Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

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Photoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your digital images. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove demonic red-eye stares, or distort the facial features of people who have been mean to you. The downside is that finding your way around the program became harder in Elements 3 than it was in the first two versions of Elements. Luckily, Elements 4 has smoothed things out a little bit.

This chapter helps get you oriented in Elements. You'll learn about what to expect when you start up the program and how to use Elements to fix your photos with just a couple of keystrokes.

Along the way, you'll find out about some of Elements' basic controls and how to get hold of the program's Help files if you need them. Elements is absolutely crammed with help at every turn. Adobe did their best to make it as easy for you as possible.

On the Elements installation disc, Adobe gives you a 15-minute video introduction to Ele ments 4. Put the disc in your computer, choose a language, accept the software agreement, and click "Get a Quick Overview" to take a tour of what Elements can do.

When you launch Elements for the first time, you get a veritable smorgasbord of options, all neatly laid out for you in the Welcome screen (shown in Figure 1-1).

Interestingly, the Welcome screen isn't actually Elements. It's a launching pad that, depending on the button you click, will start up one of two different programs:

This book covers Photoshop Elements 4. If you're not sure which version of Elements you have, the easiest way to find out is to look at the program's icon (the file you click to launch Elements).

You can use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements, because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. As a matter of fact, the Editor portion of Elements 4 didn't change all that much from Elements 3, except for the arrival of some cool new tools like the Straighten Tool (Section 3.3) and the Magic Extractor (Section 5.5.5). However, if you have one of the first two versions of Elements, there are some pretty substantial differences between those programs and Elements 3 and 4.

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When you launch Elements for the first time, you get a veritable smorgasbord of options, all neatly laid out for you in the Welcome screen (shown in Figure 1-1).

Interestingly, the Welcome screen isn't actually Elements. It's a launching pad that, depending on the button you click, will start up one of two different programs:

This book covers Photoshop Elements 4. If you're not sure which version of Elements you have, the easiest way to find out is to look at the program's icon (the file you click to launch Elements).

You can use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements, because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. As a matter of fact, the Editor portion of Elements 4 didn't change all that much from Elements 3, except for the arrival of some cool new tools like the Straighten Tool (Section 3.3) and the Magic Extractor (Section 5.5.5). However, if you have one of the first two versions of Elements, there are some pretty substantial differences between those programs and Elements 3 and 4.

Figure 1-1: The Elements Welcome screen gives you six main activities to choose from (there's also a Tutorials link in the upper-right corner). Hold your cursor over any of these options for more details about each choice. You can't bypass the Welcome screen just by clicking the Close button. If you do, the screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, you've got options: the box on Section 1.2.1 tells you how to permanently get rid of the Welcome screen.

Organizer, which lets you store and organize your image files.
Editor, which lets you edit your images.

It's quite easy to get back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you might call the two different faces of Elements—and you probably won't do much in one without eventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they still function as two separate programs. In any case, the Welcome screen offers you no less than six choices for how to get into Elements:

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The Organizer is where your photos come into Elements and go out again. It stores and catalogs your photos, and you automatically come back to it for any activities that involve sharing your photos, like printing a photo package or making a slideshow. The Organizer has three main sections, as shown in Figure 1-2:

Photo Browser lets you view your photos, sort them into collections, and assign keyword tags to them.

If you get to feeling like you've been welcomed enough, you can turn off the Welcome screen. Then you don't have to click through it every time you start the program.

In the Welcome screen's lower-left corner, you can choose where you want Elements to start when you launch the program: Editor, Organizer, or Welcome screen. Pick the one you want, and from now on, that's what opens first in Elements.

To get the Welcome screen back, from either the Editor or the Organizer, choose Window → Welcome.
Date View is a fun feature that lets you see your photo imports organized by the date you brought them into the Organizer. It's even laid out like a calendar.
Create is where you come after you've finished editing your photos and are ready to use them in slideshows, album pages, greeting cards, and other projects.

