The Editor is the other main component of Elements (Figure 1-5). 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.
Figure 1-5. The main Elements editing window, which Adobe calls Full Edit. In some previous versions of Elements it was known as the Standard Editor, something to keep in mind in case you ever try any tutorials written for Elements 3 or 4.
You can operate the Editor in any of three different modes:
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.
Quick Fix. For many beginners, Quick Fix (Figure 1-6) ends up being their main workspace. It's where Adobe has gathered together the basic tools you need to improve most photos. It's also one of the two places in Elements where you can choose to have a before-and-after view while you work. (Guided Edit, described below, is the other.) Chapter 4 gives you all the details on using Quick Fix.
Guided Edit. This window can be a big help if you're a newcomer to Elements. It provides step-by-step walkthroughs for popular projects such as cropping your photos and removing blemishes from them. Like Quick Fix, Guided Edit offers a before-and-after view of your photo as you work on it (see Getting Help) and also offers some advanced features, like the Actions Player (Using Actions).
Figure 1-6. The Quick Fix window. Use the drop-down menus in the tab at the top of the screen (circled, right) to navigate from Full Edit to the Quick Fix window (and to Guided Edit, if you like) and back again. To compare your fixes with the original photo, fire up Before & After view, which you get by clicking the View menu (circled, left).
The rest of this chapter covers some of the Editor's basic concepts and key tools.
Note
If you leave a photo open in the Editor, then 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.
When you first open the Editor, you may be dismayed at how cluttered it looks. There's stuff everywhere, and maybe not a lot of room left for the photos you're editing, especially if you have a small screen. Don't fret: One of Elements 8's best features is the way you can customize the Editor's workspace. There's practically no limit to how you can rearrange the Editor. 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. Figure 1-7 shows two different views of the same workspace.
What's more, in Elements 8 you can hide everything in your workspace except for your images and the menu bar: no tools, panels, or Options bar. This is handy when you want a good, undistracted look at what you've just done to your photo. To do that, just press the Tab key; to bring everything back into view, press Tab again.
Figure 1-7. Two different ways of working with the same images, panels, and tools. You can use any arrangement that suits you. Top: The panels in the basic Elements arrangement, with the images in the new tabbed view (Image windows). Bottom: This image shows how you can customize your panels. Here the Project bin has been moved into the Panel bin, and the whole thing is collapsed to icons (they're to the right of the image being worked on). Click an icon and that panel pops out so you can work with it. The images here are in floating windows.
Note
You may notice that Elements' menu bar at the very top of the program's window changes a little depending on the size of your monitor and whether you've got the Elements window maximized to fill your screen. You'll either see a single row above the Options bar (Elements' Tools) with the PSE logo at the left and the Arrange menu (Image Views) and the Photoshop.com login area at the middle of the screen (as in Figure 1-7), or these items may be in a separate row above the menus that say File, Edit, Image, and so on (as in Figure 1-5). Both are perfectly normal, and you'll see both arrangements in this book's illustrations.
When you're in Full Edit, the right side of the Elements window displays the Panel bin. Panels let you do things like keep track of what you've done to your photo (Undo History panel) and apply special effects to your images (Effects panel and Content panel). You'll learn about the various panels in detail throughout this book.
Note
In previous versions of Elements and in older versions of Photoshop, panels were called "palettes." If you run across a tutorial that talks about the "Content palette" for example, that's exactly the same thing as the The Content Panel.
You might like the Panel bin, but many people don't. If you don't have a large monitor, you may find it wastes too much desktop acreage, and in Elements, you need all the working room you can get. Fortunately, you don't have to keep your panels in the bin; you can close the bin and just keep your panels floating around on your desktop, or you can minimize them.
You can't close the bin completely when it has panels in it, but you can minimize it to just a narrow strip of icons by clicking the bin's very top bar, the one with the double arrows on it. To expand it again, click the top bar once more. (If you pull all the panels out of the bin so that it's empty, it disappears. To bring it back, click Reset Panels at the top of your screen, which resets all your panels, not just the bin.) You pull a panel out of the bin by dragging the panel's top tab; you've now got yourself a floating panel. Figure 1-8 shows how to make panels even smaller once they're out of the bin by collapsing them in one of two ways. You can also combine panels with each other, as shown in Figure 1-9; this works with both panels in the bin and freestanding panels.
