3photoshop.com presents

A beginner's guide to photoshop elements

 

Welcome to our first tutorials on the subject of Photoshop Elements!

Photoshop Elements is a consumer level image editing programme.

Modelled around its bigger brother, Adobe Photoshop, Elements provides everything the home enthusiast could ever want! As well as being affordable, it’s pleasingly powerful and user friendly, which is reflected in its quick fix workspace built specifically for people either in a hurry, or new to the software, and it’s full blown editing environment for anybody wanting to take full advantage of some of the most powerful features in the image editing world.

In this free 10 part video series, we’ll look at the things you need to know to get off the ground. Starting with the organiser, I’ll show you how to create and maintain an efficiently structured image catalogue. A place you can visit and know the photograph you’re looking for is seconds away from being found.

Once you have a collection of carefully organised images, it’s time to make them look good using some of Elements most basic features. Step forward the Quick Fix and Guided Edit modes. Within a couple of minutes, and the same number of adjustments, these modes allow you to quickly fix some of the most common colour, tonal and contrast problems associated with modern day digital photographs. To say it all happens in a flash would be accurate, as well as a cheap pun of course!

With Element’s quick-fire solutions firmly stuffed into our image editing repitoire, we’ll move out of the shadows and into the full glare of Adobe’s spotlight. The full edit mode is a versatile, attractive and powerful workspace that sets the benchmark for consumer level image editing. I’ll start by introducing you to a few key concepts, before starting a project that sees us creating a poster for London Zoo.

As we progress, you’ll see how to adjust shadows and highlights, correct colours, and apply modifications to specific regions of an image whilst leaving the rest untouched. We’ll look at some basic selection techniques, as well as extracting a gorilla from his background and placing him into another photograph. From there we’ll adjust his size and blend him into his new background before removing blemishes and cropping unwanted background elements from the image.

To create the final poster we’ll add some text and effects to the composition and apply a pass of sharpening to bring out the hidden details locked away inside the image. The series closes with a look at how we can get the final version of the poster to a wider audience by preparing it for email and print.

All in all, this series comprises of over two hours of high-quality, in-depth videos that serve as a starting point to mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements.

To view a list of what’s covered in this series please click here.

Good luck

A new tutorial will be added to this series every two weeks.
Click here to be notified when a new tutorial becomes available.

Project Files Available Here

	1. The Welcome Screen The first time you open Photoshop Elements you'll be greeted by the welcome screen. This serves as a portal into various workspaces such as the organizer and the editing modes.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (4:36)
	2. Organising Photos Many people think that the Organiser is a place to store and organise digital files, and it is, but it’s capable of so much more. From importing photos from your digital camera, to rotating them, adding keywords for easy reference, and the ability to store them neatly into stacks and albums, Photoshop Elements is the real-deal when it comes to organisation. There isn't a reason on earth not to use it!	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (15:40)
	3. Touring the Quick Fix and Guided Modes If you’re new to Photoshop Elements then the Quick Fix and Guided Modes are for you! Designed as a gentle introduction to image editing, these modes offer a workspace that walks you through the process of improving digital photos with no more than a few simple movements of the appropriate sliders. Whether you’re correcting for color, dark shadows, bright highlights or a soft focus, these modes are the fastest way to see better looking images.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (11:07)
	4. The Quick Fix Mode in Action Having covered the theory of the Quick Fix mode in the previous video, it’s time to correct colour, brightness and focus of a real-world digital photograph. Almost all photographs taken on a digital camera require some degree of adjustment to make them look good, and quite simply put, the Quick Fix mode is going to be the fastest and easiest way to get the job done.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (13:32)
	5. Touring the Full Edit Mode The Full Edit mode unleashes the full power of Photoshop Elements in the form of layers, a full set of tools, full ability to select and move pixels, color adjusting and retouching tools beyond the realms of your wildest dreams and much, much more. This is where things start to get interesting. Follow me on a virtual tour of the workspace and rest assured that by time we're done, you'll choose power over ease-of-use any day of the week.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (16:18)
	6. Making Photos Look Their Best At first glance, it may seem that we’re revisiting the same things we looked at way back when we explored the Quick Fix mode, but on second glance, we’re correcting the same problems only this time with way more accuracy, detail and control. Instead of the one-slider solutions offered in Quick Fix mode, we’ll look at more robust options such as the levels command to fix brightness, contrast and colour issues, as well as confining our changes to certain areas using masks, keeping our edits non-destructive with adjustment layers and adding saturation to make the colours of a photograph appear more vivid. This is where the real power of photo correction makes its long overdue debut.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (18:10)
	7. Selecting, Extracting, Moving, Transforming & Blending Anyone can make selections inside Photoshop, but it takes a good knowledge of the selection tools, and a little practice, to get on the road to mastering it. As we strive to achieve our ultimate goal – selecting and moving a gorilla into another photograph – we’ll visit the lasso tools, the marquee tools, quick selection, the magic wand and the magic extractor.  We’ll also employ the move tool to move selected elements around, the transform controls to resize the gorilla, and layer blending options to make the composition as realistic as possible. This is just the beginning to the art of image manipulation.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (19:15)
	8. Retouching, Cropping & Adding Text (Coming Soon) Ever downloaded a photograph to find blemishes and minor imperfections bugging an otherwise perfect shot? Ever wanted a photograph of the real world….to look better than the real world? If you have, then be aware that Photoshop Elements comes equipped with cloning and healing brushes that can banish even the worse defects to the history palette, never to be seen again…..unless you want to of course! The crop tool can also be used to crop away details, or to focus in on what you want the viewer to see, and if that’s not enough of a hint, then you can hide or highlight a subject with text using your favourite fonts and colours.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (11:53)
	9. Adding Effects & Sharpening (Coming Soon) Effects and filters can be used to correct or complement an image or individual layer by changing pixels in a predefined manor, subject to the controls inside the selected effect or filter.  Photoshop Elements has a wealth of these, allowing you maximum control to warp, twist, blur and distort until your heart’s content. This also brings us to the subject of sharpening – itself a filter – that brings the image into tighter focus by making details within the image stand out. It’s something that every image needs, and every image benefits from.	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (15:04)
	10. Saving, Sending, Printing & Backing Up (Coming Soon) Once you have the perfect image, chances are you’re going to want to show other people your work.  Photoshop Elements allows you to do this in a number of ways, whether by printing the image using a local inkjet printer, sending via email or placing on a web site or image hosting service. How you decide to ‘output’ the image will determine how you save it, what format, what quality settings, what size! You’ll need to know how to balance out the quality of the final image and achieve manageable file sizes for your output criteria all at the same time. And if you care about your photos, you’ll also want to know how to back them up and keep them safe. Luckily for you, Photoshop Elements can do all of that and much more!	Version - Elements 6 Runtime (18:27)