Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

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Chapter 7

chapter

7

Basic Image Retouching

You may be perfectly happy using Elements only in Quick Fix mode. And that’s

fine, as long as you understand that you’ve hardly scratched the surface of what the

program can do for you. Sooner or later, though, you’re probably going to run

across a photo where your best Quick Fix efforts just aren’t good enough. Or you

may just be curious to see what else Elements has under its hood. That’s when you

finally get to put all your image-selecting and layering skills to good use.

Elements gives you loads of ways to fix your photos beyond the limited options in

Quick Fix. This chapter guides you through fixing basic exposure problems, shows

you new ways of sharpening your photos, and most importantly, helps you under-

stand how to improve the colors in your photos.

If you want to get the most out of Elements, you need to understand a little about

how your camera, computer, and printer think about color. Next to resolution,

color is the most important concept in Elements. After all, almost all the adjust-

ments image editing programs make consist of changing the color of pixels. So

quite a bit of this chapter is about understanding how Elements—and by exten-

sion, you—can manipulate your image’s color.

TIP Most of Elements’ advanced-fixes dialog boxes have a “preview” checkbox, which lets you

watch what’s happening as your adjust the settings. It’s a good idea ...