's Web site for a Photoshop plug-in to download. (If you can scan into Photoshop, you should be able to scan into Elements.) You may also be able to scan into Elements if your scanner uses the TWAIN interface, which is an industry standard used by many scanner manufacturers.

If you don't have any of these programs, you'll need to use the scanning program that came with your scanner. Then, once you've saved your scanned image in a format that Elements understands, like TIFF (.tiff, .tif) or Photoshop (.psd), open the file in Elements like any other photo.

To control your scanner from within Elements, you can choose to scan from either the Editor or the Organizer. In the Editor, go to File → Import, and you'll find your scanner's name on the list that appears. In the Organizer, go to File → Get Photos → From Scanner, or press Ctrl+U. You should check out your available options for both locations because they're probably different. For instance, you may find that you have different file formats available to you in the Editor than you do in the Organizer.

If you do a lot of scanning, check out the Divide Scanned Photos command (Section 3.1) for helpful tips on how to quickly scan in lots of photos at the same time. Also, you can save yourself a lot of drudgery in Elements if you make sure your scanner glass and the prints you're scanning are both as dust-free as possible before you start.

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Elements lets you capture a single frame from a video and use it the way you would any still photo. This feature works best if you choose a movie that's already on your computer (versus one that's streaming to your PC from across the Web).

Elements can read many popular video file formats, including .avi, .wmv, and .mpeg. You do need to have a program on your computer (besides Elements) that's capable of viewing the video file. For example, to view a QuickTime movie, you need to have QuickTime installed on your PC.

The video capture tool in Elements isn't really designed for use with long movies. You'll get the best results with clips that aren't more than a minute or two long.

To import a video frame, in the Editor, go to File → Import → Frame From Video, and then in the Video import dialog box:

Find the video that contains the frame you want to copy.
Click the Browse button and navigate to the movie you want. After you choose the movie, the first frame should appear in the window in the Frame From Video dialog box.
Navigate to the frame you want.
Either click the Play button or use the slider below the window to move through the movie until you see what you want.
Copy the frame you want by clicking Grab Frame.
You can grab as many frames as you want. Each frame shows up in the Elements Editor as a separate file.
When you have everything you need, click Done.
While grabbing video frames is a very fun thing to be able to do, it does have certain limitations. Most importantly, your video is going to appear at a fairly low resolution, so don't expect to get a great print from a video frame.

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You can also create a new blank Elements document. You may want to create a new blank document when you're using Elements as a drawing program or when you're combining parts of other images together, for example.

To create a new file, go to the Editor, and choose File → New → Blank File (or press Ctrl+N) to bring up the New File dialog box. You have lots of choices to make each time you start a new file; they're all covered in the following sections.

You can't create a new blank file in the Organizer, but Elements gives you a quick shortcut from the Organizer to the Editor so you can open up a new, fresh file there. To open a new file, choose File → New → Blank File, and the Organizer creates a virgin file for you and automatically hops you over to the Editor. If you want to create a new file based on a photo that's in the Organizer, select the thumbnail, press Ctrl+C to copy it, and then choose File → New → Image from Clipboard in the Editor. Elements switches you to the Editor where you'll see your copied photo awaiting you, all ready to work on.

The first thing you need to decide, logically enough, is how big you want your document to be. You can choose inches, pixels, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, or columns as your unit of measurement. Just pick the one you want in the Width and Height pull-down menus and then enter a number. Or you can choose one of the many preset sizes shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6: The list of preset document sizes is divided into groups, each of which features popular file sizes and resolution settings for a variety of common uses. For example, the fifth group from the top (the one with the highlighted bar) includes traditional photo print sizes, and the group after that includes widely used choices for onscreen graphics. The default Photoshop Elements size is 4" x 6" at 300 pixels per inch, which works well if you're just playing around and trying things out.

If you decide not to use one of the presets, you need to choose a resolution for your file. You'll learn a lot more about resolution in the next chapter (see Section 3.6.1), but a good rough guide is to choose 72 pixels per inch (ppi) for files that you'll look at only on a monitor, and 300 ppi for files you plan to print.

