Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: 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've been mean to you. The downside is that all those options can make it tough to find your way around Elements, especially when you're new to the program.

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, as well as how to use the new Guided Edit mode to help you get started editing your photos. 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.

To launch Elements for the first time, you need to go to your Applications folder and open the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 folder you find there. Double-click the Photoshop Elements icon to start the program (it's the blue circle icon with the silver camera on it). When you do so, the Elements icon appears in your Dock. (To keep Elements in your Dock when you quit the program, right-click [Control+click] the icon and choose "Keep in Dock".)

Elements will take a while to start up the first time you launch it, because it's building a database for the Content and Effects palettes. Don't be concerned if the program seems to hang—just give it a minute to finish. Once Elements creates the database, it'll launch much more quickly in the future.

This book covers the Mac version Photoshop Elements 6. 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). The icon for Elements 6 is quite distinctive—it's a silver camera in a blue circle. But if you're still not sure, just check in your Applications folder—Elements is listed there as "Adobe Photoshop Elements" followed by the version number.

You can use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. But getting around in Elements is a little different in Elements 6, so you'll see lots of references to screen features and tools you don't have. There are

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To launch Elements for the first time, you need to go to your Applications folder and open the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 folder you find there. Double-click the Photoshop Elements icon to start the program (it's the blue circle icon with the silver camera on it). When you do so, the Elements icon appears in your Dock. (To keep Elements in your Dock when you quit the program, right-click [Control+click] the icon and choose "Keep in Dock".)

Elements will take a while to start up the first time you launch it, because it's building a database for the Content and Effects palettes. Don't be concerned if the program seems to hang—just give it a minute to finish. Once Elements creates the database, it'll launch much more quickly in the future.

This book covers the Mac version Photoshop Elements 6. 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). The icon for Elements 6 is quite distinctive—it's a silver camera in a blue circle. But if you're still not sure, just check in your Applications folder—Elements is listed there as "Adobe Photoshop Elements" followed by the version number.

You can use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. But getting around in Elements is a little different in Elements 6, so you'll see lots of references to screen features and tools you don't have. There are Missing Manuals for Elements 3 and 4, too, and you may prefer to track down the right book for your version of Elements. If you have Elements 6 for Windows, there's a separate edition of this book for that version, which has very different tools for organizing and sharing photos, although editing them is pretty much the same on both platforms.

When you first launch Elements, you get a veritable smorgasbord of options, all neatly laid out for you in the Welcome Screen (). It offers you no less than four options for where to start:

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When you first start using Elements 6, you have a decision to make: How do you want to organize and search for your photos?

Of course, you can decide not to organize your photos, but it sure can make them hard to find. These days, everyone has lots of photos to deal with, whether you take them with your camera or cellphone or you're busy scanning in old prints. Most people want to organize photos so they can easily find particular photos when they need 'em.

With that in mind, Adobe gives you Bridge CS3, the image browser that comes with full Photoshop and the other Creative Suite programs. (You can see Bridge in .) In some ways, this is a big step up from the File Browser in early editions of Elements or the Organizer that comes with the Windows version, especially if you shoot RAW. ( has info about RAW formats.) You can use Bridge to search for, move, and assign keywords and ratings to your photos, and to get tons of detailed information about them.

Figure : Adobe Bridge makes it easy to find photos to work with in Elements. You can see all kinds of info about your photos in the Metadata panel in the lower right, and assign keywords to your images using the Keywords panel (hidden here).

But if you're like a lot of Mac folks, you already use some kind of photo organizer. iPhoto, which comes with all new Macs, is by far the most popular, but Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom also have big followings. If you use one of these programs, you probably don't want to use Bridge most of the time. For one thing, trying to get into your photo database (like the iPhoto library file, for example) from Bridge or any application other than the program that created it can make bad things happen. The iPhoto library file, in particular, is prone to corruption if you mess with it from outside iPhoto, and that can cause big problems.

