Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Free Stuff from the Internet

You have to spend some money if you want a graphics tablet, but there's a ton of free stuff—tutorials, brushes, textures, and Layer styles, for example—available online that you can add to Elements. Most of these add-ons will say they work with Photoshop, but since Elements is based on Photoshop, you can use most of them in Elements, too.

Here are some popular places to go treasure hunting:

• Adobe Studio Exchange (http://share.studio.adobe.com). On Adobe's own Web site, you can find hundreds and hundreds of downloads, including more Layer styles than you could ever use, brushes, textures, and custom shapes (to use with Shape tool). They're all free, but you have to register. This site is one of the best resources anywhere for extra stuff. About 99 percent of the items listed are made specifically for Photoshop, but Photoshop's brushes, swatches, textures, shapes, and Layer styles work with Elements, too.

• Creative Mac (www.creativemac.com). Don't let the name put you off. Almost everything on this site works in Windows, too. Here you'll find many great tutorials and a wonderful source for specialty brushes, especially for tricky things like hair and skin.

• MyJanee (www.myjanee.com). Lots of tutorials and free downloads here.

• Sue Chastain (www.graphicssoft.about.com). This is another Web site with lots of downloads and many tutorials.

There are many, many other Web sites. Just enter what you're looking for as your Google search term, and you're bound ...