Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Adding Effects with Elements

When it comes to effects, comparing EasyShare and Picasa to Photoshop Elements is like pitting mopeds against Maseratis. While EasyShare and Picasa each provide about a dozen effects, Elements has over 90 different filters—its name for the image-modifying tools that can change your picture’s appearance in all sorts of neat ways. You can tweak and tune each filter to create truly original effects. An individual filter may have a dozen different options, and then there are the effects that you can create by applying more than one filter.

If that sounds too complicated, relax. Using filters isn’t difficult. Although Elements gives you a lot of options, applying a filter is often as easy as double-clicking a button. And even though there are a huge number of filters, they’re grouped into categories to help you find one that does what you need. This section offers a quick tour through the filter categories as well as instructions on how to actually apply the filters. Once you learn to use a couple of filters, it isn’t hard to experiment with the others.

Note

If you end up really liking filters, hold onto your hat: Elements offers dozens of other filter-like tools, called Effects and Layer Styles. You’ll only learn about filters in this book, but if you’re interested in Effects and Layer Styles they both work pretty similarly to filters.

Applying Filters

You can choose to apply any filter from either the Filter menu or the Styles and Effects palette (Window ...