Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. The Quick Fix

With Elements’ Quick Fix tools, you can dramatically improve the appearance of a photo with just a click or two. The Quick Fix window gathers easy-to-use tools that help adjust the brightness and color of your photos and make them look sharper. You don’t even need to understand much about what you’re doing. You just need to click a button or slide a pointer, and then decide whether you like how it looks.

If, on the other hand, you do know what you’re doing, you may still find yourself using the Quick Fix window for things like shadows and highlights because Quick Fix gives you a before-and-after view as you work. Also, the Temperature and Tint sliders can come in very handy for advanced color tweaking, like finessing the overall color of your otherwise finished photo. You also get two tools—the Selection brush and the Magic Selection brush—to help make changes to only a certain area of your photo.

What’s more, with Elements 7, you get some clever new fixes. You’ve always been able to correct red pupils in Elements, but do you want to whiten teeth or make the sky more blue? It’s a snap to do any of these in the Quick Fix window. You can even make part of a picture black and white, right in the Quick Fix window.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how (and in which order) to use the Quick Fix tools. If you have a newish digital camera, you may find that Quick Fix gives you everything you need to take your photos from pretty darn good to dazzling.

Note

If an entire chapter on Quick Fix is frustratingly slow, you can start off by trying out the ultra-fast Auto Smart Fix—a quick-fix tool for the truly impatient. Smart Fix tells you everything you need to know. Also, Guided Edit may give you enough help to accomplish what you want to do; Getting Help has the full story.

The Quick Fix Window

Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. If you’re in the Editor, just click the Edit tab → Quick button. If you’re in the Organizer, click the Fix tab → Quick Fix, or right-click a photo and choose Quick Fix from the shortcut menu.

Incidentally, you can also make a lot of quick fixes right from the Organizer. Click the Fix tab for buttons that let you automatically fix red eye, apply Auto Smart Fix, Auto Color, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Sharpen, or crop your photo without even launching the Editor. For more selective editing you’ll still want the Editor, but if Auto’s your thing, you’ll be very happy staying in the Organizer. If you use the Organizer, you get the added benefit of having your fixes automatically made on a copy, which Elements saves in a version set (Saving Your Work) with your original. Read on for more about what these tools do. They work the same way regardless of where you are when you use them.

The Quick Fix window looks like a stripped-down version of the Full Edit window (see Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1. The Quick Fix window. If you have several photos open when you launch the Quick Fix window, you can use the Project bin (The Project bin) at the bottom of the window to choose the one you want to edit. Just double-click any of the image thumbnails and that photo becomes the active image—the one that appears front and center in the Quick Fix preview area. See Figure 4-2 for a close-up view of the right-side quick-edit palettes.

Your tools are neatly arranged on both sides of your image: On the left side, there’s a four-item Toolbox; on the right side, there’s a collection of quick-edit palettes (Figure 4-2) stored inside the Control Panel. First, you’ll take a quick look at the tools Quick Fix provides you with. Then, later in the chapter, you’ll learn how to actually use them.

Tip

If you need extra help, check out Guided Edit (Getting Help), which walks you step by step through a lot of basic editing projects.

Figure 4-2. A closeup look at all the ways you can enhance your photos with Quick Fix. The left figure shows the top section of the Control Panel; the right, the bottom half. Besides these handy tools, you can also use most of the Full Edit menu commands if you need something more than the Control Panel provides.

The Quick Fix Toolbox

The Toolbox holds an easy-to-navigate subset of the Full Edit window’s larger tool collection. All the tools work the same way in both modes, and you can also use the same keystrokes to switch tools here. From top to bottom, here’s what you get:

• The Zoom tool lets you telescope in and out on your image—perfect for getting a good close look at details or pulling back to see the whole photo. (See The Zoom Tool for more on how the Zoom tool works.) You can also zoom by using the Zoom pull-down menu in the lower-right corner of the image preview area.

• The Hand tool helps move your photo around in the image window—just like grabbing it and moving it with your own five fingers. You can read more about the Hand tool on The Hand Tool.