Figure 1-8. You can free up even more space by collapsing your panels, accordion-style, once they're out of the bin. Top: A full-sized panel. Bottom left: A panel collapsed by double-clicking where the cursor is. Bottom right: The same panel collapsed to an icon by clicking the very top of it (where the cursor is here) once. Click the top bar again to expand it.
When you launch Elements for the first time, the Panel bin contains only two panels: Layers and Effects. To see how many more panels Elements actually gives you, check out the Editor's main Window menu (the one at the top of your screen): Everything listed in the menu's middle section—from Adjustments to Undo History—is a panel you can put in the Panel bin.
When you select a new panel from the Window menu, it appears in the bin if you're using the bin, floating on the desktop if you don't have any panels in the bin, or right where it was when you closed it last time. In addition to combining panels as shown in Figure 1-9 you can also collapse the Panel bin or any group of panels into icons. Then, to use a panel, click its icon and it jumps out to the side of the group, full size. To shrink it back to an icon, click its icon again. To expand or shrink the Panel bin, click the double arrows at the panel's upper right. You can combine panels here by dragging their icons onto each other. Then those panels open as a combined group, like the panels in Figure 1-9. Clicking one of the icons in the group collapses the opened, grouped panel back to icons. (Combined panel icons don't show a dark gray line between them in the group the way separate icons do.) You can also separate combined panels in icon view by dragging the icons away from each other.
Adobe sometimes refers to floating panels as "tabs" in Elements' menus. To close a floating tab, click the Close button (the X) at its upper right, or below the X click the barely visible square (it's made up of four horizontal lines), and choose Close from the menu that appears. If you want to put a panel back in the bin, drag it over the bin and let go when you see a blue line, or drag onto the tab of a panel that's already in the bin to create a combined panel within the bin.
Note
If you lose panels or you move stuff around so much that you can't remember where you put things, you can always go home again by clicking the Reset Panels button at the top of your screen, which puts all your panels back in their original spots.
Figure 1-9. You can combine two or more panels once you've dragged them out of the bin. Top: The Histogram panel is being pulled into, and combined with, the Layers panel. To combine panels, drag one of them (by clicking on the panel's name tab) and drop it onto the other panel. Bottom: To switch from one panel to another after they're grouped, just click the tab of the one you want to use. To remove a panel from a group, simply drag it out of the group. If you want to return everything to how it looked when you first launched Elements, click Reset Panels (not visible here) at the top of your screen.
In the Editor, the long narrow photo tray at the bottom of your screen is called the Project bin. It shows you what photos you have open, as explained in Figure 1-10, but it does a lot more than that. At the bin's upper left are two pull-down menus:
Show Open Files. This menu lets you determine what the Project bin displays: the photos currently open in the Editor, selected photos from the Organizer, or any of the albums (Albums and Smart Albums) you've made. If you send a bunch of photos over from the Organizer at once, you may think something went awry because no photo appears on your desktop or in the Project bin. If you switch this menu over to "Show Files from Elements Organizer", then you see the photos waiting for you in the bin.
Figure 1-10. The Project bin runs across the bottom of the Editor's screen. It holds a thumbnail of every photo you have open, as well as photos you sent over from the Organizer that are waiting to be opened. Here you see the bin three ways: as it normally appears (top), as a floating panel (bottom left), and collapsed to an icon (bottom right). You can also click the Close button (the X) at the bin's upper right, or right-click its tab and choose Close to hide it completely. To bring it back, go to Window → Project bin.
Bin Actions. This is where the Project bin gets really useful. You can choose to use the photos in the bin in a project (via the Create tab), share them by any of the means listed under the Task panel's Share tab, print them, or make an album right there in the bin without ever going to the Organizer.
Tip
If you don't use the Organizer, then the Project bin is a particularly great feature, because it lets you create groups of photos you can call up all together. Just put them in an album (Albums and Smart Albums), and then, from the bin's Show Open Files menu, select the album's name to see that group again.
You can drag your photos' thumbnails in the bin to rearrange them if you want to use the images in a project.
The Project bin is useful, but if you have a small monitor, you may prefer to have the space it takes up for your editing work. In Elements 8, the Project bin behaves just like any of the other panels: you can rip it loose from the bottom of the screen and combine it with the other panels. You can even collapse it to an icon, like the other panels, or drag it into the Panel bin. (If you combine it with your other panels, the combined panel may be a little wider than it would be without the Project bin, although you can still collapse the combined group to icons.) If you've used the past couple of versions of Elements, you know this is a great improvement over the old, fixed Project bin.