The good news is that you can send your photos directly to Elements from within any of these organizer programs ( has the details). So for most tasks, it's best to avoid Bridge entirely.

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The main component of Elements is the Editor (), 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 : The main Elements editing window, which Adobe calls Full Edit. In some previous versions of Elements it was known as the Standard Editor, something you might want to remember in case you ever try any tutorials written for Elements 3 or 4.

You can operate the Editor in any of three different modes:

Quick Fix. For many beginners, Quick Fix () ends up as your main workspace. 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.) gives you all the details on using Quick Fix.
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.
Guided Edit. This is new in Elements 6, and it can be enormously helpful if you're a newcomer to Elements. Basically, it provides a step-by-step walk-through 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. Guided Edit is explained on .

Figure : The Quick Fix window (shown here) and Guided Edit are the only places in Elements where you can see a before-and-after view of your photo as you work. Use the navigation buttons at the top of the screen (circled) to navigate from Full Edit to the Quick Fix window (and to Guided Edit, if you like) and back again.

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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: Adjust the brightness and color balance all in one step.

Open a photo.

Press ⌘ +O and navigate to the image you want, and then click Open.
Press Option+⌘ +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, if you don't like what just happened to your photo, no problem—simply press ⌘ +Z to undo it.)

Figure : Auto Smart Fix is the easiest, quickest way to improve the quality of your photos.
Top left: The original, unedited picture.
Top right: Auto Smart Fix makes quite a difference, but the colors are still slightly off.
Bottom: By using some of the other tools you'll learn about in this book (like Auto Contrast and Adjust Sharpness), you can make things look even better.

If you're the really impatient type, you can jump right to 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.

Don't forget to give Guided Edit a try if you see what you want to do in the list of topics. Guided Edit can be a big help when you're first learning your way around.

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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 Fortunately. drive, 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, memory 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 Adobe Bridge to sort and find your pictures once they're on your Mac. Finally, you'll learn how to save the work you create in Elements and how to make backups.

In addition to the info about Bridge in this chapter, () contains a complete listing of all Bridge's menu items and what they mean.

You have four basic ways of getting photos from your camera or memory card reader onto your computer:

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

iPhoto. Your Mac comes set up to launch iPhoto whenever it detects incoming photos from a camera or card reader, and that's convenient—if you want to use iPhoto. But if you prefer another program for organizing your photos, or if you just like to be disorganized, you don't have to use iPhoto.
Apple's Image Capture program. OS X also has a built-in downloading program called Image Capture, which you can set to open any program you like (you can have it open Bridge, for instance, if you want to first sort through your photos there).

To choose the program that Image Capture launches, start up Image Capture when you don't have a camera or card reader connected (go to Applications → Image Capture). Then go to Image Capture → Preferences → Camera and use the pull-down menu to browse to the program you want to use. You don't have to use any application to download photos, though, as explained below in "Drag and drop."

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You have four basic ways of getting photos from your camera or memory card reader onto your computer:

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

iPhoto. Your Mac comes set up to launch iPhoto whenever it detects incoming photos from a camera or card reader, and that's convenient—if you want to use iPhoto. But if you prefer another program for organizing your photos, or if you just like to be disorganized, you don't have to use iPhoto.
Apple's Image Capture program. OS X also has a built-in downloading program called Image Capture, which you can set to open any program you like (you can have it open Bridge, for instance, if you want to first sort through your photos there).

To choose the program that Image Capture launches, start up Image Capture when you don't have a camera or card reader connected (go to Applications → Image Capture). Then go to Image Capture → Preferences → Camera and use the pull-down menu to browse to the program you want to use. You don't have to use any application to download photos, though, as explained below in "Drag and drop."

