Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. The Quick Fix

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 the Quick Fix 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 Quick Selection tool—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 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.

Note

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. Smart Fix tells you everything you need to know. Also, Guided Edit may give you enough help to accomplish what you want to do (Guided Edit).

The Quick Fix Window

Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. Just click the Edit tab → Quick button. 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 launch the Quick Fix window, you can use the Project bin (Panels, Bins, and Palettes) at the bottom of the window to choose the one you want to edit. Just double-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.

Note

There’s no close button for your photos in the Quick Fix window. To close an image, just use the standard Mac keyboard shortcut (⌘ +W) or switch back to Full Edit.

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.

Note

If you need extra help, check out Guided Edit (Guided Edit), which walks you step by step through a lot of basic editing projects.

The Quick Fix Toolbox

The Toolbox holds an easy-to-navigate subset of the Full 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 The Zoom Tool 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 on The Hand Tool.

• The Quick Selection 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 the Quick Selection brush icon and choose the Selection brush from the menu that appears. 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 Quick Selection tool makes Elements figure out the boundaries of your selection based on your much less precise marks on the image. The Quick Selection tool is much more automatic than the regular Selection brush. You can read more about these brushes beginning on Selecting with a Brush.

  To get the most out of both these tools, you need to understand the concept of selections. Chapter 5 tells you everything you need to know, including the details of using these brushes.

• The Crop tool lets you change the size and shape of your photo, by cutting off the areas you don’t want (see Using the Crop Tool).

• The Red Eye tool makes it a snap to fix those horrible red eyes in flash photos (Editing Your Photos).

Note

If your photo needs straightening (Straightening the Contents of Your Image), you need to do that in Full Edit before bringing it into the Quick Fix window, since the Quick Fix Toolbox doesn’t include the Straighten tool.

The Quick Fix Control Panel

When you switch to Quick Fix, the Task panel presents you with the Quick Fix Control Panel. The Control Panel is where you make the majority of your adjustments. Elements helpfully arranges everything into four palettes—General Fixes, Lighting, Color, and Sharpen—listed in the order you’ll typically use them. In most cases, it makes sense to start at the top and work your way down until you get the results you want. (See Quick Fix Suggested Workflow for more suggestions on what order to work in.)

The Control Panel always fills the right side of the Quick Fix screen. There’s no way to hide it, and you can’t drag the palettes out of the Control Panel as you can in Standard Edit mode. But you can expand and collapse them, as explained in Figure 4-2.

Note

If you go into Quick Fix mode before you open a photo, you won’t see the pointers in the sliders, just empty tracks. Don’t worry—they’ll automatically appear as soon as you open a photo and give them something to work on.

Figure 4-2. Clicking any of these flippy triangles collapses or expands that section of the Control Panel. If you hardly ever use the tools in the Lighting section, for instance, you can collapse it so it scoots out of the way. If you have a small screen so that that the Sharpen section at the bottom is usually collapsed, there’s no need to collapse another section before expanding it—the Color section automatically collapses to make room for Sharpen when you open it.

Different Views: After vs. Before and After

When you open an image in Quick Fix, your picture first appears by itself in the main window with the word “After” above it. Elements keeps the Before view—your original photo—tucked away, out of sight. But you can pick from three other different layouts, which you can choose at any time: Before Only, Before and After—Horizontal, and Before and After—Vertical. The Before and After views are especially helpful when you’re trying to figure out if you’re improving your picture—or not—as shown in Figure 4-3. Switch between views by picking the one you want from the pop-up menu just below your image.

Figure 4-3. The Before and After view in the Quick Fix window makes it easy to see how you’re changing your photo. Here you see Before and After—Horizontal, which displays the views side by side. To see them one above the other, choose Before and After—Vertical. If you want a more detailed view, use the Zoom tool (the magnifying glass icon) to focus on just a portion of your picture.

Tip

Quick Fix limits the amount of screen space available for your image. If you want a larger view while you work, click over to Full Edit.

One of the more useful new features in Elements 6 is that you now have access to nearly all the Elements menu items in the Quick Fix window. So if you like having a before-and-after view while you work, you can stay in the Quick Fix while using many of Full Edit’s more elaborate commands.

