Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Advanced Photo Retouching with Elements

You may be perfectly happy for a very long time using Elements only in Quick Fix mode (Chapter 11). And that’s fine, as long as you understand that you’ve hardly scratched the surface of what Elements can do for you. Sooner or later, though, you’re probably going to run across a photo where your best Quick Fix efforts just aren’t good enough. Or you may just be curious to see what else Elements has under its hood.

When you graduate from the Quick Fix to Elements’ Standard Edit window, you gain the power to fix everything from exposure problems to those inevitable little blemishes that you—not to mention your subjects—would love to zap away.

Even more important is how Elements can improve your photos’ color. Next to resolution and exposure, color is the most important concept in Elements. If you want to get the best possible results from Elements, you need to understand a little about how your camera, computer, and printer think about color. So you’ll also learn in this chapter about how Elements—and by extension, you—can manipulate your image’s color.

Note

One chapter can’t give all these topics the complete coverage they deserve. It takes a book to do that, and as a matter of fact, there is one: Photoshop Elements: The Missing Manual.

Fixing Exposure Problems

Exposure, as you learned in Part 1, refers to the amount of light the sensor in your digital camera receives when you click the shutter. A well-exposed photo shows the largest ...