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The Organizer is where you keep track of your photos and start most of your projects for sharing your photos. You can see thumbnails of all your photos in the Organizer, assign keywords (called tags) to make it easier to find the pictures you want, and search for your photos in lots of different ways.

The Photo Browser is the main Organizer window. Date View is an alternate way to look at and search for your photos, as explained in Figure 2-9. But the Photo Browser is more versatile: It's your main Organizer workspace, which is what the rest of this section is about.

Figure 2-9: Date View offers you the same menu options as the main Photo Browser window, but instead of a contact sheet-like view of your photos, you see your images laid out on a calendar. Click a date (in this example, June 22 is chosen), and in the upper-right corner of the screen, you can step through a slideshow view of that day's pictures. (You can choose which holidays appear on the calendar by going to Edit → Preferences → Calendar.) Date View is fun, and sometimes handy for searching, but it doesn't offer many useful functions that aren't also in the Photo Browser.

If you want to explore the Organizer in depth, check out Michael Slater's books, Organize Your Photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements (Adobe Press), and his Web site, www.photofanatic.com. Michael is the developer of the program that became Photoshop Album and then the Elements Organizer. While his book hasn't been updated since Elements 3, his Web site may have an update for Elements 5.

The Organizer stores the information about your photos in a special database called a catalog. You don't have to do anything special to create this container—Elements creates your catalog (named My Catalog) automatically the first time you import photos. It's possible to have more than one catalog, but most people don't because you can't search more than one catalog at a time.

Your catalog can include photos stored anywhere on your computer, and even photos that you've moved to external hard drives and CDs. There aren't any limits on where you can keep your originals. But once your photos appear in the Organizer, you must move them from within the Organizer as opposed to using another method (like Windows Explorer), if you want the Organizer to know where you put them. You aren't limited to photos, either—you can store videos and audio files in the Organizer as well.

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After all your organizing, editing, and resizing effort, you want to be sure you don't lose any of those files you struggled so hard to create. Saving your work is easy in Elements. (You don't need to do anything special to save information in the Organizer like tags or collections; you need to save only images you've created or changed, and you do that in the Editor.) When you're ready to save your file, press Ctrl+Shift+S to bring up the Save As dialog box, shown in Figure 2-15.

Figure 2-15: The Elements Save As dialog box actually varies a little depending on what you're saving, but this example is pretty typical. When you click the Format pull-down menu (indicated by the cursor), you'll see a long list of file formats to choose from.

The top part of the Save As window is pretty much the same as it is for any program—you choose where you want to save your file, what you want to name it, and the file format you want. (More about file formats in a moment.) You also get some important choices that are unique to Elements:

Include in the Organizer. This checkbox always appears turned on. Leave it on and your photo gets saved in the Organizer. Turn it off if you don't want the new file to go to the Organizer.
Elements gives you several options for saving a file. Before choosing, you need to consider whether you want to create version sets (Section 2.7.1) of your photos.
To tell Elements how to react to the Save command, go to Editor → Edit → Preferences → Saving Files. You see a pull-down menu labeled On First Save. Here's what the three options do:
- Always Ask. Choose Always Ask and, when you press Ctrl+S, Elements brings up the Save As dialog box the first time you save—if it's the first time you've opened the file in this session of Elements. Close the file and reopen it while Elements is still running, and you won't see the Save As dialog box the next time you save. But once you exit Elements and start it again, you get the Save As dialog box the first time you press Ctrl+S.

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With computers, you just never know what's going to happen, so "be prepared" is a good motto. If your computer crashes, it won't be nearly so painful if all your photos are safely backed up someplace else.

Elements makes it very easy to save your files to any add-on storage device like a Zip drive or an external hard-drive. Of course, you can just do a Save As and choose your storage device as the destination, but it's also easy to back up to CDs (and DVDs, if you have a DVD burner).

Windows XP also has a CD-burning utility built right into the system. The box in Section 2.8.2.2 explains how to use it. But when it comes to easy backups, you're in for a treat with the Elements Organizer. You can burn CDs or DVDs right from the Organizer, and it gives you many different options for backing up your photos and catalogs. All these options are covered in the next section.