Editing Your Photos

The tools in the Quick Fix window are pretty simple to use. You can try one or all of them—it’s up to you. And whenever you’re happy with how your photo looks, you can leave Quick Fix and go back to the Full Edit window.

If you want to rotate your photo, you can do so here by clicking the appropriate Rotate button, below the image preview area. (See Straightening Individual Photos for more about rotating photos.) These Rotate buttons only appear when you actually have a photo open in Quick Fix.

Note

If you click the Quick Fix Reset button, just above your image, you’ll return your photo to the way it looked before you started working in Quick Fix. This button undoes all Quick Fix edits, so don’t use it if you want to undo a single action only. For that, just use the regular undo command: Edit → Undo or ⌘ +Z.

Fixing Red Eye

Everyone who’s ever taken a flash photo has run into the dreaded problem of red eye—those glowing, demonic pupils that make your little cherub look like someone out of an Anne Rice novel. Red eye is even more of a problem with digital cameras than with film, but luckily, Elements has a simple and terrific Red Eye tool for fixing it. All you need to do is click the red spots with the Red Eye tool, and your problems are solved.

To use the Quick Fix Red Eye tool:

1. Open a photo.

   The Red Eye tool works the same whether you get to it from the Quick Fix Toolbox or the main Toolbox in Full Edit.

2. Zoom in so you can see where you’re clicking.

   Use the Zoom tool to magnify the eyes. You can also switch to the Hand tool if you need to drag the photo so that the eyes are front and center.

3. Activate the Red Eye tool.

   Click the Red Eye icon in the Toolbox or press Y.

4. Click in the red part of the pupil with the Red Eye tool (see Figure 4-4).

   That’s it. Just one click should fix it. If a single click doesn’t fix the problem, you can also try dragging the Red Eye tool over the pupil. Sometimes one method works better than the other. You can also adjust two settings on the Red Eye tool: Darken Amount and Pupil Size, as explained later.

5. Click in the other eye.

   Repeat the process on the other eye, and you’re done.

Figure 4-4. Zoom in when using the Red Eye tool so you get a good look at the pupils. The eye on the left side of the picture has already been fixed. Don’t worry if your photo looks so magnified that it loses definition—just make the red area large enough for a bull’s-eye. Notice what a good job the Red Eye tool does of keeping the highlights (called catchlights) in the eye that’s been treated.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Another Red Eye Fix

The Red Eye tool does a great job most of the time, but it doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t work on animals’ eyes. Elements gives you a couple of other ways to fix red eye that work in almost any situation. Here’s one:

1. Zoom way, way in on the eye. You want to be able to see the individual pixels.

2. Use the Eyedropper tool (The Eyedropper Tool) to sample the color from a good area of the eye, or from another photo. Confirm that you’ve got the color you want by checking the Foreground Color Picker (The Color Picker).

3. Get out the Pencil tool (The Paint Bucket) and set its size to 1 pixel.

4. Now click the bad or empty pixels of the eye to replace the color with the correct shade. Remember to leave a couple of white pixels for a catchlight.

This solution works even if the eye is blown out (that is, all white with no color information left).

If you’re a layers fan, you can also fix red eye by selecting the bad area, creating a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (Adjusting Saturation with the Sponge Tool), and desaturating the red area, but this method doesn’t work so well if the eye is blown out.

If you need to adjust how the Red Eye tool works, the Options bar gives you two controls, although 99 percent of the time you can ignore them:

• Darken Amount. If the result is too light, increase the percentage in this box.

• Pupil Size. Increase or decrease the number here to tell Elements how much area to consider part of a pupil.

Note

In Elements 6, you can also fix red eye right in the RAW converter (Saving your settings), if you wish.

Smart Fix

The secret weapon in the Quick Fix window is the Smart Fix command, which automatically adjusts a picture’s lighting, color, and contrast, all with one click. You don’t have to figure anything out. Elements does it all for you.

You’ll find the Smart Fix in the General Fixes palette, and it’s about as easy to use as hitting the speed dial button on your phone: Click the Auto Smart Fix button, and if the stars are aligned, your picture will immediately look better. (Figure 4-5 gives you a glimpse of its capabilities. If you want to see for yourself how this fix works, download this photo—finch.jpg—from the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.)