• The Quick Selection tool lets you apply Quick Fix commands to select portions of your image. The regular Elements Selection brush is also available in Quick Fix. To get to the Selection brush, in the Toolbox, just click the Quick Selection tool’s icon and choose the Selection brush from the menu that appears. What’s the difference between the two tools? The Selection brush lets you paint a selection exactly where you want it (or mask out part of your photo to keep it from getting changed), while the Quick Selection tool makes Elements figure out the boundaries of your selection based on your much less precise marks on the image. The Quick Selection tool is much more automatic than the regular Selection brush. You can read more about these brushes beginning on Selecting with a Brush. To get the most out of both these tools, you need to understand the concept of selections. Chapter 5 tells you everything you need to know, including the details of using these brushes.

• The Crop tool lets you change the size and shape of your photo, by cutting off the areas you don’t want (see Cropping Pictures).

Note

If the contents of your photo need straightening (see Straighten Tool), you need to do that in Full Edit before bringing it into the Quick Fix window, since the Quick Fix Toolbox doesn’t include the Straighten tool.

The Quick Fix Control Panel

When you switch to Quick Fix, the Task panel presents you with the Quick Fix Control Panel. The Control Panel is where you make the majority of your adjustments. Elements helpfully arranges everything into five palettes—General Fixes, Lighting, Color, Sharpen, and Touch Up—listed in the order you’ll typically use them. In most cases, it makes sense to start at the top and work your way down until you get the results you want. (See Quick Fix Suggested Workflow for more suggestions on what order to work in.)

Note

There is one exception to this top-to-bottom order of operations: If you need to fix red eye problems (Editing Your Photos). The Red Eye tool is in the Touch Up panel at the bottom of the window. You may want to jump down there first and use the Red Eye tool before you do your other editing.

The Control Panel always fills the right side of the Quick Fix screen. There’s no way to hide it, and you can’t drag the palettes out of the Control Panel as you can in Standard Edit mode. But you can expand and collapse them, as explained in Figure 4-3.

Note

If you go into Quick Fix mode before opening a photo, you won’t see the pointers in the sliders, just empty tracks. Don’t worry—they’ll automatically appear as soon as you open a photo and give them something to work on.

Figure 4-3. Clicking any of these flippy triangles collapses or expands that section of the Control Panel. If you have a small screen the Touch Up section at the bottom is usually collapsed, so just click the triangle to expand it when you want those tools. There’s no need to collapse another section before expanding it—the Sharpen section automatically collapses to make room for Touch Up when you open it.

Different Views: After vs. Before and After

When you open an image in Quick Fix, your picture first appears by itself in the main window with the word “After” above it. Elements keeps the Before view—your original photo—tucked away, out of sight. But you can pick from three other layouts, which you can choose at any time: Before Only, "Before and After—Horizontal”, and “Before and After—Vertical”. Both of the “Before and After” views are especially helpful when trying to figure out if you’re improving your picture—or not—as shown in Figure 4-4. Switch between views by picking the one you want from the pop-up menu just below your image.

Figure 4-4. The “Before and After” views in the Quick Fix window make it easy to see how you’re changing your photo. Here you see “Before and After—Horizontal”, which displays the views side by side. To see them one above the other, choose “Before and After—Vertical”. If you want a more detailed view, use the Zoom tool (the magnifying glass icon—circled) to focus on just a portion of your picture.

Note

Quick Fix limits the amount of screen space available for your image. If you want a larger view while you work, click over to Full Edit.

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 Full Edit window or the Organizer.

If you want to rotate your photo, click either of the Rotate buttons, below the image preview area. (See Rotating and Flipping Options for more about rotating photos.) These Rotate buttons only appear when you actually have a photo open in Quick Fix.

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 want to undo a single action only. For that, just use the regular undo command: Edit → Undo or Ctrl+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 someone 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 Removal tool, and your problems are solved.

To use the Quick Fix Red Eye tool:

1. Open a photo.

   The Red Eye Removal tool in Elements 7 is in the Touch Up section at the very bottom of the Control Panel. This tool works the same whether you get to it from Touch Up in the Quick Fix or from the main Toolbox in Full Edit.

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.

   You may need to expand the Touch Up section by clicking the triangle next to its name (see Figure 4-3); then click the Red Eye icon or press Y (this keystroke works in Full Edit, too).

4. Click in the red part of the pupil (see Figure 4-5).

   That’s it. Just one click should fix it. If a single click doesn’t fix the problem, you can also try dragging the Red Eye tool over the pupil. 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.

   

   Figure 4-5. 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 so you can hit it right in the center. Notice what a good job the Red Eye tool does of keeping the highlights (called catchlights) in the eye that’s been treated.

