Photoshop Elements 12: The Missing Manual

Introduction

When Photoshop Elements was first released back in 2001, it became a runaway success. It’s easy to see why: Elements gives people all the tools they need to get the very best from their photographs. It lets you take a ho-hum shot and give it some wow.

If you run a graphics studio or a large professional photography business, then you need the full version of Photoshop. But for most people who aren’t creating images for commercial printing, Elements offers a very useful toolkit at an appealing price. Even if you already have a photo-management program like Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, you’ll find that Elements offers tools for certain tasks that you can’t perform with those programs.

Since Adobe introduced their new Creative Cloud monthly subscription plan for Photoshop, a lot of people are looking for an alternative that doesn’t require paying every month forever. If you’re one of them, Elements may be a good fit for you, but you need to be aware that a lot of features and controls are pretty well hidden in Elements. It’s a capable, mid-level image-editing program, but you need to know where to find things, since Elements is laid out quite differently from Photoshop and some features have different names. (For instance, if you’ve used Photoshop, what you know as Smart Sharpening is called Adjust Sharpness in Elements.) Happily, you have this book to guide you.

Why Photoshop Elements?

Adobe Photoshop is the granddaddy of all image-editing programs. It’s the Big ...