Figure 4-5. Top: This photo is so dark you may think it’s beyond help. Bottom: The Auto Smart Fix button improved it significantly with just one click. (A click of the Auto Sharpening button, explained later in “Sharpening” [Sharpening], was added to make it look really spiffy.)

Note

You’ll find Auto buttons scattered throughout Elements. The program uses them to make a best-guess attempt to implement whatever change the Auto button is next to (Smart Fix, Levels, Contrast, and so on). It never hurts to at least try clicking these Auto buttons; if you don’t like what you see, you can always perform the magical undo: Edit → Undo or ⌘ +Z.

If you’re happy with the Auto Smart Fix button’s changes, you can move onto a new photo, or try sharpening your photo a little (see Sharpening) if the focus appears a little fuzzy. You don’t need to do anything to accept the Smart Fix changes. But if you’re not ecstatic with your results, take a good look at your picture. If you like what Auto Smart Fix has done, but the effect is too strong or too weak, press ⌘ +Z to undo it, and try playing with the Smart Fix Amount slider instead.

The Amount slider does the same thing Auto Smart Fix does, only you control the degree of change. Watch the image as you move the slider to the right. If your computer is slow, there’s a certain amount of lag time, so go slowly to give it a chance to catch up. If you happen to overdo it, sometimes it’s easier to press the Reset button above your image and start again. Use the checkmark and the cancel button (which appears next to the General Fixes label, as shown in Figure 4-6) to accept or reject your changes.

Figure 4-6. When you move a slider in any of the Quick Fix palettes, the Cancel and Accept buttons appear in the palette you’re using. Clicking the cancel symbol undoes the last change you made, while clicking the accept symbol applies the change to your image. If you make multiple slider adjustments, the cancel symbol undoes everything you’ve done since you clicked Accept. (The little light bulb takes you to the Elements Help Center.)

Tip

Usually you get better results with a lot of little nudges to the Smart Fix slider than with one big sweeping movement.

Incidentally, these are the same Smart Fix commands you see in two places in the Full Edit Enhance Menu: Enhance → Auto Smart Fix (Option+⌘ +M), and Enhance → Adjust Smart Fix (⌘ +Shift+M).

Sometimes Smart Fix just isn’t smart enough to do everything you want, and sometimes it does things you don’t want. Smart Fix is better with photos that are underexposed than overexposed, for one thing. Fortunately, you still have several other editing choices, covered in the following sections. If you don’t like the effect Smart Fix has had, undo it before going on to make other changes.

Adjusting Lighting and Contrast

The Lighting palette lets you make very sophisticated adjustments to the brightness and contrast of your photo. Sometimes problems that you thought stemmed from exposure or even focus may be fixed by these commands.

Levels

If you want to understand how Levels really works, you’re in for a long technical ride. On the other hand, if you just want to know what it can do for your photos, the short answer is that it adjusts the brightness of your photo by redistributing the color information; Levels changes (and hopefully fixes!) both brightness and color at the same time.

If you’ve never used any photo-editing software before, this may sound rather mysterious, but photo-editing pros will tell you that Levels is one of the most powerful commands for fixing and polishing your pictures. To find out if its magic works for you, click the Auto Levels button. Figure 4-7 shows what a big difference it can make. Download this photo (squirrel.jpg) from the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com, if you’d like to try this out yourself.

Figure 4-7. A quick click of the Auto Levels button can make a very dramatic difference. Left: The original photo of the squirrel isn’t bad, and you may not realize how much better the colors could be. Right: This image shows how much more effective your photo is once Auto Levels has balanced the colors.

What Levels does is very complex. Chapter 7 contains loads more details about what’s going on behind the scenes and how you can apply this command much more precisely.

Contrast

The main alternative to Auto Levels in Quick Fix is Auto Contrast. Most people find that their images tend to benefit from one or the other of these options. Contrast adjusts the relative darkness and lightness of your image without changing the color, so if Levels made your colors go all goofy, try adjusting the contrast instead. You activate Contrast the same way you do the Levels tool: just click the Auto button next to its name.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Calibrating Your Monitor

Why do my photos look awful when I open them in Elements?

Do you find that your photos don’t look so great on your monitor? Maybe they look muddy or washed out. Or maybe they look great onscreen but terrible when you print them out or post them to a Web site.