The Organizer has lots of really cool features, and in the body of this book you'll meet them when they're relevant to the image-editing task at hand. The next chapter shows you how to use the Organizer to import and organize your photos, and Appendix A covers all the Organizer's different menu options.

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In addition to the Organizer, the other main section of Elements is what Adobe calls the Editor (Figure 1-4). This is the fun part of Elements, 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, if you like.

Figure 1-3: The Adobe Photo Downloader is yet another program that you get when you install Elements. Its role in life is to pull your photos from your camera (or other storage device) into the Organizer. The Downloader runs even if Elements isn't currently open (although, as you'll learn on Section 2.2, you can disable the Downloader if you don't like it). After the Downloader does its thing, you end up in the Organizer.

You can operate the Editor in either of two different modes:

Quick Fix. For many beginners, the Quick Fix will end up as your main workspace. Adobe has gathered together the basic tools you need to improve most photos, and it's the one place in Elements where you can have a before-and-after view while you work. Chapter 4 discusses using the Quick Fix in detail.
Standard Edit. The Standard Edit window gives you access to Elements' most sophisticated tools. There are far more ways to work on your photo in Standard Edit than in the 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 Standard Edit window.

The rest of this chapter covers some of the basic concepts and key tools you'll come across in the Editor.

If you leave a photo open in the Editor, 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.

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If you're the impatient type and you're starting to squirm because you want to be up and doing something to your photos, here's the quickest way to get started in Elements. You can adjust the brightness and color balance all in one step.

While you're in the Editor, open a photo.

Press Ctrl+O and navigate to the image you want, and then click Open.
Press Alt+Ctrl+M.

You've just applied Elements Auto Smart Fix tool.

Voilà! You should see quite a difference in your photo, unless the exposure, lighting, and contrast were almost perfect before. The Auto Smart Fix tool is one of the many easy-to-use features in Elements. (Of course, you may not like what just happened to your photo, but that's why you bought this book.)

If you're the really impatient type, you can jump right to Chapter 4 to learn about using the Quick Fix commands. But it's worth taking the time to read the next two chapters so you understand which file formats to choose and how to make some basic adjustments to your images, like rotating and cropping them.

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Now that you've had a look around Elements, it's time to start learning how to get photos into the program, and also how to keep track of where these photos are stored. As a digital photographer, you may no longer be facing shoeboxes stuffed with prints, but you've still got to face the menace of photos piling up on your hard drive. Fortunately, Elements gives you some great tools for organizing your collection and quickly finding individual pictures.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to import your photos from cameras, digital card readers, and scanners. You'll also find out how to import individual frames from videos, how to open files that are already on your computer, and how to create a new file from scratch. After that, you'll learn how to use the Organizer to sort and find your pictures once they're in Elements.

Elements gives you lots of different ways to get photos into your computer, but the simplest tool is the Adobe Photo Downloader. If you don't like the Downloader, later in this section you'll learn about other ways to import your photos.

Take a moment to carefully read the instructions from your camera manufacturer. These directions should always take precedence over anything you read here that suggests doing something differently.

You may have already made the acquaintance of the Photo Downloader, since it automatically appears whenever you connect a camera or card reader—even if Elements isn't running.

The Downloader window is divided into two main parts (see Figure 2-1). On the left side are the thumbnails of your photos. The little checkmarks next to each image indicate which photos will be imported; just turn off the checkboxes for the ones you don't want to bring into the Organizer. If you've already imported some of the images, the Organizer tells you so and doesn't import them again. You can also import video and sound files. The three buttons above the preview area let you choose which kind of files to see.

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Elements gives you lots of different ways to get photos into your computer, but the simplest tool is the Adobe Photo Downloader. If you don't like the Downloader, later in this section you'll learn about other ways to import your photos.

Take a moment to carefully read the instructions from your camera manufacturer. These directions should always take precedence over anything you read here that suggests doing something differently.

You may have already made the acquaintance of the Photo Downloader, since it automatically appears whenever you connect a camera or card reader—even if Elements isn't running.

