Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

Photo Filter

The Photo Filter command gives you a host of nifty photo filters that are the digital equivalent of the lens-mounted filters of various colors used in traditional film photography. You can use them to correct problems with your image's white balance, as well as for a bunch of other fixes from the seriously photographic to the downright silly. For example, you can correct a bad skin tone or dig out an old photo of your fifth-grade nemesis and make him green, literally. Figure 8-10 shows the Photo Filter in action.

Figure 8-10. You can use the Photo Filter to correct the color casts you get from artificial lighting. Left: This photo had a strong bluish tinge from nearby fluorescent lighting. Right: A Warming Filter (85) took care of it. Use Cooling Filter (80) or Cooling Filter (82) to counteract the orange cast from tungsten lighting. (The numbers stand for the numbers of glass filters you'd use on a film camera.)

POWER USERS' CLINIC: (Faking) HDR/Digital Blending

One of the big new buzz terms in photography recently has been high dynamic range, or HDR for short. This technique has been around awhile, but before it was more often called digital blending. With most digital cameras, you're likely to hit the clipping point (Adjusting Tone) in an image much sooner than you want to. If you up the exposure so that the shadows are nice and detailed, about half the time you've blown ...