If that’s the case, you need to calibrate your monitor, as explained on Getting started with calibrating. It’s easy to do and it makes a big difference.

Elements is what’s known as a color-managed program. You can read all about color management on Calibrating Your Monitor.

Mac OS X has system-wide color management built in via Apple’s ColorSync utility. So if you have a problem with your monitor, you’ll probably realize it even before you get into Elements. The extra color management options in Elements can be a little more trouble to set up initially, but the truly wonderful results you can get are worth investing a little more time and effort when you’re getting started.

Note

After you use Auto Contrast, look closely at the edges of the objects in your photo. If your camera’s contrast was already high, you may see a halo or a sharp line around the photo’s subject. If you see that line or halo, the contrast is too high and you need to undo Auto Contrast (⌘ +Z) and try another fix instead.

Shadows and Highlights

The Shadows and Highlights tools do an amazing job of bringing out the details that are lost in the shadows or bright areas of your photo. Figure 4-8 shows what a difference these tools can make.

The Shadows and Highlights tools are a collection of three sliders, each of which controls a different aspect of your image:

• Lighten Shadows. Nudge the slider to the right and you’ll see details emerge from murky black shadows.

• Darken Highlights. Use this slider to dim the brightness of overexposed areas.

• Midtone Contrast. After you’ve adjusted your photo’s shadows and highlights, your photo may look very flat and not have enough contrast between the dark and light areas. This slider helps you bring a more realistic look back to your photo.

Tip

You may think you need only lighten shadows in a photo, but sometimes just a smidgen of Darken Highlights may help, too. Don’t be afraid to experiment by using this slider even if you’ve got a relatively dark photo.

Go easy. Getting overenthusiastic with these sliders can give your photos a very washed-out, flat look.

Figure 4-8. Top: This photo shows a classic vacation picture problem: The day is bright, the scenery’s beautiful, but everyone’s faces are hidden in the dark shadows cast by their hats. Bottom: The Shadows and Highlights tools brought back everyone’s faces, but now they look a tad orange. Use the color sliders to make them look healthy again.

Color

The Color palette lets you—surprise, surprise—play around with the colors in your image. In many cases, if you’ve been successful with Auto Levels or Auto Contrast, you won’t need to do anything here.

Auto Color

Once again, there’s another one-click fix available: Auto Color. Actually, in some ways Auto Color should be up in the Lighting section. Like Levels, it simultaneously adjusts color and brightness, but it looks at different information in your photos to decide what to do with them.

When you’re first learning to use Quick Fix, you may want to try all three—Levels, Contrast, and Auto Color—to see which generally works best for your photos. Undo between each change and compare your results. Most people find they like one of the three most of the time.

Auto Color may be just the ticket for your photos, but you may also find that it shifts your colors in strange ways. Give it a click and see what you think. Does your photo look better or worse? If it’s worse, just click Reset or ⌘ +Z to undo it, and go back to Auto Levels or Auto Contrast. If they all make your colors look a little wrong, or if you want to tweak the colors in your photo, move on to the Color sliders, explained in the next section.

Using the Color sliders

If you want to adjust the colors in your photo without changing the brightness, check out the Color sliders. For example, your digital camera may produce colors that don’t quite match what you saw when you took the picture; or you may have scanned an old print that’s faded or discolored; or you may just want to change the colors in a photo for the heck of it. If so, the sliders below the Auto Color button are for you.

You get four ways to adjust your colors here:

• Saturation controls the intensity of your photo’s color. For example, you can turn a color photo to black and white by moving the slider all the way to the left. Move it too far to the right and everything glows with so much color that it looks radioactive.

• Hue changes the color from, say, red to blue or green. If you aren’t looking for realism, you can have some fun with your photos by really pushing this slider to create funky color changes.

• Temperature lets you adjust color from cool (bluish) on the left to warm (orangeish) on the right. Use Temperature for things like toning down the warm glow you see in photos taken in tungsten lighting, or just for fine-tuning your color balance.

• Tint adjusts the green/magenta balance of your photo, as shown in Figure 4-9.

Figure 4-9. Left: The greenish tint in this photo is a drastic example of a very common problem caused by many digital cameras. Right: A little adjustment of the Tint slider clears it up in a jiffy. It’s not always as obvious as it is here that you need a tint adjustment. If you aren’t sure, the sky is often a dead giveaway. Is it robin’s egg blue? If the photo’s sky is that color and the real sky was just plain blue, tint is what you need.