The Downloader window is divided into two main parts (see Figure 2-1). On the left side are the thumbnails of your photos. The little checkmarks next to each image indicate which photos will be imported; just turn off the checkboxes for the ones you don't want to bring into the Organizer. If you've already imported some of the images, the Organizer tells you so and doesn't import them again. You can also import video and sound files. The three buttons above the preview area let you choose which kind of files to see.

Figure 2-1: The Photo Downloader is the easiest way to get your photos into the Organizer. If you want to control how many photos appear in the Downloader's main window, use the image size slider (where the cursor is in the illustration) to adjust the size of the thumbnail photos. (You'll see a similar slider in all the main Organizer windows, too.) Move the slider all the way to the left for the smallest possible thumbnails. As you move it to the right, the thumbnails get progressively larger so that you see fewer and fewer at once. You can also enlarge a thumbnail to maximum size by double-clicking it.

The Organizer only keeps a record of where your photos are; it doesn't actually make copies for its own use. So if you use a program like Windows Explorer to delete a photo from your hard drive, you'll have deleted it permanently.

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If you've got photos already stored on your computer, you have several options for opening them with Elements. If the file format is set to open in Elements, just double-click the file's icon to launch Elements and open the image. (If you want to change which files automatically open in Elements, see the box on Section 2.2.1.) You've also got a few ways to open files from within Elements:

From the Organizer, for files not yet in the Organizer. Go to File → Get Photos → From Files and Folders, or press Ctrl+Shift+G, and then select your file. The other options in the Get Photos menu (like opening files stored on a mobile phone) are covered on Section A.1.

You can also select an image that's stored in the Organizer and open it directly in the Editor. To do so, in the Organizer, click the file's thumbnail, and then press Ctrl+I, or go to Edit → Go to Standard Edit. If you'd rather go to the Quick Fix (see Section 4.1), choose Edit → Go to Quick Fix instead.
From the Editor. Go to File → Open or press Ctrl+O and select your file.

If you've used earlier versions of Elements, you may be wondering where to find the Editor's File Browser. The File Browser has been retired—it's not in the current version of Photoshop (CS2) either. (It's been replaced by the Adobe Bridge application there.) In Elements 4, the Organizer has taken over all browsing and searching tasks.

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Elements comes bundled with many scanners because it's the perfect software for making your scans look their best. There are two main ways of getting scans into Elements. Some scanners come with a driver plug-in, a small utility program that lets you scan directly into Elements. Look on your scanner's installation software for information about Elements compatibility or check the manufacturer's Web site for a Photoshop plug-in to download. (If you can scan into Photoshop, you should be able to scan into Elements.) You may also be able to scan into Elements if your scanner uses the TWAIN interface, which is an industry standard used by many scanner manufacturers.

If you don't have any of these programs, you'll need to use the scanning program that came with your scanner. Then, once you've saved your scanned image in a format that Elements understands, like TIFF (.tiff, .tif) or Photoshop (.psd), open the file in Elements like any other photo.

To control your scanner from within Elements, you can choose to scan from either the Editor or the Organizer. In the Editor, go to File → Import and you'll find your scanner's name on the list that appears. In the Organizer, go to File → Get Photos → From Scanner, or press Ctrl+U. You should check out your available options for both locations, since they're probably different. For instance, you may find that you have different file formats available to you in the Editor than you do in the Organizer.

If you do a lot of scanning, check out the "Divide Scanned Photos" command (Section 3.1) for helpful tips on how to quickly scan in lots of photos at the same time.

Also, you can save yourself a lot of drudgery in Elements if you make sure your scanner glass and the prints you're scanning are both as dust-free as possible before you start.

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Elements lets you capture a single frame from a video and use it the way you would any still photo. This feature works best if you choose a movie that's already on your computer (versus one that's streaming to your PC from across the Web).

Elements can read many popular video file formats, including .avi, .wmv, and .mpeg. You do need to have a program on your computer (besides Elements) that's capable of viewing the video file. For example, to view a QuickTime movie, you need to have QuickTime installed on your PC.

