Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Editing Your Photos

The tools in the Quick Fix window are pretty simple to use. You can try one or all of them—it's up to you. And whenever you're happy with how your photo looks, you can leave Quick Fix and go back to the Standard Editor.

If you want to rotate your photo, you can do it here by clicking the appropriate Rotate button at the top of the Control Panel. (See page 49 for more about rotating photos.)

Note

If you click the Quick Fix Reset button, just above your image, you'll return your photo to the way it looked before you started working in Quick Fix. This button undoes all Quick Fix edits, so don't use it if you only want to undo a single action. For that, just use the regular undo command: Edit → Undo or Ctrl+Z (⌘-Z).

Fixing Red Eye

Everyone who's ever taken a flash photo has run into the dreaded problem of red eye—those glowing, demonic pupils that make your little cherub look like something out of an Anne Rice novel. Red eye is even more of a problem with digital cameras than with film, but luckily, Elements has a simple and terrific Red Eye tool for fixing it. All you need to do is click the red spots with the Red Eye tool, and your problems are solved.

To use the Red Eye tool (Figure 4-4):

1. Open a photo.

   The Red Eye tool works the same whether you get to it from the Quick Fix Toolbox or the main Toolbox in Edit mode.

2. Zoom in so you can see where you're clicking.

   Use the Zoom tool to magnify the eyes. You can also switch to the Hand tool if you need to drag the photo so that the eyes are front and center.

3. Activate the Red Eye tool.

   Click the Red Eye icon in the Toolbox or press Y.

4. Click in the red part of the pupil with the Red Eye tool (see Figure 4-4).

   That's it. Just one click should fix it. If a single click doesn't fix the problem, you can also try dragging over the pupil with the Red Eye tool. Sometimes one method works better than the other. You can also adjust two settings on the Red Eye tool: Darken Amount and Pupil Size, as explained later.

5. Click in the other eye.

   Repeat the process on the other eye, and then you're done.

If you need to adjust how the Red Eye tool works, the Options bar gives you two controls, although 99% of the time you can ignore them:

• Darken Amount.If the result is too light, increase the percentage in this box.

• Pupil Size.Increase or decrease the number here to tell Elements how much area to consider part of a pupil.

Figure 4-4. Zoom in when using the Red Eye tool so you get a good look at the pupils. The eye on the left side of the picture has already been fixed. Don't worry if your photo looks so magnified that it loses definition—just make the red area large enough for a bulls-eye (so to speak). Notice what a good job the Red Eye tool does of keeping the highlights (called catchlights) in the eye that's been treated.

POWER USERS' CLINICOther Red Eye Fixes

The Red Eye tool does a great job most of the time but it doesn't always work and it doesn't work on animals' eyes. There are a couple of other ways you can fix red eye that work in almost any situation. Here's one:

1. Zoom way, way in on the eye. You want to be able to see the individual pixels.

2. Use the Eyedropper tool (page 177) to sample the color from a good area of the eye, or from another photo. Confirm that you've got the color you want by checking the Foreground color picker.

3. Get out the Pencil tool (page 280) and set its size to 1 pixel.

4. Now click in the bad or empty pixels of the eye to replace the color with the correct shade. Remember to leave a couple of white pixels for a catch-light.

This solution works even if the eye is blown out (i.e., all white with no color information left.)

If you understand layers, you can also fix Red Eye by selecting the bad area, creating a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and desaturating the red area, but this method doesn't work so well if the eye is blown out.

Smart Fix

The secret weapon in the Quick Fix window is the Smart Fix command, which automatically adjusts a picture's lighting, color, and contrast, all with one click. You don't have to figure anything out. Elements does it all for you.

You'll find the Smart Fix in the General Fixes palette, and it's about as easy to use as hitting the speed dial button on your phone: click the Auto Smart Fix button, and if the stars are aligned, your picture will immediately look better. (Figure 4-5 gives you a glimpse of its capabilities.)

Tip

You'll find Auto buttons scattered throughout Elements. Elements uses them to make a best-guess attempt to implement whatever change the Auto button is next to (Smart Fix, Levels, Contrast, etc.). It never hurts to at least try clicking these Auto buttons since if you don't like what you see, you can always perform the magical undo: Edit → Undo, or Ctrl+Z (⌘-Z).

If you're happy with the Auto Smart Fix button's changes, you can move onto a new photo, or try sharpening your photo a little (see page 96) if the focus appears a little fuzzy. You don't need to do anything to accept the Smart Fix changes.