If you're downloading directly from a camera, always be sure your camera is set to the correct mode for transferring files before you connect it to the computer. It's not a bad idea to use a card reader: It's slightly safer than getting photos directly from your camera and, if your camera has a USB 1.0 port, a USB 2.0 or Firewire card reader will also be much faster. In addition, card readers hardly ever have trouble getting computers to recognize them, a problem people occasionally have with direct camera connections.
Adobe Photo Downloader. You got this program along with Elements, and it's set up to grab your photos and launch Bridge so you can sort through them. (The Downloader isn't really an independent program, though—you have to launch it from Elements or Bridge, at least the first time you use it.) But, as with Image Capture, you can set the Downloader not to open Bridge (turn off the checkbox in the Downloader window). However, for most people most of the time, the Downloader isn't very useful, and you can safely ignore it. The situations where the Downloader offers you an advantage are outlined on . If the Downloader interests you, you'll find detailed instructions on how to use it on this book's Missing CD page at

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Now that you've got your photos onto your Mac, you need to get them into Elements so you can work on them. This section explains the many ways to open files in Elements. One option is to use Bridge, Adobe's browsing program that you got with Elements, but you can do lots of things with Bridge besides open photos in Elements (see ) You'll also learn how to send photos to Elements from other programs, like Aperture or iPhoto.

If you have Leopard, you can also browse for files to open in Elements without using any special programs like Bridge or iPhoto, as explains.

Instead of the Organizer that comes with the Windows version of Elements, you get Adobe Bridge, you lucky Mac person. Bridge is the ultra-deluxe file browser that comes with Photoshop CS3. You can use Bridge to view and organize your picture files—and other kinds of files, if you want. (See the box on for the differences between the Elements and Photoshop versions of Bridge.) You can do a ton of different things with your photos in Bridge: browse, arrange, categorize, delete, search, apply keywords, view, edit, and apply metadata information (). But this section just explains the minimum you need to know to find your way around Bridge. The more advanced features are discussed later in this chapter, beginning on .

Figure : In Leopard (OS X 10.5), the Finder makes a handy photo browser. First, open a Finder window (click once on your desktop and then press ⌘+N) and click the button for Cover Flow view (circled). In the top of the Finder window, you can quickly scroll through thumbnails of the contents of any folder. To get a closer look at a photo, right-click (Control+click) its name in the list in the bottom half of the window, and then choose Quick Look. A larger view of your image appears, without actually opening the file. You can even get a full-screen view of it by clicking the arrows at the bottom of the preview window (where the cursor is here). Click the arrows again to close the full-screen view. To close the preview, click the X in the upper left of the window (or at the bottom of the window if you're in full-screen view).

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Elements comes bundled with many scanners because it's the perfect software for making your scans look their best. You have 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 an Elements plug-in for your scanner and the Adobe TWAIN driver doesn't work for you, 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, go to File → Import, and you'll see your scanner's name on the list that appears. If you have a Mac with an Intel processor and your scanner driver (the software that lets it talk to your computer) is old, you may see the message shown in when you start up Elements.

Figure : If you have an Intel Mac and an older scanner driver, this warning may appear when you launch Elements. It means that Elements found something that isn't designed to run on an Intel Mac. But don't worry—you can still scan. You just need to force Elements to run under Rosetta, the built-in OS X emulator for older Power PC systems.
It's less complicated than it sounds. Simply quit Elements (⌘+Q), and then go to the Applications folder and find the program (Applications → Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 → Adobe Photoshop Elements). Click once on the program's icon, then press ⌘+I to bring up the Get Info window. Turn on the checkbox next to "Open using Rosetta," and then relaunch Elements. Note that Elements probably won't be as zippy as it is when it's not running in Rosetta, so you most likely only want to do this when you need to scan. To return things to normal, head back to Elements' Get Info window and turn off the "Open using Rosetta" checkbox.

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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 only works for videos that are already on your computer (as opposed to streaming video from the Internet, for example).

Elements can open video files in most formats your Mac can open. But Elements can't open Windows Media files (.wmv files), or any video files that include DRM (digital rights management, which is code that restricts who can view the file).

