Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: 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 aimed at beginners. The program also has 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 takes Raw files—a format some cameras use to give you maximum editing control—and lets you convert and edit them in Elements. In this chapter, you’ll learn lots more about Raw and why you may (or may not) want to use it. Don’t skip to the next chapter if your camera shoots only JPEGs, though: You can use the Raw Converter to edit JPEGs and TIFFs, too, which can come in 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.

You’ll also get to know the Photo Filter command, which helps adjust image colors by replicating the old-school effect of placing filters over a camera’s lens. And Elements includes some useful batch-processing tools, including features that help you rename files, perform format conversions, and even apply basic retouching to multiple photos.

The big news for digital photographers is the new Exposure Merge feature, which lets you combine different versions of your photo to create a single image with a higher dynamic ...