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 all those options can make it tough to find your way around Elements, especially when you’re new to the program.
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, as well as how to use the new Guided Edit mode to help you get started editing your photos. 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.
The Welcome Screen
To launch Elements for the first time, you need to go to your Applications folder and open the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 folder you find there. Double-click the Photoshop Elements icon to start the program (it’s the blue circle icon with the silver camera on it). When you do so, the Elements icon appears in your Dock. (To keep Elements in your Dock when you quit the program, right-click [Control+click] the icon and choose “Keep in Dock”.)
Note
Elements will take a while to start up the first time you launch it, because it’s building a database for the Content and Effects palettes. Don’t be concerned if the program seems to hang—just give it a minute to finish. ...
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