The video capture tool in Elements isn't really designed for use with long movies. You'll get the best results with clips that aren't more than a minute or two long, at most.

To import a video frame, in the Editor, go to File → Import → Frame From Video, and then in the Video import dialog box:

Find the video that contains the frame you want to copy.

Click the Browse button and navigate to the movie you want. After you choose the movie, the first frame should appear in the window in the Frame From Video dialog box.
Navigate to the frame you want.

Either click the Play button or use the slider below the window to move through the movie until you see what you want.
Copy the frame you want by clicking Grab Frame.

You can grab as many frames as you want. Each frame shows up in the Elements Editor as a separate file.
When you have everything you need, click Done.

While grabbing video frames is a very fun thing to be able to do, it does have certain limitations. Most important, your video is going to appear at a fairly low resolution, so don't expect to get a great print from a video frame.

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You can also create a new blank Elements document. You want create a new blank Elements document when you're using Elements as a drawing program or sometimes when you're combining parts of other images together, for example.

To create a new file, go to the Editor, and choose File → New → Blank File (or press Ctrl+N) to bring up the New File dialog box. You have lots of choices to make each time you start a new file; they're all covered in the following sections.

You can't create a new blank file in the Organizer, but Elements gives you a quick shortcut from the Organizer to the Editor so you can open up a new, fresh file there. To open a new file, choose File → New → Blank File, and the Organizer creates a virgin file for you and automatically hops you over to the Editor. If you want to create a new file based on a photo that's in the Organizer, select the thumbnail, press Ctrl+C to copy it, and then choose File → New → Image from Clipboard in the Editor. Elements switches you to the Editor where you'll see your copied photo awaiting you, all ready to work on.

The first thing you need to decide, logically enough, is how big you want your document to be. You can choose inches, pixels, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, or columns as your unit of measurement. Just pick the one you want in the Width and Height pull-down menus and then enter a number. Or you can choose one of the many preset sizes shown in Figure 2-4.

Figure 2-4: The list of preset document sizes is divided into groups, each of which features popular file sizes and resolution settings for a variety of common uses. For example, the fifth group from the top (the one with the highlighted bar) includes traditional photo print sizes, and the group after that lists widely used choices for onscreen graphics. The default Photoshop Elements size is 5" x 7" at 72 pixels per inch, which works well if you're just playing around and trying things out.

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The Organizer is where you keep track of your photos and start most of your projects for sharing your photos. You can see thumbnails of all your photos in the Organizer, assign keywords (called tags) to make it easier to find the pictures you want, and search for your photos in lots of different ways.

There are three main windows in the Organizer. Create is where you make calendars, greeting cards, album pages, and other fun stuff. (The various Create projects are covered in Chapters 14, 15 through 16.) Date View is an alternate way to look at and search for your photos, as explained in Figure 2-7. The Photo Browser is the most versatile of the three and your main Organizer workspace—that's what the rest of this section is about.

Figure 2-6: The checkered background is Elements' way of indicating that an area is transparent. (It doesn't mean you've somehow selected a patterned background.) If you place this photo into another image, all you'll see is the shell itself, not the checkerboard or the rectangular outline of the photo. If you don't like the size and color of the grid, you can adjust them in Edit → Preferences → Transparency.

If you want to explore the Organizer in depth, check out Michael Slater's books, Organize Your Photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements (Adobe Press), and his Web site, www.photofanatic.com. Michael is the developer of the program that became Photoshop Album and then the Elements Organizer, and he's sure to have a new book out for Elements 4.

The Organizer stores the information about your photos in a special database called a catalog. You don't have to do anything special to create this container— Elements creates your catalog (named My Catalog) automatically the first time you import photos. It's possible to have more than one catalog, but most people don't, since you can't search more than one catalog at a time.

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In the last chapter, you learned how to get your photos into Elements. Now it's time to look at how to trim off unwanted areas, straighten out crooked photos, and save your files. You'll also learn how to change the overall size of your images and how to zoom in and out, to get a better look at things while you're editing.

