Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 1. Finding Your Way Around Elements

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 finding your way around the program has gotten a lot more complicated than it used to be, especially if you're using the Windows version.

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—a great new feature in this version.

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. Elements is absolutely crammed with help at every turn. Adobe did their best to make it as easy for you as possible.

UP TO SPEEDWhich Version of Elements Do You Have?

This book covers Photoshop Elements 3. 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 on to launch Elements).

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 there are some pretty substantial differences between Elements 3 and the earlier versions, much more so than between Elements 1 and Elements 2.

The Welcome Screen

When you launch Elements for the first time, you get a veritable smorgasbord of options, all neatly laid out for you in the Welcome screen (the Windows version is shown in Figure 1-1 and the Mac version in Figure 1-2).

Figure 1-1. The Windows Welcome screen gives you six main activities to choose from (there's also a Tutorials link in the upper-right corner). Hold your cursor over any of these options for more details about each choice. You can't bypass the Windows Welcome screen just by clicking the Close button. If you do, the screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, you've got options: the box on page 6 tells you how to permanently get rid of the Welcome screen.

Windows Version

Interestingly, the Windows Welcome screen is not actually Elements. It's a launching pad that, depending on the button you click, will start up one of two different programs:

• Organizer, which lets you store and organize your image files.

• Editor, which lets you edit your images.

  It's quite easy to get back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you might call the two different faces of Elements—and you probably won't do much in one without eventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they still function as two separate programs. In any case, the Welcome screen offers you no less than six choices for how to get into Elements:

• Product Overview offers a round-up of all the features inside Elements.

• View and Organize Photos takes you to the Organizer, where you can store and sort all your images.

• Quickly Fix Photos brings you to the wonderful new Quick Fix window (which is actually part of the Editor) where you can perform amazing color corrections with just a click.

• Edit and Enhance Photos takes you to the Editor, which is the digital darkroom/art studio where you can perform your most extensive edits.

• Make Photo Creation enables you to use your photos in a wide variety of projects like greeting cards and slideshows. You perform all these tasks in the Organizer.

• Start From Scratch provides you a new blank document in the Editor to noodle away on.

Tip

The boxed version of Elements for Windows includes a half-hour video introduction to the program, led by Photoshop guru Deke McClelland. It's a good overview of some of the main features of Elements. To see it, fire up the Elements CD, click past the legal stuff, and click Product Overview. Windows Media Player launches, and Deke speaks.

If you start in the Organizer, once you've located a photo to edit, you have to wait while the Editor loads. And if you have both the Editor and the Organizer running, quitting the Editor doesn't close the Organizer. You have to close both programs independently.

UP TO SPEEDWhere the Heck Did Elements Go?

If you know that you've installed Elements but you can't seem to figure out how to launch it, no problem.

In Windows: There should be a shortcut to Elements on your desktop once you've installed the program, or go to the Start menu and click the Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 icon. If you don't see Elements in the Start menu, click the arrow next to "All Programs," and you should find it in the pop-up menu.

On a Mac: Go to Applications → Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and double-click the Photoshop Elements icon to launch the program. Elements usually creates its own Dock icon on its first launch. If you don't want this icon in your Dock, just drag it off and watch it vanish in a puff of smoke.

Mac Version

If you have a Mac, on the other hand, life is far less complex, since you only have one program to deal with: Elements. You'll either use Elements' File Browser or iPhoto to organize your photos. Adobe's made the reasonable guess that Mac fans will prefer to use iPhoto for many of the tasks Organizer handles for Windows folks, like online print and book ordering, or any other organizing program you might already be using.

Elements on the Mac opens right into the Standard Edit window and presents the Welcome screen, as shown in Figure 1-2, which lets you choose to connect to your camera or scanner, browse for files, start a new file, or open a recent one.

Figure 1-2. If you're using a Mac, click the Tutorials button to go to Adobe's online tutorials for Elements. Also, after you've actually had some photos open in Elements, you'll see a list of recent items, like the ones shown here, on the Welcome screen. Just click any file to open it.

WHAT'S NEWGetting Rid of the Welcome Screen

If you get to feeling like you've been welcomed enough, you can turn off the Welcome screen in Elements on either platform. Then you don't have to click through it every time you start the program.

Windows: In the Welcome screen's lower-left corner you can choose where you want Elements to start when you launch the program: Editor, Organizer, or Welcome screen. Pick the one you want, and from now on, that's what opens first in Elements.

To get the Welcome screen back, from either the Editor or the Organizer, choose Window → Welcome.

Mac:Turn off "Show at start-up" at the bottom of the Welcome Screen window. If later on you decide you want the Welcome screen back, go to Window → Welcome to turn it on again.