You probably won’t use all these sliders on a single photo, but you can use as many of them as you like. Remember to click the Accept checkmark that appears in the Color palette if you want to accept your changes. Chapter 7 has much more information about how to use the full-blown Editor to really fine-tune your image’s color.

Tip

If you look at the color of the slider’s track, it shows you what happens if you move in that direction. So there’s less and less color as you go left in the Saturation track, and more and more to the right. Looking at the tracks can help you know where you want to move the slider.

Sharpening

Now that you’ve finished your other corrections, it’s time to sharpen your photo. Sharpening gives the effect of better focus by improving the edge contrast in your photo. Most digital camera photos need some sharpening because the sharpening your camera applies is usually deliberately conservative. Once again, a Quick Fix Auto button is at your service. Give the Auto Sharpen button (located in the Sharpen palette) a try to get things started. Figure 4-10 shows what you can expect.

Figure 4-10. Left: The original image. Like most digital photos, it could stand a little sharpening. Middle: What you get by clicking the Auto Sharpen button. Right: The results of using the Sharpen slider to achieve stronger sharpening than Auto was initially willing to perform.

Tip

Mac OS X actually has some pretty sophisticated sharpening tools built right in. Preview allows you to apply Luminance Channel sharpening, a complex technique you might like better than the Elements sharpening options. You may want to open a photo in Preview and give it a try to see whether you prefer it to what the Quick Fix can do.

The sad truth is that there really isn’t any way to actually improve the focus of a photo once it’s taken. Software sharpening just increases the contrast where the program perceives edges, so using it first can have strange effects on other editing tools and their ability to understand your photo.

If you don’t like what Auto Sharpening does (you very well may not), you can undo it (press ⌘ +Z) and try the slider. If you thought the Auto button overdid things, go very gently with the slider. Changes vary from photo to photo, but usually Auto’s results fall at around the 30 to 40 percent mark on the slider.

Note

If you see funny halos around the outlines of objects in your photos, or strange flaky spots (making your photo look like it has eczema), those are artifacts from too much sharpening.

Always try to view Actual Pixels (View → Actual Pixels) whenever you sharpen because that gives you the clearest idea of what you’re actually doing to your picture. If you don’t like what the button does, undo it, and then try the slider. Zero sharpening is all the way to the left. Moving to the right increases the amount of sharpening applied to your photo.

As a general rule, you want to sharpen more for photos you plan to print than for images for Web use. You can read lots more about sharpening on Saving colors in the Swatches palette.

Note

If you’ve used photo-editing programs before, you may be interested to know that the Auto Sharpen button applies Smart Sharpening (Adjust Sharpness) to your photo. The difference is that you don’t have any control over the settings, as you would if you applied it from the Enhance menu. But the good news is that if you want it, you can get this control—even from within Quick Fix. Just go to the Enhance Menu and choose Unsharp Mask, or, for even more control, check out the Adjust Sharpness command just below it (Saving colors in the Swatches palette).

At this point, all that’s left is cropping your photo, if you’d like to reduce its size. Cropping Pictures tells you everything you need to know about cropping.

Quick Fix Suggested Workflow

There are no hard-and-fast rules for what order you need to work in when using the Quick Fix tools. As mentioned earlier, Elements lays out the tools in the Control Panel, from top to bottom, in the order that usually makes sense. But you can pick and choose which tools you want, depending on what you think your photo needs. But if you’re the type of person who likes a set plan for fixing photos, here’s one order in which to apply the commands:

1. Rotate your photo (if needed).

   Use the buttons below the image preview.

2. Fix red eye (if needed).

   See Editing Your Photos.

3. Crop.

   If you know you want to crop your photo, now’s the time. That way, you get rid of any problem areas before they affect other adjustments. For example, say your photo has a lot of overexposed sky that you want to crop out. If you leave it in, that area may skew the effects of the Lighting and Color tools on your image. So if you already know where you want to crop, do it before making other adjustments for more accurate results.

4. Try Auto Smart Fix and/or the Smart Fix slider. Undo if necessary.

   Pretty soon you’ll get a good idea of how likely it is that this fix will do a good job on your photos. Some people love it; others think it makes their pictures too grainy.

