| If you're a power-using Photoshopper you might be wondering why I'm writing about Photoshop Elements. I've been using the full version of Photoshop for just about 10 years now. Why would I be interested in an entry level version of essentially the same software? My fascination began after attending an iPhoto session at Macworld back in January 2003. Photographer Rick Smolan (creator of the Day in the Life book series) had a very interesting comment during the session. He said when he was on the road with his digital camera he didn't have time to mess with all the color correction capabilities of Photoshop. He said he used the Color Cast feature of Photoshop Elements since all you had to do was click around on an image with an Eyedropper and you were done! Coming from a Pro I thought this was quite an interesting comment. Well when I got home I ended up installing Photoshop Elements 2 that came with my Wacom Intuos tablet and did some exploring. I was quite surprised to find a few features that I wish Photoshop 7 had! I'm not going to do a full review of Photoshop Elements 2, but rather point out some of the more powerful capabilities it has to offer. To begin with Photoshop Elements 2 is aimed at the consumer end of the market. You won't find support for CMYK, advanced Web features like slicing, or the more advanced options that the Pros demand like Curves. What you will find is a program that is essentially a stripped down version of Photoshop 7 that is ideal for someone with a digital camera. To get started Photoshop Elements has a great way of color correcting images as Rick Smolan suggested. Take this digital camera image that was taken with the wrong white point setting. The sky has a yellowish cast that needs correcting. |
|
Go to the Enhance Menu, then to Adjust Color/Color Cast.
|
| It's as simple as it looks! Just start clicking around on the image whether it be a hilight, midtone, or shadow. |
|
| The next feature to look at is Element's capability to adjust lighting. I took this photo at the Apple booth at the Macworld SF2003 show. I turned my flash off since it wouldn't have had the power to cover the distance required. I also wanted to show off the cool lighting from the light boxes. Trouble is the shadows are pretty dark. |
| Looking at the Histogram in the Levels dialogue shows that there is little information in the midtone areas of the image. |
| Next step is to go to the Enhance menu and go to Adjust Lighting/ Fill Flash. Here it is simply a matter of using the Lighter slider to pull up detail in the shadows. There is also a Saturation slider that can be used to lower the saturation as Lightening too much can create an oversaturated image. |
| After clicking "OK" we can see that the Histogram now shows a lot of combing in the shadows because such a drastic move to lighten the image has taken place. |
| But all things considered the final image looks pretty good! This feature is also not available in Photoshop 7 and would be quite tricky to accomplish using Curves and Levels! |
| Also included in Elements 2 is a stripped down version of the Brushes introduced in Photoshop 7. This new Brush engine is a big leap from previous versions of Photoshop. If you have a Wacom tablet definitely try out the "Pen Pressure" set of brushes. They're tons of fun! |
| Also a cool feature of Elements 2 is the Selection Brush. With Photoshop you have this capability of painting selections but only while in Quickmask mode! |
| If you want to do multiple corrections to an image all at once you can using the Quick Fix dialogue. Pretty handy little feature. |
| Elements also has the ability to directly import frames from a video camera. Very cool! |
| To quickly sum up: Photoshop Elements 2 contains most of the core funtionality of it's big daddy Photoshop 7 but without some of the high end features and the steep learning curve (or the big price tag). Also included are some features that a Photoshop Poweruser might find pretty handy to have around! |
Back to the Top
Tips Home