5. Click in the other eye.

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

Tip

You can also apply the Organizer’s Auto Red Eye Fix in either the Quick Fix or Full Edit window. In either Quick Fix or Full Edit, just press Ctrl+R, or go to Enhance → Auto Red Eye Fix. In Full Edit you can also activate the Red Eye tool and click the Auto button in the Options bar. The only tradeoff to using the Auto Red Eye Fix in the Editor is you don’t automatically get a version set (as you do when using the tool from within the Organizer). But you can create a version set when you save your changes, as explained on Saving Your Work.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Another Red Eye Fix

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. Elements gives you a couple of other ways to 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 (The Eyedropper Tool) 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 (Choosing the Color You Want).

3. Get out the Pencil tool (The Impressionist Brush) and set its size to 1 pixel.

4. Now click 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 catchlight (the pupil’s glinting center highlight).

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

If you’re a layers fan, you can also fix red eye by selecting the bad area, creating a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (Adding Fill and Adjustment Layers), and desaturating the red area, but this method doesn’t work so well if the eye is blown out.

If you need to adjust how the Red Eye tool works, the Options bar gives you two controls, although 99 percent 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.

Note

You can also fix red eye right in the Raw converter (Using the Raw Converter), if you’re dealing with Raw format photos.

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 4-6 gives you a glimpse of its capabilities. If you want to see for yourself how this fix works, download this photo—finch.jpg—from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.)

Figure 4-6. Top: This photo is so dark you may think it’s beyond help. Bottom: The Auto Smart Fix button improved it significantly with just one click. (A click of the Auto Sharpening button, explained on Using the Color sliders, was added to make it look really spiffy.)

Tip

You’ll find Auto buttons scattered throughout Elements. The program uses them to make a best-guess attempt to implement whatever change the Auto button is next to (Smart Fix, Levels, Contrast, and so on). It never hurts to at least try clicking these Auto buttons; if you don’t like what you see, you can always perform the magical undo: Edit → Undo or Ctrl+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 Using the Color sliders) 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 picture. If you like what Auto Smart Fix has done, but the effect is too strong or too weak, press Ctrl+Z to undo it, and try playing with the Smart Fix Amount slider instead.

The Amount slider does the same thing 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. Use the checkmark and the cancel button (which appears next to the General Fixes label, as shown in Figure 4-7) to accept or reject your changes.

Tip

Usually you get better results with a lot of little nudges to the Smart Fix slider than with one big sweeping movement.

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

Figure 4-7. When you move a slider in any of the Quick Fix palettes, the Cancel and Accept buttons appear in the palette you’re using. Clicking the cancel symbol undoes the last change you made, while clicking the accept symbol applies the change to your image. If you make multiple slider adjustments, the cancel symbol undoes everything you’ve done since you clicked Accept. (The little light bulb takes you to the Elements Help Center.)

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

Tip

Auto Smart Fix is one of the commands you can apply from within the Organizer, so there’s no need to launch the Editor at all if you want just this tool. Simply click your photo and press Ctrl+Alt+M, or right-click your picture and choose Auto Smart Fix from the pop-up menu. You can also get to the Auto Smart Fix command via the Organizer’s Fix pane or the Edit menu.

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 be fixed by these commands.

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 (and 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 will tell you that Levels is one of the most powerful commands for fixing and polishing your pictures. To find out if its magic works for you, click the Auto Levels button. Figure 4-8 shows what a big difference it can make. Download this photo (squirrel.jpg) from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com, if you’d like to try this out yourself.

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.

Figure 4-8. A quick click of the Auto Levels button can make a very dramatic difference. Left: The original photo isn’t bad, and you may not realize how much better the colors could be. Right: This image shows how much more effective your photo is once Auto Levels has balanced the colors.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Calibrating Your Monitor

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

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

If that’s the case, you need to calibrate your monitor, as explained on Calibrating Your Monitor. It’s easy to do and it makes a big difference.

Elements is what’s known as a color-managed program. You can read all about color management on Controlling the Colors You See.

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 do.

Color-managed programs like Elements are a little more trouble to set up initially, but the advantage is that you can get truly wonderful results if you invest a little time and effort when you’re getting started.

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

Note

After you use Auto Contrast, look closely at the edges of the objects in your photo. If your camera’s contrast was already high, you may see a halo or a sharp line around the photo’s subject. If you do, the contrast is too high and you need to undo Auto Contrast (Ctrl+Z) and try another fix instead.