5. If Smart Fix wasn’t smart enough, work your way down through the other Lighting and Color commands until you like the way your photo looks.

   Read the sections earlier in this chapter to understand what each command does to your photo.

6. Sharpen.

   Try to perform sharpening as your last adjustment because other commands can give you funky results on photos that have already been sharpened.

Tip

When you’re in Quick Fix mode, you can switch back to Full Edit at any point if you want tools or filters not available in Quick Fix. Also, note that there’s no Close button in Quick Fix. To close a photo there, use the File menu or ⌘ +W.

Adjusting Skin Tones

If you’re like most amateur photographers, your most important photos are pictures of people: your family, your friends, or even just fascinating strangers. Elements gives you yet another tool for making fast fixes—one that’s designed especially for correcting photos that have people in them. This is the "Adjust Color for Skin Tone” command, available in both the Quick Fix and Full Edit windows.

The name "Adjust Color for Skin Tone” may be a bit confusing. What this command actually does is adjust your entire image based on the skin tone of someone in the photo. The idea behind "Adjust Color for Skin Tone” is that you may well be much more interested in the way the people in your photos look than in how the background looks. This command gives the highest priority to creating good skin color. It’s an automatic fix, but there’s a dialog box where you can tweak the results once you’ve previewed Elements’ suggested adjustments. To use the “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” command:

1. Call up the “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” dialog box.

   In either Quick Fix or Full Edit, go to Enhance → Adjust Color → “Adjust Color for Skin Tone”. The dialog box shown in Figure 4-11 appears. You may need to move it out of the way of your photo so you can see what’s happening.

2. Show Elements an area of skin to sample for calculating the color adjustments.

   Once the dialog box appears, your cursor turns to an eyedropper. Just find a portion of your photo where your subject’s skin has relatively good color, and click it.

   

   Figure 4-11. When this dialog box appears, your cursor turns into a little eyedropper when you move it over your photo. Just click the best-looking area of skin you can find. After Elements adjusts the photo based on your click, you can use the sliders to fine-tune the results. Clicking different spots gives different results, so you may want to experiment by clicking different places.

3. Tweak the results.

   Elements is often a bit overenthusiastic in its adjustments. Use the sliders in the dialog box to get a more pleasing, realistic color. The Ambient Light slider works just like the Temperature slider in the Quick Fix control panel (Using the Color sliders). Blush increases the rosiness of the skin as you move the slider to the right and decreases it to the left. Tan increases or decreases the browns and oranges in the skin tones. You may get swell results with your first click, or you may have to use all the sliders to get a truly realistic result. It all depends on the photo.

   You can preview the changes right in your photo as you work. If you mess up and want to start again, click Reset. If you decide you’d rather be using another tool instead, click Cancel.

   Tip

   The "Adjust Color for Skin Tone” sliders are like the Quick Fix sliders in that you can get an idea of which way to move them by looking at the colors in the slider tracks in the dialog box.

4. When you like what you see, click OK.

   Elements applies your changes. If you want to undo them, press ⌘ +Z.

“Adjust Color for Skin Tone” seems to work best on fair skin, and not so well on darker skin tones. And it’s most suited for making fairly subtle adjustments, so you may have to reduce the amount of change from what Elements first did.

Also, notice that not only the skin tones are changing. Elements is adjusting all the colors in the photo in sync with the skin tones (Figure 4-12). Sometimes you may find you’ve acquired quite a color cast by the time you’ve got the skin just right (see Removing Unwanted Color). If this bothers you, try a different tool. On the other hand, you can create some very nice late afternoon light effects with this command.

While “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” is really meant as a kind of alternative fast fix, you may find it’s most useful for making small final adjustments to photos you’ve already edited using other tools.

Tip

If you understand layers (explained in Chapter 6), you may want to make a duplicate layer and apply this command to your duplicate. Then you can adjust the intensity of the result by adjusting the layer’s opacity (see Managing Layers).

Figure 4-12. Top: This photo shows a slight greenish cast, giving the little boy a somewhat unappealing skin tone. Bottom: “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” is able to warm up his skin tones, and it even removes the greenish tinge to the wood of the bench he’s sitting on.