But if you're not ecstatic with your results, take a good look at your photo. If you like what Auto Smart Fix has done, but the effect is too strong or too weak, press Ctrl+Z (⌘-Z) to undo it, and try the Smart Fix Amount slider instead. The Amount slider does the same thing the Auto Smart Fix does, only you control the degree of change.

Watch the image as you move the slider to the right. If your computer is slow, there's a certain amount of lag time, so go slowly to give it a chance to catch up. If you happen to overdo it, sometimes it's easier to press the Reset button above your image and start again. Figure 4-6 explains how to use the checkmark and the cancel button (which appear next to the General Fixes label) to accept or reject your changes.

Tip

Usually you get better results with a lot of little nudges to the Smart Fix slider than by moving it way over to the right and back again.

Incidentally, these are the same Smart Fix commands you see in two places in the Editor's Enhance Menu: Enhance → Auto Smart Fix (Ctrl+M, or ⌘-Option-M) and Enhance → Adjust Smart Fix (Ctrl+Shift+M, or ⌘-Shift-M).

Sometimes Smart Fix just isn't smart enough to do everything you want it to do, and sometimes it does things you don't want it to do to your photos. The Smart Fix is better with photos that are underexposed than photos that are overexposed, for one thing. Fortunately, you still have several other editing choices to try, and they're covered in the following sections. If you don't like what Smart Fix has done to your photo, undo it before going on to make other changes.

Figure 4-5. The Auto Smart Fix button produced the bottom photo with just one click. (A click of the Auto Sharpening button, explained later on page 96, was added to really make it look spiffy.)

Note

You can also get to the Smart Fix command from within the Organizer; the box on page 98 shows you how.

Adjusting Lighting and Contrast

The Lighting palette lets you make very sophisticated adjustments to the brightness and contrast of your photo. Sometimes problems that you thought stemmed from exposure or even focus may right themselves with these commands.

Figure 4-6. When you move a slider in any of the Quick Fix palettes, the cancel and checkmark buttons appear in the palette you're using. Clicking the cancel symbol undoes the last change you made, while clicking the checkmark applies the change to your image.If you make multiple slider adjustments, the cancel symbol undoes everything you've done since you clicked the checkmark. So, for example, if you lightened shadows and adjusted the midtone contrast, clicking cancel removes both changes. But if you adjusted the shadows, then clicked the checkmark, and then made the contrast adjustment, canceling the contrast adjustment would cancel just that without affecting the shadows' change.

Levels

If you want to understand how Levels really works, you're in for a long technical ride. On the other hand, if you just want to know what it can do for your photos, the short answer is that it adjusts the brightness of your photo by redistributing the color information; Levels changes (hopefully fixes!) both brightness and color at the same time.

If you've never used any photo-editing software before, this may sound rather mysterious, but photo-editing pros can tell you that Levels is one of the most powerful commands for fixing and polishing up your pictures. To find out if its magic works for you, click the Auto Levels button. Figure 4-7 shows what a big difference it can make to your photo.

What Levels does is very complex. Chapter 7 contains loads more details about what's going on behind the scenes and how you can apply this command much more precisely.

Contrast

The main alternative to Auto Levels in Quick Fix is Auto Contrast. Most people find that their images tend to benefit from one or the other of these. Contrast adjusts the relative darkness and lightness of your image without changing the color, so if Levels made your colors go all goofy, try adjusting the contrast instead.

Figure 4-7. A quick click of the Auto Levels button can make a very dramatic difference in how vivid your photo is. The original photo of the squirrel (left) isn't bad, and you might not realize how much better the colors could be. But the photo on the right shows how much more effective your photo can be once Auto Levels has balanced the colors.

You activate Contrast just as you do the Levels tool: just click the Auto button next to its name.

Shadows and Highlights

The Shadows and Highlight tools do an amazing job of bringing out the details that are lost in the shadows or bright areas of your photo. Figure 4-9 shows what a difference these tools can make.

The Shadow and Highlight tools are a collection of three sliders, each of which controls a different aspect of your image:

• Lighten Shadows.Nudge the slider to the right and you'll see details emerge from murky black shadows.

• Darken Highlights.Use this slider to dim the brightness of overexposed areas.

• Midtone Contrast. After you've adjusted your photo's shadows and highlights, your photo may be very flat looking with not enough contrast between the dark and light areas. This slider helps you bring a more realistic look back to your photo.