Elements 5 has a much-requested new feature for making backups: you can create multi-session discs. That means you can tell Elements to leave your CD or DVD open, so that you can come back later and use the disc again to add more files to it, instead of wasting an entire CD or DVD to burn a handful of pictures. To use this feature, go to Organizer → Edit → Preferences → Files and turn on "Enable multisession burning to CD/DVD."

The Organizer offers a really helpful way to back up your photos. It's one of the best parts of Elements, and it's certainly very thorough, even going so far as to remind you to label the disc you create. You can backup your catalog, or just copy specific photos. In Elements 5, the process is a little different, depending on which you choose. Just follow these steps:

Call up the Backup dialog box, and let Elements make sure your catalog is in shape for backing up.
Go to File → Backup Catalog, or press Ctrl+Shift+B. Elements reviews your catalog and offers to reconnect any missing files, or you can reconnect them manually if you prefer. Section A.1.12 has more on how to do that.

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In the last chapter, you learned how to get your photos into Elements. Now it's time to look at how to trim off unwanted areas and straighten out crooked photos. You'll also learn how to change the overall size of your images and how to zoom in and out to get a better look at things while you're editing.

From here through Chapter 14, you need to be in the Elements Editor. If you're still in the Organizer, press Ctrl+I to go to the Full Edit window.

Anyone who's scanned old photos can testify about the hair-pulling frustration when your carefully placed pictures come out crooked onscreen. Whether you're feeding in your precious memories one at a time or scanning batches of photos to save time, Elements can help straighten things out.

If you've got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them as you can fit on your scanner. Thanks to Elements' wonderful Divide Scanned Photos command, you'll have individual images in no time.

Start by scanning in the photos (Figure 3-1). The only limit is how many can fit on your scanner at once. It doesn't matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use your scanner's own software. (See Section 2.4 for more about scanning images into Elements.)

Figure 3-1: Consumer-grade flatbed scanners are generally pretty slow, so it's a huge timesaver if you can scan four or even six photos at a time. Elements can automatically separate and straighten individual photos in a group thanks to the Divide Scanned Photos command.

Sometimes it pays to be crooked. Divide Scanned Photos does its best work if your photos are fairly crooked, so don't waste time trying to be precise when placing your pictures on the scanner.

When you're done scanning, follow these steps:

Open your scanned image file in the Editor.
It doesn't matter what file format you use when saving your scanned group of photos: TIFF, JPEG, PDF, whatever. Elements can read 'em all.
Divide, straighten, and crop the individual photos

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Anyone who's scanned old photos can testify about the hair-pulling frustration when your carefully placed pictures come out crooked onscreen. Whether you're feeding in your precious memories one at a time or scanning batches of photos to save time, Elements can help straighten things out.

If you've got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them as you can fit on your scanner. Thanks to Elements' wonderful Divide Scanned Photos command, you'll have individual images in no time.

Start by scanning in the photos (Figure 3-1). The only limit is how many can fit on your scanner at once. It doesn't matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use your scanner's own software. (See Section 2.4 for more about scanning images into Elements.)

Figure 3-1: Consumer-grade flatbed scanners are generally pretty slow, so it's a huge timesaver if you can scan four or even six photos at a time. Elements can automatically separate and straighten individual photos in a group thanks to the Divide Scanned Photos command.

Sometimes it pays to be crooked. Divide Scanned Photos does its best work if your photos are fairly crooked, so don't waste time trying to be precise when placing your pictures on the scanner.

When you're done scanning, follow these steps:

Open your scanned image file in the Editor.
It doesn't matter what file format you use when saving your scanned group of photos: TIFF, JPEG, PDF, whatever. Elements can read 'em all.
Divide, straighten, and crop the individual photos.
Go to Image → Divide Scanned Photos. Sit back and enjoy the view as Elements carefully calculates, splits, straightens out, and trims each image. You'll see the individual photos appear and disappear as Elements works through the group.
Name and save each separated image.
When Elements is done, you'll have the original group scan as one image and a separate image file for each photo Elements has carved out. Once you're done, import the cut-apart photos into the Organizer. To do that, just make sure that "Include in Organizer" is turned on in the Save As dialog box (Section 2.7).