In Elements 8, you can choose how you want to see the images you're working on. Older versions of Elements have used floating windows, where each image appears in a separate window that you can drag around. Elements 8 starts you out with floating windows, but you can also put your images into a new, tabbed view, which is something like the tabs in a web browser, or the tabs you'd find on paper file folders. The advantage of tabbed view is that you have plenty of workspace around the image, which is handy when you're working near the edges of an image, or using a tool that requires you to be able to get outside the image's boundaries. All the things you can do with image windows are explained on Image Views.
Incidentally, Clicking Reset Panels doesn't do anything to your image windows or tabs; it just resets your panels.
Elements gives you an amazing array of tools to use when working on your photos. You get almost two dozen primary tools to help select, paint on, and otherwise manipulate images, and many of the tools have as many as six subtools hiding beneath them (see Figure 1-11). Bob Vila's workshop probably isn't any better stocked than Elements' virtual toolbox.
Figure 1-11. Like any good toolbox, Elements' Tools panel has lots of hidden drawers tucked away in it. Many Elements tools are actually groups of tools, which are represented by tiny black triangles on the lower-right side of the tool's icon (you can see several of these triangles here). Right-clicking or holding the mouse button down when you click the icon brings out the hidden subtools. The little black square next to the regular Eraser tool means it's the active tool right now.
Note
To explore every cranny of Elements, you need to open a photo (in the Editor, choose File → Open). Lots of the menus are grayed out if you don't have a file open.
The long, skinny strip on the left side of the Full Edit window (shown back in Figure 1-5—Editing Your Photos) is the Tools panel. It stays perfectly organized so you can always find what you want without ever having to lift a finger to tidy it up. If you forget what a particular tool does, just hover your cursor over the tool's icon, and a label (called a tooltip) appears telling you the tool's name. To activate a tool, click its icon. Any tool that you select comes with its own collection of options, as shown in Figure 1-12.
Figure 1-12. When a tool is active, the Options bar changes to show settings specific to that tool. Elements' tools are highly customizable, letting you do things like adjust a brush's size and shape. Here you see the Brush tool's options. (The caterpillar-like thingy at the left is a sample of the brushstroke you'd get using the tool's current settings.)
As the box below explains, you can have either a single- or double-columned Tools panel.
Other windows in Elements, like Quick Fix and the Raw Converter (see Using the Raw Converter), also have toolboxes, but none is as complete as the one in Full Edit.
Note
If you've used Elements 5 or earlier, you'll notice an important difference in getting to subtools in Elements 8: You can't switch from one tool in a subgroup to another by using the Options bar anymore. Now you can choose a tool from a group only by using the tool's pop-out menu in the Tools panel, or by pressing its shortcut key repeatedly to cycle through the tool's subgroup. Stop tapping the key when you see the icon for the tool you want.
Don't worry about learning the names of every tool right now, but if you want to see them all, they're all on display in Figure 1-13. It's easier to remember what a tool is once you've used it. And don't be overwhelmed by all of Elements' tools. You probably have a bunch of Allen wrenches in your garage that you only use every year or so. Likewise, you'll find that you tend to use certain Elements tools more than others.
Figure 1-13. The mighty Tools panel. Because some tools are grouped together in the same slot (indicated by the little black triangles next to the tool icons), you can't ever see all the tools at once. (This Tools panel has two columns; the box on Elements' Tools explains how to switch from one to two columns.) For grouped tools, the icon you see is the icon for the last tool in the group you used.
Tip
You can save a ton of time by activating tools with their keyboard shortcuts, since you don't have to interrupt what you're doing to trek over to the Tools panel. To see a tool's shortcut key, hover your cursor over its icon. A label pops up indicating the shortcut key (it's the letter to the right of the tool's name). To activate the tool, just press the appropriate key. If the tool you want is part of a group, all the tools in that group have the same keyboard shortcut, so just keep pressing that key to cycle through the group until you get to the tool you want.
Wherever Adobe found a stray corner in Elements, they stuck some help into it. You can't move anywhere in this program without being offered some kind of guidance. Here are a few of the ways you can summon assistance if you need it:
Help menu. Choose Help → Photoshop Elements Help, or press F1. Elements launches your web browser, which displays Elements' Help files, where you can search or browse a topic list and glossary. The Help menu also contains links to online video tutorials and Adobe's support forum for Elements.
Tooltips. When you see a tooltip (Elements' Tools) pop up under your cursor as you move around Elements, if the tooltip's text is blue, that means it's linked to the appropriate section in Elements; Help. You can click blue-text tooltips for more information about whatever your cursor is hovering over.