Tip

You may think you only need to lighten shadows in a photo, but sometimes just a smidgen of Darken Highlights may help, too. Don't be afraid to experiment by using this slider even if you've got a relatively dark photo.

Be discreet. Getting overenthusiastic with these sliders can give your photos a very washed out, flat look.

Figure 4-8. The top photo shows a classic vacation picture problem: the day is bright, the scenery's beautiful, but everyone's faces are hidden in the dark shadows cast by their hats.In the bottom photo, the Shadow and Highlight tools brought back everyone's faces, but now they look a bit jaundiced. Use the color sliders to make them look healthy again.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONCalibrating Your Monitor

Why do my photos look awful when I open them in Elements?

Do you find that when you open your photos in Elements they look really terrible, even though they look decent in other programs? Maybe your photos are all washed out looking, or reddish or greenish, or even black and white?

If that's the case, you need to calibrate your monitor, as explained on page 160. It's easy to do and it makes a big difference.

Elements is what is known as a color-managed application. You can read all about color management in Chapter 7.

For now, you just need to understand that color-managed programs pay much more attention to the settings for your monitor than regular programs like word processors.

It makes programs like Elements a little more trouble to set up initially, but it also means that you can get truly wonderful results if you invest a little time and effort when you are getting started. Also, if you don't calibrate your monitor, Elements can show its displeasure in odd ways that don't seem to have anything to do directly with color.

Color

The Color palette lets you—surprise, surprise—play around with the colors in your image. In many cases, if you've been successful with Auto Levels or Auto Contrast you won't need to do anything here.

Auto Color

Once again, there's another one-click fix available—Auto Color. Actually, in some ways this one should be up in the Lighting section. Like Levels, it simultaneously adjusts color and brightness, but it looks at different information in your photos to decide what to do with them.

When you're first learning to use Quick Fix, you might want to try all three—Levels, Contrast, and Auto Color to see which generally works best for your photos. Undo between each change and compare your results. Most people find that they like one of the three most of the time, but you usually don't need to apply all three to the same photo.

Auto Color may be just the ticket for your photos, but you may also find that it shifts your colors in strange ways. Give it a click and see what you think. Does your photo look better or worse? If it's worse, just click Reset or Ctrl+Z (⌘-Z) to undo it, and go back to Auto Levels or Auto Contrast. If they all make your colors look a little wrong, or if you want to tweak the colors in your photo, move on to the Color sliders, which are explained in the next section.

Using the Color sliders

If you want to adjust just the colors in your photo without changing the brightness, then you want to check out the Color sliders. For example, your digital camera may produce colors that don't quite match what you saw when you took the picture, you might have scanned an old print that's faded or discolored, or you might just want to change the colors in a photo for the heck of it. If so, the sliders below the Auto Color button are for you.

There are four ways to adjust your colors here:

• Saturationcontrols the intensity of the color in your photo. For example, you can turn a color photo to black and white by moving the slider all the way to the left. Move it too far to the right and everything glows with so much color that it looks radioactive.

• Huechanges the color from, say, red to blue or green. If you aren't looking for realism, you can have some fun with your photos by really pushing this slider, as you saw back in Figure 4-3.

• Temperaturelets you adjust color from cool (bluish) on the left to warm (orange-ish) on the right. You'd use this for things like toning down the warm glow you see in photos taken in tungsten lighting, or just for fine-tuning your color balance.

• Tintadjusts the green/magenta balance of your photo, as shown in Figure 4-9.

Figure 4-9. The greenish tint in the top photo is a drastic example of a very common problem caused by many digital cameras. A little adjustment of the Tint slider clears it up in a jiffy (bottom). It's not always as obvious as it is here that you need a tint adjustment. If you aren't sure, the sky is often a dead giveaway. Is it robin's egg blue? If the photo's sky is that color and the real sky was just plain blue, tint is what you need.

You probably won't use all these sliders on a single photo, but you can use as many of them as you like. Remember to click the checkmark that appears in the Color palette if you want to accept your changes. Chapter 7 has much more information about how to use the full-blown Editor to really fine-tune your image's color.

Tip

If you look at the color of the slider's track, it shows you what happens if you move in that direction. So there's less and less color as you go left in the Saturation track, and more and more to the right. Looking at the tracks can help you know where you want to move the slider.

Sharpening

Now that you've finished your other corrections, it's time to sharpen, or improve the focus, of your photo. Most digital camera photos need some sharpening, since the sharpening your camera applies is usually deliberately conservative. Once again, a Quick Fix Auto button is at your service. Give the Auto Sharpen button a try to get things started (Figure 4-10).