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Owners of print photographs aren't the only ones who sometimes need a little help straightening their pictures. Digital photos sometimes need to be rotated. For example, not all cameras output photos so that Elements (or any other image-editing program, for that matter) knows the correct orientation. Some cameras, for example, send portrait-orientated photos out on their side, and it's up to you to straighten things out.

Fortunately, Elements has rotation commands just about everywhere you go. If all you need to do is get Dad off his back and stand him upright, here's a list of where you can perform a quick 90-degree rotation on any open photo:

Quick Fix (Section 4.1). Click either of the Rotation buttons at the bottom of the preview area.
Full Edit. Select Image → Rotate → 90° Left (or Right).
RAW Converter (Section 8.1). Click the left or right arrow at the bottom of the Preview window.
Organizer (Section 2.6). You can rotate a photo almost any time in the Organizer by pressing Ctrl plus the left or right arrow key. You can also choose Edit → Rotate 90° Left (or Right). Finally, there's a pair of Rotate buttons to click at the bottom of the Photo Browser window.

Those commands all get you one-click, 90-degree changes. But Elements has all sorts of other rotational tricks up its sleeve, as explained in the next section.

Elements gives you several ways to change the orientation of your photo. To see what's available, in the Editor, go to Image → Rotate. You'll notice two groups of Rotate commands in this menu. For now, it's the top group you want to focus on. (The second group does the same things, only those commands work on layers, which are explained in Chapter 6.)

In the first group of commands, you'll see:

Rotate 90° Left or Right. This command produces the same rotation as the rotate buttons explained earlier. Use these commands for digital photos that come in on their sides.
Rotate 180

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What about all those photos you've taken where the content isn't quite straight? You can flip those pictures around forever, but if your camera was off-kilter when you snapped the shot, your subjects will lean like a certain tower in Pisa. Elements has planned for this problem, too, by including a nifty Straighten tool that makes adjusting the horizon as easy as drawing a line.

About 95 percent of the time, the Straighten tool will do the trick. But for the few cases where you can't get things looking perfect, you can still use the old school Elements method—the Free Rotate command, described in Section 3.3.2.

If you can never seem to hold a camera perfectly level, you'll love the Elements Straighten tool. It lives just below the Cookie Cutter tool in the Full Editor's toolbox. To straighten a crooked photo:

Open the photo, and then activate the Straighten tool.
Its icon is two little photos, one crooked and one not. Or, on the keyboard, just press P.
Make any changes to the Options bar settings for the Straighten tool before you use the tool.
Your choices are described below.
Tell Elements where the horizon is.
Drag a line in your photo to show Elements where horizontal should be. Figure 3-4 shows how. Your line appears at an angle when you draw it. That's fine, because Elements is going to level out your photo, making your line the true horizontal plane in the image.

Figure 3-4: Left: To correct the crooked horizon in this photo, just draw a line along the part that should be level. It's easiest to do this by choosing a clearly marked area like the horizon in this photo, but Elements doesn't need any visual help. You could draw a line across the middle of a lawn, for instance, and Elements would straighten the photo to that line.
Right: Elements automatically rotates the photo to straighten its contents. In this case, you see the results of selecting "Crop to Remove Background" (in the Options bar), which trims off all the ragged edges for you.

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Whether or not you straightened your digital photo, sooner or later you'll probably need to crop it—trim it to a certain size. Most people crop their photos for one of two reasons: If you want to print on standard size photo paper, you usually need to cut away part of your image to make it fit on the paper. Then there's the "I don't want that in my picture" reason. Fortunately, Elements makes it easy to crop away distracting background objects or people you'd rather not see.

A few cameras produce photos that are proportioned exactly right for printing to a standard size like 4" x 6". But most cameras give you photos that aren't the same proportions as any of the standard paper sizes like 4" x 6" or 8" x 10". (The width-to-height ratio is also known as the aspect ratio.)