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.

To import a video frame, 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 create a new blank Elements document. You may want to create a new blank document when you're using Elements as a drawing program or when you're combining parts of other images together, for example.

To create a new file, go to File → New → Blank File (or press ⌘+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.

The first thing you need to decide, logically enough, is how big you want your document to be. In Elements 6, there are two ways to do this:

Start with a Preset. Preset, the first menu item in the New File window, lets you choose the general kind of document you want to create. If you want to create a file for printing, pick from the second group in the menu. The third group contains choices for onscreen viewing. Once you make a selection in this menu, the next menu—Size—changes to show you suitable sizes for your choice. shows you how it works.
Enter the numbers yourself. Just ignore the Preset and Size menus and type in what you want. 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.

If you decide not to use one of the presets, you need to choose a resolution for your file. You'll learn a lot more about resolution in the next chapter (), but a good rough guide is to choose 72 pixels per inch (ppi) for files that you'll look at only on a monitor, and 300 ppi for files you plan to print.

Figure : Elements helps you pick an appropriate size when you use the Preset Menu. Choose a general category—here, Photo is the choice. The Size menu then changes to show you standard sizes for photo paper, each available in either landscape or portrait orientation. The size that Elements automatically selects is 6" x 4" at 300 pixels per inch, which works well if you're just playing around and trying things out.

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Earlier in this chapter, you learned the very basics of finding photos with Adobe Bridge. But you can do lots more with Bridge than just that: You can use Bridge to organize your photos; search for photos; assign keywords, labels, and ratings to them; and create and edit their metadata ().

Before you do anything in Bridge, there's one important thing you should understand: When you move or delete a file in Bridge, you're moving or deleting the original. Bridge doesn't keep copies of your images or need to have a perfect database of them all the time. It's a just browser for, well, browsing files, not an asset management program.

Figure : 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 seashell itself, not the checkerboard or the rectangular outline of the photo. When you don't like the size and color of the grid, you can adjust them in Edit → Preferences → Transparency.

One benefit of this is that Bridge doesn't care what you do to your photos when you're not in Bridge. Unlike iPhoto or the Organizer in the Windows version of Elements, which want you to use them for all photo moving, Bridge just shows you your files and folders as they are right now. If you move a file from the Finder, Bridge won't complain that it can't find that file anymore, the way other organizing programs do when you don't use them for every move you make with the photos you've catalogued with them.

Bridge is great for arranging your photo collection. In Bridge, you can:

Move a Photo or Folder. To move a photo, just drag it to where you want it. Use the Folders panel () to find the folder you want to put it in (just keep clicking the flippy triangles to expand your view down to the folder you want), and then drag the photo's thumbnail to the folder's icon. You can move folders by dragging, too.

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After all your editing, keywording, and resizing effort, you want to be sure you don't lose any of those files you've worked so hard on. Saving your work is just as easy in Elements as in any other programs. (Bridge automatically saves what you do there, like your keywords and ratings—there's no need to do anything special.) The Save As dialog box in Elements has a few settings you don't see in other programs, though. Press ⌘+S to bring it up.

In addition to the standard Save As settings you'd find in any program (format, location, and so on), Elements also gives you these saving options:

As a Copy. When you save an image as a copy, Elements makes the copy, names it "[OriginalFileName] copy," and puts the copy away. The original version remains open. If you want to work on the copy, you must open it. Sometimes Elements forces you to save as a copy—for instance, if you want to save a layered image and you turn off the layers option. (See for more about layers.)
Layers. If your image has layers, then turn on this checkbox to keep them. When you turn off this setting, Elements usually forces you to save as a copy. To avoid having to save as a copy, flatten your image () before saving it. Remember that once you close a flattened image, you can't get your layers back again—flattening is a permanent change.
Embed Color Profile. You can choose to keep a color profile in your image. explains color profiles.