From here until Chapter 14, you need to be in the Elements Editor. If you're still in the Organizer, press Ctrl+I to go to the Standard Edit window.

Almost everyone knows the frustration of carefully placing a photo on a scanner, only to find that your scan has come out crooked. Elements includes a wonderful command—Divide Scanned Photos—that solves this problem. Not only that, but you can scan several photos at once, and Elements straightens them out and chops them apart for you. Anyone who's slogged their way through digitizing generations of ancient snapshots will testify that this command is a very big deal indeed, almost worth the whole price of Elements.

Figure 3-1 shows how you can use Elements to help save time. Put as many photos on the scanner bed as you can fit; once you've gotten your scan into Elements, you can use Divide Scanned Photos to separate and straighten the individual images.

Start by scanning in a group of photos. The only limit on the number of photos is how many you can fit on your scanner. It doesn't matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use your scanner's own software. (See Section 2.3 for more about scanning images into Elements.)

Figure 3-1: Consumer-grade flatbed scanners are generally pretty slow, so it's a huge timesaver if you can scan four or even six photos at a time. (You can do something else while the scanner is working on your photo group.) Elements can automatically separate and straighten the individual photos from a group scan like this one

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Almost everyone knows the frustration of carefully placing a photo on a scanner, only to find that your scan has come out crooked. Elements includes a wonderful command—Divide Scanned Photos—that solves this problem. Not only that, but you can scan several photos at once, and Elements straightens them out and chops them apart for you. Anyone who's slogged their way through digitizing generations of ancient snapshots will testify that this command is a very big deal indeed, almost worth the whole price of Elements.

Figure 3-1 shows how you can use Elements to help save time. Put as many photos on the scanner bed as you can fit; once you've gotten your scan into Elements, you can use Divide Scanned Photos to separate and straighten the individual images.

Start by scanning in a group of photos. The only limit on the number of photos is how many you can fit on your scanner. It doesn't matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use your scanner's own software. (See Section 2.3 for more about scanning images into Elements.)

Figure 3-1: Consumer-grade flatbed scanners are generally pretty slow, so it's a huge timesaver if you can scan four or even six photos at a time. (You can do something else while the scanner is working on your photo group.) Elements can automatically separate and straighten the individual photos from a group scan like this one

Sometimes it pays to be crooked. Divide Scanned Photos does its best work if your photos are fairly crooked, so don't waste time trying to be precise when placing your pictures on the scanner.

It's a snap to use Divide Scanned Photos. Just follow these simple steps:

Open your scanned image file in the Editor.

It doesn't matter what file format you used to scan in your group of photos.

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Owners of print photographs aren't the only ones who sometimes need a little help straightening out their pictures. Digital photos sometimes need to be rotated. For example, not all cameras output photos so that Elements (or any other image-editing program, for that matter) knows the correct orientation for your picture. Some cameras send portrait-orientated photos out on their side, and it's up to you to straighten things out.

Fortunately, Elements has rotation commands just about everywhere you go in the program. If all you need to do is get Dad off his back and stand him upright again, here's a list of where you can perform a quick 90-degree rotation on any open photo:

Quick Fix (Section 4.1). Click either of the Rotation buttons at the bottom of the preview area.
Standard Edit. Select Image → Rotate → 90° Left (or Right).
RAW Converter (Section 8.1.4.1). Click the left or right arrow at the bottom of the Preview window.
Organizer (Section 2.6). You can rotate a photo almost any time in the Organizer by pressing Ctrl+ the left or right arrow key. Another way to rotate is to go to Edit → Rotate 90° Left (or Right). Finally, there's a pair of Rotate buttons to click at the bottom of the Photo Browser window.

Those commands all get you one-click, 90-degree changes. But Elements has all sorts of other rotational tricks up its sleeve, as explained in the next section.

