Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

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 what to expect when you launch the program, how to use Elements to fix photos with just a couple of keystrokes, and how to sign up for and connect to all the goodies that await you on Photoshop. You'll also learn how to use Guided Edit mode to get started editing your photos. Along the way, you'll find out about some of Elements' basic controls, and how to get to the program's Help files.

The Welcome Screen

When you launch Elements for the first time, you're greeted by the Welcome screen (Figure 1-1). This is where you register Elements and sign up for your free Photoshop.com account (U.S. only). Activation explains how.

Note

If you aren't in the U.S., the whole process of registering Elements works a bit differently—see Activation.

Interestingly, the Welcome screen isn't actually Elements. It's just a launching pad that starts up one of two different programs, depending on the button you click:

• Organize button. This starts the Organizer, which lets you store and organize your image files.

• Edit button. Click this for the Editor, which lets you modify your images.

You can easily hop back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you might call the two halves of Elements—and you probably won't do much in one without eventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they function as two separate programs.

UP TO SPEED: Which Version of Elements Do You Have?

This book covers Photoshop Elements 8. If you're not sure which version you've got, the easiest way to find out is to look at the program's icon (the file icon you click to launch Elements). The icon for Elements 8 is actually pretty close to the icon for Elements 7—both use a blue square with the letters "PSE" (Elements' initials) on it, but the icon for version 8 is a lighter peacock blue than the icon for version 7. But if you're still not sure, click once on the Elements icon on your desktop, and the full name of the program, including the version number, appears below the icon, if it wasn't already visible. You can also check the Windows Start menu: Elements is listed along with its version number.

Or, if Elements is running, in the program's window, go to Help → About Photoshop Elements.

You can use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. But Elements 8 is a little different, especially because of changes in how images are displayed in the program, so you'd probably feel more comfortable with a reference book for the version you have. There are Missing Manuals for Elements 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, too, and you may prefer to track down the right book for your version of Elements.

Figure 1-1. Elements' Welcome screen. What you see in the right part of the window changes occasionally, so it may not be exactly the same as this illustration. The left part of the window always stays the same, though. There you can choose to start organizing or editing photos. The bottom of the screen always has links for signing onto Photoshop.com and displays info about your Photoshop.com account, if you have one. You can't bypass the Welcome screen just by clicking the upper-right Close (X) button. When you do, the screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, you've got options: The box on Organizing Your Photos tells you how to permanently say goodbye to this screen.

If you start in the Organizer, then once you've picked a photo to edit, you have to wait a few seconds while the Editor loads. And when you have both the Editor and the Organizer running, just quitting the Editor doesn't close the Organizer—you have to close both programs independently. When both programs are running, you can switch back and forth between them by clicking the button at the upper right of the screen; the button reads Organizer when you're in the Editor and "Editor" when you're in the Organizer. (The Organizer button just takes a click, but the Editor button includes a drop-down menu where you choose the editing mode you want.) You can also just click the Editor or the Organizer icon in the Windows taskbar to switch from one to the other.

Adobe built Elements around the assumption that most people work on their photos in the following way: First, you bring photos into the Organizer to sort and keep track of them. Then, you open photos in the Editor to work on them and save them back to the Organizer when you've finished making changes. You can work differently, of course—like opening photos directly in the Editor and bypassing the Organizer altogether—but you may feel like you're always swimming against the current if you choose a different workflow. The next chapter has a few hints for disabling some of Elements' features if you find they're getting in your way.

The Welcome screen can also serve as your connecting point for signing onto www.photoshop.com. Photoshop.com has more about Photoshop.com, but for now you just need to know that a basic account is free if you're in the United States (it's not available yet in other countries), and it gives you access to all the interesting features in Elements 8 that require an Internet connection. If you're signed into Photoshop.com already, you can see how much of your online storage you've already used in the graph at the bottom of the Welcome screen. There's also a reminder of your personal URL at Photoshop.com and links to online help and to tips and tricks for using Elements. However, you can also get to all these things from within the Editor or the Organizer, so there's no need to keep the Welcome screen around for that.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: Turning the Lights On

You may find Elements' snazzy dark color scheme hard to see or just plain annoying. Elements 8 gives you a choice of a dark or light color scheme in both the Editor and the Organizer, although the "light" color scheme is more medium than light, really. In either part of the program, just go to Edit → Preferences → General → Appearance Options, and then use the radio buttons to choose Light or Dark. (The Organizer has one control for the overall window and its menus [User Interface] and a separate one for the background around your photo thumbnails [Grid].)

When you pick a new color scheme, the change takes effect immediately, so you don't need to restart Elements to see the difference. The Editor and Organizer adjustments are independent, so you can have each at a different brightness level if you like.

The images in this book include ones taken in both color schemes, so don't be alarmed if the graphics in these pages look darker or lighter than what you see on your screen.

Tip

After you create your Photoshop.com account, you may find you have trouble with the Welcome screen if your Internet connection isn't active when you start Elements. If the Welcome screen hangs while trying to gather your account info, just quit it (you may need to do this in Windows' Task Manager—press Ctrl+Alt+Del in XP or Ctrl+Shift+Esc in Vista to call it up), then follow the directions in the box below for starting the Editor or the Organizer directly from the program file.