Dialog box links. Most dialog boxes have a few words of bright blue text somewhere in them. That text is actually a link to Elements Help. If you get confused about what Remove Color Cast does, for instance, then, in the Remove Color Cast dialog box, click the blue "color cast" text for a reminder.
If you're a beginner, Guided Edit, shown in Figure 1-14, can be a big help. It walks you through a variety of popular editing tasks, like cropping, sharpening, correcting colors, and removing blemishes. It also includes some features that are useful even if you're an old Elements hand, like the Actions Player (Using Actions) and the new Exposure Merge (Blending Exposures).
Guided edit is really easy to use:
Go to Guided Edit.
In the Editor, click the Edit tab → EDIT Guided.
Open a photo.
Press Ctrl+O, and then, from the window that appears, choose your photo. If you already have a photo open, it appears in the Guided Edit window automatically. If you have several photos in the Project bin, then you can switch images by double-clicking the thumbnail of the one you want to work on.
Figure 1-14. Guided Edit gives you step-by-step help with basic photo editing. Just use the tools that appear in this panel once you choose an activity. After you've selected a task, you can change the view to Before & After. Keep clicking the little blue button (circled) at the bottom of the window to toggle views between After Only, Before & After—Horizontal, and Before & After—Vertical.
Choose what you want to do.
Your options are grouped into major categories like Basic Photo Edits and Color Correction, with a variety of specific projects under each heading. Just click the task you want in the list on the right side of the window. The panel displays the relevant buttons and/or sliders for the task you selected.
Make your adjustments.
Just move the sliders and click the buttons till you like what you see. If you want to start over, click Reset. If you change your mind about the whole project, click Cancel.
If several steps are involved, then Elements shows you just the buttons and slider you need to use for the current step, and then switches to a new set of choices for the next step as you go along.
If you need to adjust your view of your photo while you work on it, Guided Edit has a little toolbox with the Hand (The Hand Tool) and Zoom (The Zoom Tool) tools to help you out.
Click Done to finish.
If there are more steps, then you may see another set of instructions. If you see the main list of topics again, you're all through. Don't forget to save your changes (Saving Your Work). To close your photo, press Ctrl+W, or leave it open and switch to another tab to share it or use it in a project.
Note
Guided Edit shows you quick and easy ways to change your image, but you don't always get the best possible results. It's a great tool for starting out; just remember that what you see here isn't necessarily the best you can possibly make your images look. Once you're more comfortable in Elements, Quick Fix (Chapter 4) is a good next step.
You've probably noticed the little text alerts that zip in and out at the bottom of both the Editor and the Organizer windows, as shown in Figure 1-15. If you click one, then you get a pop-up window that suggests a tutorial explaining how to do whatever the text alert mentioned. Click the arrow where it says "Learn how", and up pops the Adobe Elements Inspiration Browser, a mini-program that lets you watch tutorials. You need a Photoshop.com account (available only for U.S. residents; see Photoshop.com) to use the Browser. (If you call up the Browser and you change your mind about using it, or if you don't have an account, press the Esc key to close it.) It's well worth checking out, because the Browser is a direct connection to a slew of tutorials for things you might want to do with Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements (Adobe's movie-editing program).
The first time you start the Inspiration Browser, you see a license agreement for yet another program: Adobe AIR, which lets other programs show you content stored online; no need to get out a web browser and navigate to a website. (Adobe AIR got installed automatically along with Elements.)
This process may seem like a lot of work, but it's well worth the effort, since you can find tutorials on everything from beginner topics like creating albums to advanced subjects like working with Displacement Maps (a sophisticated technique used for things like making your photo look like it's painted on a brick wall, or making a page of text look like a crumpled newspaper). The tutorials are all in either PDF or video format. You'll see tutorials from well-known Elements gurus here, but anyone can submit a tutorial for the Inspiration Browser. So if you figure out how to do a project you think might be useful to others, you can create a tutorial and send it in for approval by clicking the "Submit a Tutorial" button and entering the requested information in the window that appears. (You need to create your tutorial as either a PDF or, for a video, in the Flash FLV format.)
Figure 1-15. Top: Click these little text banners for more information about the topic. Bottom: In these pop-up windows you can either click "Learn how" to go directly to that particular tutorial, or click the faintly ghosted left and right arrows (circled; they get brighter when you mouse over them) in the pop-up window to read about other available tutorials. You can also get to the Inspiration Browser by going to Help → Photoshop Inspiration Browser. (Not all the pop-ups have these navigation arrows. Some have a single arrow that only takes you to the linked tutorial without letting you browse for others.)