Elements gives you several ways to change the orientation of your photo. To see what's available, in the Editor, go to Image → Rotate. You'll notice two groups of Rotate commands in this menu. For now, it's the top group you want to focus on. (The second group does the same things, only those commands work on layers, which are explained in Chapter 6.)

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What about all those photos you've taken where the content isn't quite straight? You can flip those pictures around forever, but if your camera was off-kilter when you snapped the shot, your subjects will lean like a certain tower in Pisa. Elements has planned for this problem, too. Elements 4 includes a nifty new Straighten tool that makes adjusting the horizon as easy as drawing a line.

About 95 percent of the time, the Straighten tool will do the trick. But for the few cases where you can't get things looking perfect, you can still use the old school Elements method—the Free Rotate command, which is described on Section 3.3.2.

Ever since Elements 1, people have been asking Adobe for an easier way to straighten up the content of their photos. In Elements 4, Adobe comes through in a big way with its new Straighten tool. If you can draw a line, you can straighten a photo with this tool.

The Straighten tool lives just below the Cookie Cutter tool in the Standard Editor's toolbox. To straighten your photo:

Open a crooked photo, and then activate the Straighten tool.

Its icon is two little photos, one crooked and one not. To activate the Straighten tool, click the icon or press P.
Make any changes to the Options bar settings for the Straighten tool before you use the tool.

Your choices are described below.
Tell Elements where the horizon is.

Drag a line in your photo to show Elements where horizontal should be. Figure 3-4 shows how. Your line's at an angle when you draw it. That's fine, because Elements is going to level out your photo, making your line the true horizontal plane in the image.

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Whether or not you straightened your digital photo, sooner or later you'll probably need to crop it—trim it to a certain size. There are two main reasons for cropping your photos. If you want to print on standard sizes of photo paper, you usually need to trim off part of your image so it fits onto the paper. The other important reason for cropping your photo is to enhance it. You can crop away distracting objects in the background or other people you don't want in the picture, for instance.

A few cameras produce photos that are proportioned exactly right for printing to a standard size like 4" x 6". But most cameras give you photos that aren't the same proportions as any of the standard paper sizes like 4" x 6" or 8" x 10". (The width-to-height ratio is also known as the aspect ratio.)

The extra area most cameras provide gives you room to crop wherever you like. You can also crop out different areas for different size prints (assuming you save your original photo). Figure 3-7 shows an example of a photo that had to be cropped to fit on a 4" x 6" piece of paper. If you'd like to experiment with cropping or changing resolution (explained on Section 3.6.2), download the image in the figure (waterfall.jpg) from the "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Figure 3-6: To straighten the contents of your photo, or even to spin it around in a circle, grab these little arrows (circled here in red) and start turning. Just reach for the corner and adjust your photo the way you'd straighten a crooked picture on your wall. The arrows appear when you move your mouse near a corner of the photo.

Figure 3-7: When you print onto standard sized paper, you may have to choose the part of your digital photo you want to keep.
Left: The photo as it came from the camera.

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Sometimes, rather than changing the size of your photo, all you want to do is change its appearance in Elements so you can get a better look at it. For example, you may want to zoom in on a particular area, or zoom out, so you can see how edits you've made have affected your photo's overall composition.

This section is about how to adjust the view of your image inside Elements. Nothing you do with the tools and commands in this section changes anything about your actual photo. You're just changing the way you see it. Elements gives you lots of tools and keystroke combinations to help with these new views; soon you'll probably find yourself making these changes without even thinking about them.

Before you start resizing your view of your photos, Elements gives you several different ways to position your image windows. When you first use Elements, if you have more than one photo open at a time, your photos tile themselves so that you can see them all simultaneously. If you have two photos open, for instance, each photo window spreads itself out to take half the available space on your desktop. You're not stuck with this layout, though.

When you go to Window → Images, you get several choices for how your image windows should display:

Maximize. Each photo window takes up the entire Elements desktop. You can also click the large square at the right of the Editor shortcuts bar to switch to this view.
Cascade. Your image windows appear in overlapping stacks. Most people find Cascade the most practical view when you want to compare or work with two images.
Tile. Your image windows appear edge to edge so that they fill the available desktop space. With two photos open, each gets half the window; with four photos, each gets one quarter of it, and so on. If you click the four squares in the Shortcuts bar, you get this view.