The extra area most cameras provide gives you room to crop wherever you like. You can also crop out different areas for different size prints (assuming you save your original photo). Figure 3-7 shows an example of a photo that had to be cropped to fit on a 4" x 6" piece of paper. If you'd like to experiment with cropping or changing resolution (explained in Section 3.6.1), download the image in the figure (waterfall.jpg) from the "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Figure 3-7: When you print onto standard sized paper, you may have to choose the part of your digital photo you want to keep.
Left: The photo as it came from the camera.
Right: The results of cropping the image down to make it the correct shape for a 4" x 6" print.

If your photo isn't in the Organizer, it's best to perform your crops on a copy, since trimming is going to throw away the pixels outside the area you choose to keep. And you never know—you may want those pixels back someday.

You can use the Crop tool in either the Full Edit or Quick Fix window. The Crop tool includes a helpful list of preset sizes to make cropping easier. If you don't need to crop to an exact size, here's how to perform basic freehand cropping:

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Sometimes, rather than changing the size of your photo, all you want to do is change its appearance in Elements so you can get a better look at it. For example, you may want to zoom in on a particular area, or zoom out, so you can see how edits you've made have affected your photo's overall composition.

This section is about how to adjust the view of your image inside Elements. Nothing you do with the tools and commands in this section changes anything about your actual photo. You're just changing the way you see it. Elements gives you lots of tools and keystroke combinations to help with these new views; soon you'll probably find yourself making these changes without even thinking about them.

Before you start resizing your view of your photos, Elements gives you several different ways to position your image windows. When you first use Elements, if you have more than one photo open at a time, your photos tile themselves so that you can see them all simultaneously. If you have two photos open, for instance, each photo window spreads itself out to take half the available space on your desktop. You're not stuck with this layout, though.

When you go to Window → Images, you get several choices for how your image windows should display:

Maximize Mode. Each photo window takes up the entire Elements desktop. You can also click the large square at the right of the Editor shortcuts bar to switch to this view.
In Maximize mode, you can only have one photo open at a time. Switch to Cascade or Tile if you want to work on two or more photos simultaneously.
Tile. Your image windows appear edge to edge so that they fill the available desktop space. With two photos open, each gets half the window; with four photos, each gets one quarter of it, and so on. If you click the four squares in the Shortcuts bar, you get this view.
Cascade. Your image windows appear in overlapping stacks. Most people find Cascade the most practical view when you want to compare or work with two images.

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The previous section explained how to resize the view of your image as it appears on your monitor. But sometimes you need to change the size of your actual image, and that's what this section is about.

Resizing your photo brings you up against a pretty tough concept in digital imaging: resolution, which measures, in pixels, the amount of detail your image can show. Where it gets confusing is that resolution for printing and for onscreen use (like email and the Web) are quite different.

For example, you need many more pixels to create a good-looking print than you do for a photo that's going to be viewed only onscreen. A photo that's going to print well almost always has too many pixels in it for onscreen display, and as a result, its file size is usually pretty hefty for emailing. So you often need two different copies of your photo for the two different uses. If you want to know more about resolution, a good place to start is www.scantips.com.

This section gives you a brief introduction to both screen and print resolution, especially in terms of what decisions you'll need to make when using the Resize Image dialog box. You'll also learn how to add more canvas (more blank space) around your photos. You'd add canvas to make room for captions below your image, for instance, or when you want to combine two photos.

To get started, open a photo you want to resize and go to Image → Resize → Image Size (Figure 3-17).

Figure 3-17: The Image Size dialog box gives you two different ways to change the size of your photo. Use the Pixel Dimensions section when preparing a photo for onscreen viewing. (The number immediately to the right of Pixel Dimensions—here, 1.59 M—indicates the current size of your file in megabytes or kilobytes.) Before you can make any changes here, you must turn on Resample Image in the bottom part of the dialog box, since changing pixel dimensions always involves Resampling (see Section 3.6.2.1). Use the Document Size section to prepare photos for printing.