Shadows and Highlights

The Shadows and Highlights tools do an amazing job of bringing out 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 Shadows and Highlights 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 look very flat and not have enough contrast between the dark and light areas. This slider helps you bring a more realistic look back to your photo.

Figure 4-9. Top: This 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. Bottom: The Shadows and Highlights tools brought back everyone’s faces, but now they look a tad orange. Use the color sliders to make them look healthy again.

Tip

You may think you need only 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.

Go easy. Getting overenthusiastic with these sliders can give your photos a very washed-out, flat look.

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 Auto Color 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 may 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 they like one of the three most of the time.

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 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, explained in the next section.

Using the Color sliders

If you want to adjust the colors in your photo without changing the brightness, 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; or you may have scanned an old print that’s faded or discolored; or you may 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.

You get four ways to adjust your colors here:

• Saturation controls the intensity of your photo’s color. 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.

• Hue changes 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 to create funky color changes.

• Temperature lets you adjust color from cool (bluish) on the left to warm (orangeish) on the right. Use Temperature for things like toning down the warm glow you see in photos taken in tungsten lighting, or just for fine-tuning your color balance.

• Tint adjusts the green/magenta balance of your photo, as shown in Figure 4-10.

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 Accept 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.

Figure 4-10. Left: The greenish tint in this photo is a drastic example of a very common problem caused by many digital cameras. Right: A little adjustment of the Tint slider clears it up in a jiffy. 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.

Sharpening

Now that you’ve finished your other corrections, it’s time to sharpen your photo. Sharpening gives the effect of better focus by improving the edge contrast in your photo. Most digital camera photos need some sharpening because 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 (located in the Sharpen palette) a try to get things started. Figure 4-11 shows what you can expect.

Figure 4-11. Left: The original image. Like most digital photos, it could stand a little sharpening. Middle: What you get by clicking the Auto Sharpen button. Right: The results of using the Sharpen slider to achieve stronger sharpening than Auto was initially willing to perform.

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 (press Ctrl+Z) and try the slider. If you thought the Auto button overdid things, go very gently with the slider. Changes vary from photo to photo, but usually Auto’s results fall at around the 30 to 40 percent mark on the slider.

Tip

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; reduce the Sharpening settings till they go away.

Always try to view Actual Pixels (View → Actual Pixels) whenever you sharpen 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 then 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 Sharpening Your Images.

Note

If you’ve used photo-editing programs before, you may be interested to know that the Auto Sharpen button applies Adjust Sharpness (Adjust Sharpness) to your photo. The difference is that you don’t have any control over the settings, as you would if you applied it from the Enhance menu. But the good news is that if you want it, or if you prefer to use Unsharp Mask (Sharpening Your Images), you can get this control—even from within Quick Fix. Just go to the Enhance Menu and choose the sharpener of your choice.

At this point, all that’s left is cropping your photo, if you’d like to reduce its size. Cropping Pictures tells you everything you need to know about cropping. However, you can also give your photo a bit more punch by using the new tools in the Touch Up panel, as explained in the next section.

Touch Ups

In Elements 7, you’ll notice the new Touch Up panel at the very bottom of the Quick Fix Control Panel. (You can see it in Figure 4-12.) You’ve already learned how to use one of its main attractions—the Red Eye Removal tool—earlier in this chapter (Editing Your Photos). There are also other three fixes available here:

• Whiten Teeth. As you probably guessed from the name, use this tool to make teeth look brighter. What’s especially nice is that it doesn’t create a fake, overly-white look.

• Make Dull Skies Blue. It’s such a common problem with digital cameras—your exposure for the subject is perfect, but the sky is all washed out looking. Unfortunately, if your sky is really gray or blown out (white looking), this tool won’t help much. It should probably have been called “Make Blue Skies Bluer.” It is useful for creating more dramatic skies, though.

• Black and White High Contrast. You’re probably wondering what the heck that means. It’s Adobe’s way of saying, “transform the area I choose from color to black and white.” This tool’s a great timesaver when you want to create a photo where only part of the picture is in color. (High Contrast refers to the style of black and white conversion this tool uses.)

All three tools work pretty much the same way—just draw a line over the area you want to change, and Elements makes a detailed selection of the area and applies the change for you:

1. Open a photo and make your other corrections first.

   If you’re an old hand at using Elements, use the Touch Up tools before sharpening. But if you’re a beginner and not comfortable with layers (see Chapter 6), sharpen first. (See the note on Quick Fix Suggested Workflow for more about why.)