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The previous section explained how to resize the view of your image as it appeared on your monitor. Sometimes you need to change the size of your actual image, and that's what this section is about.

Resizing your photo brings you up against a pretty tough concept in digital imaging: resolution, which measures, in pixels, the amount of detail your image can show. Where it gets confusing is that resolution for printing and for onscreen use (like email and the Web) are quite different.

For example, you need many more pixels to create a good-looking print than you do for a photo that's going to be viewed only onscreen. A photo that's going to print well almost always has too many pixels in it for onscreen display, and as a result, its file size is usually pretty hefty for emailing. So you often need two different copies of your photo for the two different uses. If you want to know more about resolution, a good place to start is www.scantips.com.

This section gives you a brief introduction to both screen and print resolution, especially in terms of what decisions you'll need to make when using the Resize Image dialog box. You'll also learn how to add more canvas (more blank space) around your photos. You'd add canvas to make room for captions below your image, for instance.

To get started, open a photo you want to resize and go to Image → Resize → Image Size. This action brings up the Image Size dialog box, shown in Figure 3-16.

Figure 3-16: The Pixel Dimensions section of the Image Size dialog box contains the settings you'll need when preparing a photo for onscreen viewing. The number immediately to the right of Pixel Dimensions (14.1 M) indicates the current size of your file in megabytes. The Document Size section has the settings you'll use when you want to prepare photos for printing.

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After all your editing and resizing effort, you want to be sure that you don't lose any of those files you struggled so hard to create. Saving your work is easy in Elements. When you're ready to save your file, press Ctrl+Shift+S to bring up the Save As dialog box, shown in Figure 3-22.

The top part of the Save As window is pretty much the same as it is for any program—you choose where you want to save your file, what you want to name it, and the file format you want. (More about file formats in a moment.) You also get some important choices that are unique to Elements:

Include in Organizer. This checkbox always appears turned on. Leave it on and your photo gets saved in the Organizer. Turn it off if you don't want the new file to go to the Organizer.

Figure 3-21: The Canvas Size dialog box isn't as complicated as it looks. The strange little Anchor grid with arrows pointing everywhere lets you decide exactly where to add new canvas to your image. The white Anchor box represents your photo's current position, and the arrows surrounding it show where Elements will add the new canvas. By clicking in any of the surrounding boxes, you tell Elements where to position your photo on the newly sized canvas. In the top pair of images, the new canvas has been added equally around all sides of the existing image. In the bottom pair, the new canvas has been added below and to the right of the existing image.
Save in Version Set with Original. This option tells the Organizer to save your image (including any edits you've made) as a new version, separate from your original. Your photo gets the name of the original plus an ending to indicate it's an edited version.

You can create as many versions as you want. Then you can go directly to any state that you've saved your image in. It's a very handy feature. When you choose to start a version set, from now on, you'll get the Save As dialog box every time you save (instead of being able to just save your changes). Elements does that to give you the chance to create a new version each time.

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With computers, you just never know what's going to happen, so "Be prepared" is a good motto. If your computer crashes, it won't be nearly so painful if all your photos are safely backed up someplace else.

Elements makes it very easy to save your files to any add-on storage device like a Zip drive or an external hard-drive. Of course, you can just do a Save As and choose your storage device as the destination, but it's also easy to back up to CDs (and DVDs, if you have a DVD burner).

Windows XP also has a CD-burning utility built right into the system. The box on Section 3.8.2 explains how to use it. But when it comes to easy backups, you're in for a treat with the Elements Organizer. You can burn CDs or DVDs right from the Organizer, and it gives you many different options for backing up your photos and catalogs (Section 2.6). All these options are covered in the next section.