You should understand, though, that the sad truth is that there really isn't any way to actually improve the focus of a photo once it's taken. Software sharpening just increases the contrast where the program perceives edges, so using it first can have strange effects on other editing tools and their ability to understand your photo.

If you don't like what Auto Sharpening does (you very well may not), you can undo it (click the Cancel button on the Sharpen palette) and try the slider. If you thought the Auto button overdid things, go very gently with the slider and stop and look at where the Auto button moved the slider to. Changes vary from photo to photo, but usually Auto's results fall at around the 40 to 50 percent mark on the slider.

Note

If you see funny halos around the outlines of objects in your photos, or strange flaky spots (making your photo look like it has eczema), those are artifacts from too much sharpening.

Figure 4-10. On the left, you can see the original image, then what Auto Sharpen did (middle), and finally, the results of using the Sharpen slider (right) to achieve stronger sharpening than Auto was willing to perform.

Always try to view Actual Pixels (View → Actual Pixels) when sharpening, because that gives you the clearest idea of what you're actually doing to your picture. If you don't like what the button does, undo it and try the slider. Zero sharpening is all the way to the left. Moving to the right increases the amount of sharpening applied to your photo.

As a general rule, you want to sharpen more for photos you plan to print than for images for Web use. You can read lots more about sharpening on page 182.

Tip

If you've used photo-editing programs before, you might be interested to know that the Auto Sharpen button applies the Unsharp Mask filter to your photo. The difference is, you don't have any control over the settings, as you would if you applied the mask from the Filters menu. But the good news is that if you want it, you can get this control—even from within Quick Fix. Just go to the Filters menu and choose Sharpen → Unsharp Mask.

At this point, all that's left is cropping your photo, if you'd like to reduce its size. Page 53 tells you everything you need to know about cropping.

Quick Fix Suggested Workflow

There're no hard and fast rules for what order you need to work in when using the Quick Fix tools. As mentioned earlier, Elements lays out the tools in the Control Panel, from top to bottom, in the order that usually makes sense. But you can pick and choose which tools you want, depending on what you think your photo needs. But if you're the type of person who likes a set plan for fixing photos, here's one order in which to apply the commands the Quick Fix has to offer:

1. Rotate your photo (if needed).

   Use the buttons at the top of the Control Panel.

2. Fix red eye (if needed).

3. Try Auto Smart Fix and/or the Smart Fix slider. Undo if necessary.

   Pretty soon you'll get a good idea of how likely it is that this fix will do a good job on your photos. Some people love it; some people think it makes their pictures too grainy looking.

4. If Smart Fix wasn't smart enough, work your way down through the other Lighting and Color commands until you like the way your photo looks.

   Read the sections earlier in this chapter to understand what each command does to your photo.

5. Sharpen.

   Try to perform sharpening as your last adjustment, because other commands can give you funky results on photos that have already been sharpened.

6. Crop.

   You might also want to crop as a first step sometimes, depending on the photo. If you've got a lot of overexposed sky that you plan to cut out anyway, you may get better results from the Lighting and Color tools if it's gone already.

Note

When you're in Quick Fix mode, you can always switch back to the Standard Editor at any point if you want tools or filters not available in Quick Fix.

GEM IN THE ROUGHPerforming Quick Fixes from the Organizer

If you're using Windows, you don't even need to be in the Quick Fix window to perform one-button fixes. In the Organizer, on the Shortcuts bar, if you choose Edit→ Auto Fix Window, you'll see the dialog box shown here. All the commands are identical to their equivalents in the Quick Fix window. Clicking "More Editing…" will take you to the Standard Edit window.

Incidentally, if you take a look at the illustration, you can see a dire-looking warning right above the image. It tells you that the photo contains data for Print Image Matching that you may lose if you edit your photo. Print Image Matching, or P.I.M., is a special technology that supposedly can give you better prints when you print your photo without editing it.

You need to have a P.I.M. enabled camera and an Epson Printer to use Print Image Matching. If you want to try P.I.M. printing from Elements, you need to go to the Goodies folder on the install disc, find and install the plug-in, and read the PDF, which gives detailed instructions for how to do this kind of printing. The plug-in doesn't install automatically when you install Elements.

The bottom line is that Elements is warning you that if you edit your photo, you won't have an unedited file anymore to use for P.I.M. Fortunately, the Organizer's Auto Fix window is the only place in Elements where you're likely to run into the warning.