Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Creating Special Effects

As you’ve seen in the past few chapters, editing and retouching photos often involves making subtle changes. The goal is to make your photos look better, yet still completely natural, which requires a light hand and a sense of moderation.

Get ready to rock and roll. When you use special effects, you can toss moderation out the window. With a little help from your computer, you can make your photos look like, well, a psychedelic rock and roll poster from the 1960s. You can transform a color photo to black and white or even give it the sepia tones of an antique print. You can make a bright midday image look like you shot it at sunset, or add a grainy texture that makes a digital photo look like you took it on actual film.

This chapter shows you how to create special effects in three programs: EasyShare, Picasa, and Photoshop Elements. EasyShare and Picasa offer some of the same effects, like converting color photos to black and white, but their effects lists aren’t identical (see Table 13-1 for a full comparison). EasyShare focuses on fun effects that completely alter a photo’s appearance with a single click—making a photo look like a drawing, for example. Picasa’s also easy to use, but it leans toward more realistic effects, and gives you more tools (like sliders) to help control the results.

While EasyShare offers 10 effects and Picasa 12, Elements gives you more than 90. (Well, for $100, it darn well should.) In Elements, you create effects by ...