Elements gives you loads of file format options. Your best choice depends on how you plan to use your image.

Photoshop (.psd, .pdd). It's a good idea to save your files as .psd files—the native file format for Elements or Photoshop—before you work on them. A .psd file can hold lots of information, and you don't lose any data by saving in this format. Also, it allows you to keep layers, which is very important, even if you haven't used them for much yet.

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Elements 6 makes it super easy to burn your photos to discs right from Elements. (Not that it's hard to burn a disc in the Finder, but maybe you're more likely to burn a backup CD if you don't have the extra step of leaving Elements first.) You can burn discs to back up your latest photographic magnum opus, or just to share with your friends. You can burn both photos and the projects you'll learn how to create later in this book.

To burn a disc:

Choose your files.

You can start from either Elements or Bridge. It's probably best to start from Bridge if you want to back up a lot of files, since you can select as many as you want without opening them. If you start from Elements, you'll back up all your open files—you can't choose which files to include. (If you want to burn images that are open in Elements, save your changes before you start.)
Tell Elements or Bridge you want to burn a CD/DVD.

In Elements, go to Share → CD/DVD. In Bridge, go to File → Burn CD (the menu says "CD," but if you have a drive that burns DVDs, too, you can burn either kind of disc). Wherever you start, Elements comes to the front for the actual burning.
Put a disc in your drive.

If there isn't already a blank disc in your drive, Elements asks for one. (If you have more than one disk-burning drive, like an external DVD burner, Elements shows you a list of all your available drives.) Put a disc in and make any changes to the burn settings, if you like (see ).

Figure : You generally don't need to adjust your burn settings, but if you want to make changes, click this button to expand the Burn Disc window, as shown here. You can change the burn speed, choose settings for erasing rewritable discs, and tell Elements what you want it do with the disc when it's done burning.
Click Burn

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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 and straighten out crooked photos. 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.

Anyone who's scanned old photos can testify about the hair-pulling frustration when your carefully placed pictures come out crooked onscreen. Whether you're feeding in your precious memories one at a time or scanning batches of photos to save time, Elements can help straighten things out.

If you've got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them as you can fit on your scanner. Thanks to Elements' wonderful Divide Scanned Photos command, you'll have individual images in no time.

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

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.

Figure : 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. Elements can automatically separate and straighten individual photos in a group thanks to the Divide Scanned Photos command.

When you're done scanning, follow these steps:

Open your scanned image file.

It doesn't matter what file format you use when saving your scanned group of photos: TIFF, JPEG, PDF, whatever. Elements can read 'em all.
Divide, straighten, and crop the individual photos

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Anyone who's scanned old photos can testify about the hair-pulling frustration when your carefully placed pictures come out crooked onscreen. Whether you're feeding in your precious memories one at a time or scanning batches of photos to save time, Elements can help straighten things out.

If you've got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them as you can fit on your scanner. Thanks to Elements' wonderful Divide Scanned Photos command, you'll have individual images in no time.

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

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.

Figure : 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. Elements can automatically separate and straighten individual photos in a group thanks to the Divide Scanned Photos command.

When you're done scanning, follow these steps:

Open your scanned image file.

It doesn't matter what file format you use when saving your scanned group of photos: TIFF, JPEG, PDF, whatever. Elements can read 'em all.
Divide, straighten, and crop the individual photos.

Go to Image → Divide Scanned Photos. Sit back and enjoy the view as Elements carefully calculates, splits, straightens out, and trims each image. You'll see the individual photos appear and disappear as Elements works through the group.
Name and save each separated image

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Owners of print photographs aren't the only ones who sometimes need a little help straightening their pictures. Digital photos sometimes need to be rotated, because some cameras don't include data in their image files that tells Elements (or any other image-editing program, for that matter) the correct orientation. Certain cameras, for example, send portrait-orientated photos out on their sides, and it's up to you to straighten things out.

