Photoshop Elements 11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Elements for Digital Photographers

If you’re a fairly serious digital photographer, you’ll be delighted to know that Adobe hasn’t just loaded Elements with easy-to-use features. The program also includes a collection of pretty advanced tools pulled straight from the full-featured Photoshop.

Number one on the list is the Adobe Camera Raw Converter, which lets you convert and edit Raw files—a format some cameras use to give you maximum editing control. In this chapter, you’ll learn lots more about the Raw format and why you may (or may not) want to use it. But don’t skip to the next chapter if your camera only shoots JPEGs: You can use the Raw Converter to edit JPEG and TIFF images, too, which can come in really handy, as you’ll see shortly.

Note

Whereas JPEG and TIFF are acronyms for technical photographic terms, the word “Raw”—which you may occasionally see in all caps (RAW)—actually refers to the pristine, unprocessed quality of these files.

Adobe recently gave the Raw Converter a major update, and the version included with Elements 11 includes new, improved processes for converting files. It’s a huge improvement over past versions of the Converter. If you’ve used Elements before and decided that you prefer your camera manufacturer’s conversion software to what’s available in Elements, it’s time to give Elements’ Raw Converter another try.

This chapter also explains Exposure Merge, which lets you combine different versions of a photo to create a single image with a higher ...