2. Click the icon for the tool you want to use.

   See Figure 4-12 if you aren’t sure which is which.

   

   Figure 4-12. The Touch Up tools let you make fairly complex changes to parts of your photos simply by dragging over the area you want to fix.

3. Draw a line over the area you want to change.

   When you click one of the Touch Up tools, your cursor turns to a circle with crosshairs in it. Just drag that over the area you want to change. Elements automatically expands the area to include the entire object it thinks you want. (It works just like the Quick Selection tool, only it also applies the changes to your image. You can learn more about using the Quick Selection tool on Selecting with a Brush.) You’ll see the marching ants appear (Selecting Everything) around the area Elements is changing.

4. If Elements included too much or too little, tweak the size of the selected area.

   In the Options bar, you’ll see three little brush icons. The left icon lets you start another new selection. Click the one on the right and drag over any area you want to remove, or click the middle one and drag to add to the area. You can also just drag to extend your selection, or Alt+drag if Elements covered too much area and you need to remove some of it, without going to the Options bar at all.

5. Once you’re happy with the area covered by the change, you’re done.

   You can back up by pressing Ctrl+Z to undo your changes step by step. Just keep going to eliminate the change completely if you don’t like it. (Clicking the Reset button doesn’t undo the Touch Up changes, except for the Red Eye tool.)

The Touch Up tools can be very helpful, but they work based on the colors in your photo, so they may not always give you exactly the results you want, as you can see in Figure 4-13. If you want to use the Color sliders (Using the Color sliders) to adjust things, you’ll need to switch away from the Touch Up tools and use the Selection brush to reselect the area. That’s because the sliders are not available when the Touch Up tools are active.

Note

The Touch Up tools (except for Red Eye) create a layered file. If you understand layers, you can also go back to Full Edit and make changes after the fact, like adjusting the opacity or blend mode of the layer (See Chapter 6 to learn about layers). You can always discard your Touch Up changes by discarding the layer they’re on. And you can even edit the area affected by the changes by editing the layer mask, as explained on Editing a layer mask, or you can use the Smart Brush tool (Correcting color with a brush) in Full Edit.

Figure 4-13. Blue Skies can help punch up the sky color in your photos—sometimes. Left: Smog makes the sky in this photo look very dull. Right: One quick drag across the sky with the “Make Dull Skies Blue” tool produced a much more vivid sky, maybe too vivid (and maybe a tad green). Elements used a gradient (see Applying Gradients) to give a more realistic shading to the new sky color.

Also, if there isn’t enough color to begin with, the Touch Up tools may not produce any visible result in your photo. If your subject has very white dentures, Whiten Teeth may not do anything, or Make Dull Skies Blue may prove to be a dud if your sky is just solid gray or completely overexposed. You may find, however, that after using a Touch Up tool, nothing happens when you try to make other changes to your photo. If you run into that problem, read the Note that follows.

Note

As mentioned above, Elements leaves you with a layered file after the Touch Up tools (except for the Red Eye Removal tool). That isn’t normally a problem, even if you don’t know anything about layers, but once in a while you may find nothing happens when you try to make other changes to your photo.

If that happens, at the top of the page, click the Full button (under the Edit tab) to go back to Full Edit. Then find the Layers palette. It should be in the Palette bin unless you’ve removed it. (If you can’t find it, go to Window → Layers to bring it back.) In the Layers palette, look for the word Background and click that. That part of the palette should be a lighter or darker gray (depending on your brightness slider settings) than the rest of the palette (the area that says Blue Skies, Pearly Whites, or whatever). If it isn’t, click it again. Then you can go back to the Quick Fix and do whatever you want to your photo. However, the part you used the Touch Up tools on may behave differently from the rest of the photo. If that happens, and you haven’t closed the photo since using the Touch Up tools, use Undo History (The one rule of Elements) to back up to before the Touch Up.

Quick Fix Suggested Workflow

There are 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:

1. Rotate your photo (if needed).

   Use the buttons below the image preview.

2. Fix red eye (if needed).

   See Editing Your Photos.

3. Crop.

   If you know you want to crop your photo, now’s the time. That way, you get rid of any problem areas before they affect other adjustments. For example, say your photo has a lot of overexposed sky that you want to crop out. If you leave it in, that area may skew the effects of the Lighting and Color tools on your image. So if you already know where you want to crop, do it before making other adjustments for more accurate results.