You can search for tutorials using the box on the Browser's left, or click All Tutorials and then filter them by category or product (so you don't have to see Premiere Elements topics if you have only Photoshop Elements, for example). You can also click on one of the column headings to see the available tutorials arranged by Title, Author, Difficulty, Date Posted, Category, Type (video or PDF), or the average star rating people have given it. Use the buttons at the window's upper right to change the view from a list to thumbnails (info about each tutorial appears below its thumbnail).
The Inspiration Browser is a wonderful resource and may well give you most of the help you need with Elements beyond this book.
Tip
If the author of a tutorial has a website, then the tutorial's page has a link to it. Exploring these links can help you find lots of useful Elements-related resources, as well as useful add-on tools that extend Elements' capabilities (see Chapter 19).
Elements has a couple of really wonderful features to help you avoid making permanent mistakes: the Undo command and the Undo History panel. After you've gotten used to them, you'll probably wish it were possible to use these tools in all aspects of your life, not just Elements.
No matter where you are in Elements, you can almost always change your mind about what you just did. Press Ctrl+Z, and the last change you made goes away. Pressing Ctrl+Z works even if you've just saved your photo, but only while it's still open—if you close the file, your changes are permanent. Keep pressing Ctrl+Z and you keep undoing your work, step by step.
If you want to redo what you just undid, press Ctrl+Y. These keyboard shortcuts are great for toggling changes on and off while you decide whether you really want to keep them. The Undo/Redo keystroke combinations work in the Organizer and the Editor.
In the Full Edit window, you get even more control over the actions you can undo, thanks to the Undo History panel (Figure 1-16), which you open by choosing Window → Undo History.
Figure 1-16. For a little time travel, just slide the pointer (on the left, just above the cursor here) up and watch your changes disappear. You can go back only sequentially. Here, for instance, you can't go back to the Crop tool without first undoing what you did with the Paint Bucket and the Eraser. Slide the pointer down to redo your work. You can also hop to a given spot in the list by clicking the place where you want to go instead of using the slider.
This panel holds a list of the changes you've made since you opened your image. Just push the slider up and watch your changes disappear one by one as you go. Like the Undo command, Undo History even works if you've saved your file: As long as you haven't closed the file, the panel tracks every action you take. You can also slide the other way to redo changes that you've undone.
Be careful, though: You can back up only as many steps as Elements is set to remember. The program is initially set up to record 50 steps, but you can change that number by going to Edit → Preferences → Performance → History & Cache and adjusting the History States setting. You can set it as high as 1,000, but remembering even 100 steps may slow your system to a crawl if you don't have a superpowered processor, plenty of memory, and loads of disk space. If Elements runs slowly on your machine, then reducing the number of history states it remembers (try 20) may speed things up a bit.
As you're beginning to see, Elements lets you work in lots of different ways. What's more, most people who use Elements approach projects in different ways. What works for your neighbor with her pictures may be quite different from how you'd work on the very same shots.
But you'll hear one suggestion from almost every Elements veteran, and it's an important one: Never, ever work on your original. Always, always, always make a copy of your image and work on that instead.
The good news is that if you store your photos in the Organizer, you don't need to worry about accidentally trashing your original. If you save your files as version sets (Saving Your Work), Elements automatically creates a copy when you edit a photo that's cataloged in the Organizer, so that you can always revert to your original.
If you're determined not to use the Organizer or version sets, then follow these steps to make a copy of your image in the Editor:
Go to File → Duplicate.
The Duplicate Image dialog box appears.
Name the duplicate and then click OK in the dialog box.
Elements opens the new, duplicate image in the main image window.
Find the original image and click its Close button (the X).
If you have floating windows, the Close button is the standard Windows Close button you'd see at the upper right of any window. If you have tabs, the close X is on the right side of the image's tab. Now the original is safely tucked out of harm's way.
Save the duplicate by pressing Ctrl+S.
Choose Photoshop (.psd) as the file format when you save it. (You may want to choose another format after you've read Chapter 3 and understand more about your different format options.)
Now you don't have to worry about making a mistake or changing your mind, because you can always start over.
Note
Elements doesn't have an autosave feature, so you should get into the habit of saving frequently as you work. Saving Your Work has more about saving.
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