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

Quick Fix (). Click either of the Rotation buttons at the bottom of the preview area.
Full Edit. Go to Image → Rotate → 90° Left (or Right).
Project bin. Right-click (Control+click) a thumbnail and choose Rotate 90° Left (or Right).
RAW Converter (). Click the left or right arrow at the top of the Preview 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, 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 .)

In the first group of commands, you'll see:

90° Left or Right. These commands produce the same rotation as the rotate buttons explained earlier. Use these commands for digital photos that come in on their sides.
180°. This turns your photo upside down and backward.
Custom

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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, by including a nifty 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, described on .

If you can never seem to hold a camera perfectly level, you'll love the Elements Straighten tool. It lives just below the Cookie Cutter tool in the Full Edit Toolbox. To straighten a crooked photo:

Open the photo, and then activate the Straighten tool.

Its icon is two little photos, one crooked and one not. Or, on the keyboard, just press P.
Make any changes to the Options bar settings for the Straighten tool before you use the tool.

Your choices are described in a moment.
Tell Elements where the horizon is.

Drag to draw a line in your photo to show Elements where horizontal should be. shows how. Your line appears 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.

Figure : Left: To correct the crooked horizon in this photo, just draw a line along the part that should be level. It's easiest to do this by choosing a clearly marked boundary like the horizon in this photo, but you can actually draw a line across anything you want to make level.
Right: Elements automatically rotates the photo to straighten its contents. In this case, you see the results of selecting "Crop to Remove Background" (in the Options bar), which trims off all the ragged edges for you.

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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. Most people crop their photos for one of two reasons: If you want to print on standard size photo paper, you usually need to cut away part of your image to make it fit on the paper. Then there's the "I don't want that in my picture" reason. Fortunately, Elements makes it easy to crop away distracting background objects or people you'd rather not see.

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). 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 ), download the image in the figure (waterfall.jpg) from the "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Figure : 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.
Right: The results of cropping the image to make it the correct shape for a 4" x 6" print.

It's best to perform your crops on a copy, since trimming is going to throw away the pixels outside the area you choose to keep. And you never know—you may want those pixels back someday.

You can use the Crop tool in either the Full Edit or Quick Fix window. The Crop tool includes a helpful list of preset sizes to make cropping easier. If you don't need to crop to an exact size, here's how to perform basic freehand cropping:

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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.

Figure : With the Elements Cookie Cutter tool, you don't have to be square anymore. The Cookie Cutter tool lets you crop your images to various shapes, from the kind of abstract border you see here, to heart- or star-shaped outlines. You can read more about how to use the Cookie Cutter tool in .

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 overlap each other so that you can see as much as possible of the front photo, with only the edges of the photos behind it visible. This is a very efficient way to work, but if you don't like it, you're not stuck with it.

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

Maximize Mode. Each photo window takes up the entire Elements desktop.

In Maximize mode, you can only have one photo visible at a time. Switch to Cascade or Tile if you want to work on two or more photos simultaneously.
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.

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The previous section explained how to resize the view of your image as it appears on your monitor. But 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, or when you want to combine two photos.

To get started, open a photo you want to resize and go to Image → Resize → Image Size ().

Figure : The Image Size dialog box gives you two different ways to change the size of your photo. Use the Pixel Dimensions section when preparing a photo for onscreen viewing. (The number immediately to the right of Pixel Dimensions—here, 11.1 M—indicates the current size of your file in megabytes [as in this example] or kilobytes.) Before you can make any changes here, you must turn on Resample Image in the bottom part of the dialog box, since changing pixel dimensions always involves resampling (see ). Use the Document Size section to prepare photos for printing.

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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.

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

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 : The Quick Fix window. If you have several photos open when you launch the Quick Fix window, you can use the Project bin () 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.

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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 : The Quick Fix window. If you have several photos open when you launch the Quick Fix window, you can use the Project bin () 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.

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.

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

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 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 you

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