4. 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; others think it makes their pictures too grainy.

5. 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.

6. Sharpen.

   Try to perform sharpening as your last adjustment because other commands can give you funky results on photos that have already been sharpened. However, if you’re a beginner and not comfortable with layers, you can sharpen before using Whiten Teeth, Make Dull Skies Blue, or “Black and White High Contrast” in the Touch Up panel. (See Quick Fix Suggested Workflow for more about why you’d wait to use these.)

Note

When you’re in Quick Fix mode, you can switch back to Full Edit at any point if you want tools not available in Quick Fix. Also, note that there’s no Close button in Quick Fix. To close a photo there, use the File menu or Ctrl+W.

Adjusting Skin Tones

If you’re like most amateur photographers, your most important photos are pictures of people: your family, your friends, or even just fascinating strangers. Elements gives you yet another tool for making fast fixes—one that’s designed especially for correcting photos that have people in them. This is the “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” command, available in both the Quick Fix and Full Edit windows.

The name “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” may be a bit confusing. What this command actually does is adjust your entire image based on the skin tone of someone in the photo. The idea behind “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” is that you may well be much more interested in the way the people in your photos look than in how the background looks. This command gives the highest priority to creating good skin color. It’s an automatic fix, but there’s a dialog box where you can tweak the results once you’ve previewed Elements’ suggested adjustments. To use the “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” command:

1. Call up the “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” dialog box.

   In either Quick Fix or Full Edit, go to Enhance → Adjust Color → “Adjust Color for Skin Tone”. The dialog box shown in Figure 4-14 appears. You may need to move it out of the way of your photo so you can see what’s happening.

2. Show Elements an area of skin to sample for calculating the color adjustments.

   Once the dialog box appears, your cursor turns to an eyedropper. Just find a portion of your photo where your subject’s skin has relatively good color, and click it.

3. Tweak the results.

   Elements is often a bit overenthusiastic in its adjustments. Use the sliders in the dialog box to get a more pleasing, realistic color. The Ambient Light slider works just like the Temperature slider in the Quick Fix control panel (Using the Color sliders). Blush increases the rosiness of the skin as you move the slider to the right and decreases it to the left. Tan increases or decreases the browns and oranges in the skin tones. You may get swell results with your first click, or you may have to use all the sliders to get a truly realistic result. It all depends on the photo.

   

   Figure 4-14. When this dialog box appears, your cursor turns into a little eyedropper when you move it over your photo. Just click the best-looking area of skin you can find. You won’t see any sliders in the tracks until you click. After Elements adjusts the photo based on your click, the sliders appear and you can use them to fine-tune the results. Clicking different spots gives different results, so you may want to experiment by clicking different places.

   You can preview the changes right in your photo as you work. If you mess up and want to start again, click Reset. If you decide you’d rather be using another tool instead, click Cancel.

   Note

   The “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” sliders are like the Quick Fix sliders in that you can get an idea of which way to move them by looking at the colors in the slider tracks in the dialog box.

4. When you like what you see, click OK.

   Elements applies your changes. If you want to undo them, press Ctrl+Z.

“Adjust Color for Skin Tone” seems to work best on fair skin, and not so well on darker skin tones. And it’s most suited for making fairly subtle adjustments, so you may have to reduce the amount of change from what Elements first did.

Also, notice that not only the skin tones are changing. Elements is adjusting all the colors in the photo in sync with the skin tones (Figure 4-15). Sometimes you may find you’ve acquired quite a color cast by the time you’ve got the skin just right (see Removing Unwanted Color). If this bothers you, try a different tool. On the other hand, you can create some very nice late afternoon light effects with this command.

While “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” is really meant as a kind of alternative fast fix, you may find it’s most useful for making small final adjustments to photos you’ve already edited using other tools.

Tip

If you understand layers (explained in Chapter 6), you may want to make a duplicate layer and apply this command to your duplicate. Then you can adjust the intensity of the result by adjusting the layer’s opacity (see Managing Layers).

Figure 4-15. Top: This photo shows a slight greenish cast, giving the little boy a somewhat unappealing skin tone. Bottom: “Adjust Color for Skin Tone” is able to warm up his skin tones, and it even removes the greenish tinge to the wood of the bench he’s sitting on.