It's important to learn how to size your photos so that they show up clear and easy to view onscreen. Have you ever gotten an emailed photo that was so huge you could see only a tiny bit of it on your monitor at once? That happens when someone sends an image that isn't optimized for viewing on a monitor. It's very easy to avoid that problem—once you know how to correctly size your photos for onscreen viewing.

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With Elements' Quick Fix tools, you can dramatically improve the appearance of a photo with just a click or two. The Quick Fix window gathers easy-to-use tools that help adjust the brightness and color of your photos and make them look sharper. You don't even need to understand much about what you're doing. You just need to click a button or slide a pointer, and then decide whether you like how it looks.

If, on the other hand, you do know what you're doing, you may still find yourself using the Quick Fix window for things like shadows and highlights because it's the only place in Elements that gives you a before-and-after view as you work. Also, the Temperature and Tint sliders can come in very handy for advanced color tweaking, like finessing the overall color of your otherwise finished photo. You even get two tools—the Selection brush and the Magic Selection brush—to help make changes to only a certain area of your photo.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to use all of the Quick Fix tools. You'll also learn about what order to apply the fixes so you get the most out of these tools. If you have a newish digital camera, you may find that the Quick Fix gives you all the tools you need to take your photos from pretty darn good (the way they came out of the camera) to dazzling.

If an entire chapter on Quick Fix is frustratingly slow, you can start off by trying out the ultra-fast Auto Smart Fix—a quick-fix tool for the truly impatient. Section 1.4 tells you everything you need to know.

Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. If you're in the Editor, go to the Shortcuts bar and click the Quick Fix button. If you're in the Organizer, go to the Shortcuts bar and click the Edit button's drop-down triangle, and then choose Go to Quick Fix. The Quick Fix window looks like a stripped-down version of the Full Edit window (see Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1: The Quick Fix window. If you have several photos open when you come into the Quick Fix window, you can use the Photo bin (Section 1.3.2) at bottom to choose the one you want to edit. Just click any of the image thumbnails and that photo becomes the active image—the one you see in the Quick Fix preview area in the center of your screen.

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Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. If you're in the Editor, go to the Shortcuts bar and click the Quick Fix button. If you're in the Organizer, go to the Shortcuts bar and click the Edit button's drop-down triangle, and then choose Go to Quick Fix. The Quick Fix window looks like a stripped-down version of the Full Edit window (see Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1: The Quick Fix window. If you have several photos open when you come into the Quick Fix window, you can use the Photo bin (Section 1.3.2) at bottom to choose the one you want to edit. Just click any of the image thumbnails and that photo becomes the active image—the one you see in the Quick Fix preview area in the center of your screen.

Your tools are neatly arranged on both sides of your image: On the left side, there's a five-item Toolbox; on the right side, there's a collection of quick-edit palettes stored inside the Control Panel. First, you'll take a quick look at the tools Quick Fix provides you with. Then, later in the chapter, you'll learn how to actually use them.

The Toolbox holds an easy-to-navigate subset of the Standard Edit window's larger tool collection. All the tools work the same way in both modes, and you can also use the same keystrokes to switch tools here. From top to bottom, the Quick Fix Toolbox holds:

The Zoom tool lets you telescope in and out on your image so that you can get a good close look at details or pull back to see the whole photo. (See Section 3.5.2 for more on how the Zoom tool works.) You can also zoom by using the Zoom pull-down menu in the lower-right corner of the image preview area.
The Hand tool helps move your photo around in the image window—just like grabbing it and moving it with your own hand. You can read more about the Hand tool in Section 3.5.3.
The Magic Selection brush tool lets you apply Quick Fix commands to select portions of your image. The regular Elements Selection brush is also available in Quick Fix. To get to the Selection brush, in the Toolbox, just click and hold on the Magic Selection brush icon, or click its icon in the Options bar when the Magic Selection brush is active. The difference between the two tools is that the Selection brush lets you paint a selection exactly where you want it (or mask out part of your photo to keep it from getting changed), while the Magic Selection brush makes Elements figure out the boundaries of your selection based on your much less precise marks on the image. The Magic Selection brush is much more automatic than the regular Selection brush.

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