The Organizer offers you a simply swell way to back up your photos. It's one of the best parts of the Organizer, and it's certainly very thorough, even going so far as to remind you to label the CD you create (Figure 3-24).

Figure 3-24: The Organizer walks you through every step of backing up your photos. It doesn't forget a thing, even reminding you to write the disc's name on it when you're done. Your basic procedure is the same, no matter how many Organizer photos you want to back up.

In the Organizer, select the files you want to back up.

Ctrl+click the thumbnails to select only the ones you want, if you aren't planning to back up your entire catalog. You can also press Ctrl+A to select all your photos and then Ctrl+click to deselect the ones you don't want.

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With Elements, you can dramatically improve the appearance of a photo with just a click or two—even if you have no idea of what you're doing. The Quick Fix window gathers together easy-to-use tools that can help you 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 know how to click a button or slide a pointer with your mouse, and then decide whether you like the look of what you just did.

If, on the other hand, you do know what you're doing, you may still find yourself adjusting things like shadows and highlights in the Quick Fix window because it's the only place in Elements that gives you a before-and-after view as you work.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to use all of Elements' Quick Fix tools. You'll also learn about what order to apply the fixes so you get the most out of these tools. Adobe is very focused on making Elements as easy to use as possible, so in Elements 4, they've given you two new tools for making quick fixes: the Magic Selection brush and the Adjust Color for Skin Tone command. The Magic Selection brush makes it easy to use the Quick Fix commands on only part of your photograph instead of altering the whole image. Adjust Color for Skin Tone fixes the colors in your photo based on the skin tones of someone in the picture. This chapter explains how to use these new tools, too.

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. Section 4.2.2 tells you everything you need to know.

Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. If you're in the Editor, go to the Shortcuts bar and click the Quick Fix button. If you're in the Organizer, on the Shortcuts bar, click the Edit button's drop-down triangle, and choose "Go to Quick Fix." The Quick Fix window looks like a stripped-down version of the Standard Editor (see Figure 4-1).

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Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. If you're in the Editor, go to the Shortcuts bar and click the Quick Fix button. If you're in the Organizer, on the Shortcuts bar, click the Edit button's drop-down triangle, and choose "Go to Quick Fix." The Quick Fix window looks like a stripped-down version of the Standard Editor (see Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1: The Quick Fix window. If you have several photos open when you come into the Quick Fix window, you can use the Photo Bin (Section 1.3.2) to choose the one you want to edit. Just click a thumbnail at the bottom of your screen, and that photo becomes the active image, the one you see in the Quick Fix preview area in the center of your screen.

Your tools are neatly arranged on both sides of your image: on the left side, there's a five-item Toolbox, and 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 what tools Quick Fix provides you with. Then, later in the chapter, you'll learn how to actually use them.

The Toolbox holds an easy-to-navigate subset of the larger tool collection you'll find in the Standard Edit window. 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 Section 3.5.2 for more on how the Zoom tool works.) You can also zoom by using the Zoom pull-down menu below 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 (Section 3.5.3).

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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 Standard Editor or the Organizer.

If you want to rotate your photo, you can do so here by clicking the appropriate Rotate button, below the image preview area. (See Section 3.2 for more about rotating photos.)

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 Ctrl+Z.

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 something out of an Anne Rice novel. Red eye is even more of a problem with digital cameras than with film because the small size of many digital camera puts the flash so close to the lens. 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.

Elements 4 gives you a new, totally automatic Red Eye fix right in the Organizer, as explained on section 2.1.1. If you turned off the Organizer's Auto Red Eye feature, you can still fix red eye without launching the Editor. Just click once on your photo to select it, and then do one of the following:

Press Ctrl+R.
Right-click the thumbnail and choose Auto Red Eye Fix from the pop-up menu.
Go to Edit → Auto Red Eye Fix.

You don't need to do anything else. Elements automatically analyzes your photo to find red eyes, and fixes them without any additional input from you. This method is wonderful when it works, but it's really asking a lot of the program to make such a big guess without any hints from you, so the results can sometimes be pretty random.

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