Photoshop 9

Chapter 1. Finding Your Way Around ElementsPhotoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your digitalimages. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove demonic red-eye stares, or distortthe facial features of people who’ve been mean to you. The downside is that all thoseoptions can make it tough to find your way around Elements, especially if you’re new to theprogram.This chapter helps get you oriented in Elements. You’ll learn what to expect when youlaunch the program, how to use Elements to fix photos with just a couple of keystrokes, andhow to sign up for and connect to all the goodies that await you on Photoshop.com. You’llalso 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 Helpfiles. Getting StartedPeople complained for a long time about how different the Mac and Windows versions ofElements were.

(Previously, the Mac version gave you Adobe Bridge instead of the ElementsOrganizer, for instance.) In Elements 9, things are much more alike betweenthe two platforms, but there are still a few differences.One of the biggest differences is what you see when you launch Elements. In Windows,the program presents you with a Welcome screen (explained below) where you choose which part of Elements youwant to use: the Editor or the Organizer (you’ll learn about both in this chapter). On a Mac,you don’t have to bother with that—you go right to the Editor to work on your photos. Theonly time you see the Welcome screen on a Mac without deliberately seeking it out is ifyou launch Elements for the very first time by clicking the Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 button in the last screen of the installer ( tells you how to install Elements). Up To Speed: Which Version of Elements Do You Have?This book covers Photoshop Elements 9.

If you’re not sure which version you’ve got, theeasiest way to find out is to look at the program’s icon (the one you click to launchElements). The icon for Elements 9 is actually pretty close to the icons for Elements 7and 8—all three use a blue square with the letters “PSE” (Elements’ initials) on it, butif you look at the icon for version 9 very closely, it looks like a little flat boxinstead of Elements 8’s icon, which is a plain square. (Elements 7’s icon is also asquare, but it’s a bit darker than the ones for Elements 8 and 9.)If you’re still not sure, in Windows, click once on the Elements icon on yourdesktop, and Windows displays the full name of the program—including the versionnumber—below the icon, if it wasn’t already visible. You can also check the WindowsStart menu, where Elements is listed along with its version number. On a Mac, check inyour Applications folder to see the version number. Or, if Elements is already runningin Windows, in Elements, go to Help→About Photoshop Elements.

On a Mac, go to PhotoshopElements→About Photoshop Elements.You can still use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements because a lotof the basic editing procedures are the same. But Elements 9 is a little different, soyou’d probably feel more comfortable with a reference book for the version you have.There are Missing Manuals for Elements 3 through 8, too, and you may prefer to trackdown the right book for your version of Elements.

(For Elements 6 and 8 there areseparate editions for the Mac and Windows versions.).Organize button. This starts the Organizer, which lets you store and organize yourimage files.Edit button. Click this for the Editor, which lets you modify yourimages.You can easily hop back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you canthink of as the two halves of Elements—and you probably won’t do much in one withouteventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they function as twoseparate programs. If you start in the Organizer, then once you’ve picked a photo to edit, you have to wait a fewseconds while the Editor loads. When you have both the Editor and the Organizer running, just quitting the Editor doesn’t close theOrganizer—you have to close both programs independently. Figure 1-1. Elements’ Welcome screen.

What you see in the right part of the window changesoccasionally, so it may not be exactly the same as this illustration. The left part ofthe window is always the same, though; it’s where you choose whether to organize oredit photos. The bottom of the screen always has links for signing into yourPhotoshop.com account, if you have one. You can’t bypass the Welcome screen just byclicking the upper-right Close (X) button. If you do that, the screen goes away—but sodoes Elements. Fortunately, you’ve got options: The box on page 18 tells you how topermanently say goodbye to this screen.In the upper-right part of the Editor’s main window is a button that you can clickto launch the Organizer or switch over to it once it’s running. The button looks like awhite square with smaller squares on it.

If you want to do the opposite—get photos fromthe Organizer to the Editor—select the photo(s) and then eitherright-click/Control-click one of the selected thumbnails and choose “Edit with PhotoshopElements”, or go to Fix→Edit Photos, or click the down arrow to the right of the word“Fix” and choose Full, Quick, or Guided Edit. Whichever method you use, your photo(s)appear in the Editor so you can work on them. You can also just click the Editor or theOrganizer icon in the Windows taskbar or the Mac Dock to switch from one to the other.Adobe built Elements around the assumption that most people work on their photos inthe following way: First, you bring photos into the Organizer to sort and keep track ofthem.

Then, you open photos in the Editor to work on them and save them back to theOrganizer when you’ve finished making changes. You can work differently, of course—likeopening photos directly in the Editor and bypassing the Organizer altogether—but you mayfeel 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 findthey’re getting in your way.)The Welcome screen can also serve as your connecting point for signing ontoPhotoshop.com. Has more about thiswebsite, but for now you just need to know that a basic account is free if you’re in theUnited States (it’s not available in other countries), and it gives you access to allthe interesting features in Elements 9 that require an Internet connection.

If you’resigned into Photoshop.com already, you can see how much of your online storage you’vealready used by looking at the graph at the bottom of the Welcome screen. There’s also a reminder of your personal URL atPhotoshop.com and links to online help, 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 just forthat. TipAfter you create your Photoshop.com account, you may have trouble with the Welcome screen ifyou’re not connected to the Internet when you start Elements. If the Welcome screenhangs or freezes while trying to gather your account info, just quit it (in Windows, you may need to do this in Windows’ Task Manager—pressCtrl+Alt+Del in XP or Ctrl+Shift+Esc in Windows 7 or Vista to call it up), then followthe directions in the box below for starting the Editor or the Organizer directly fromthe program file. On a Mac, click the Welcome Window’s Dock icon (if you can’t tell itfrom the Editor’s icon, it’s the one that says “9.0” at the end of its name when youhover your mouse over it), then choose Force Quit.

Frequently Asked Question: Say Goodbye to the Welcome ScreenHow do I get rid of the Welcome screen?If you use the Windows version of Elements and you get to feeling welcomed enough,you may want to turn off the Welcome screen so you don’t have to click through itevery time you start the program. Unfortunately, you can’t:Every time you startElements, you see the Welcome screen. There’s a button in the upper-right corner ofthe Welcome screen that gives you some control over how it behaves, but only to saywhether it should launch along with the Editor or Organizer (yourchoice), or simply let you choose which one to launch (its standard behavior). There’sno option for “Don’t show this screen again”. If this is unwelcome news, don’t fret:There’s a workaround.To directly launch the Editor or the Organizer, you just need to create a desktopshortcut.

Go to C:Program Files Program Files(x86) if you have a 64-bitsystemAdobePhotoshop Elements 9.0, and then find the actualapplication file (the one ending in.exe) for the Editor or theOrganizer. Right-click it, and then choose Create Shortcut.

Windows adds a directshortcut to the component of your choice, right on the desktop. In the future,double-click this shortcut to launch your preferred part of Elements. (You can makeshortcuts for both the Editor and the Organizer, if you like.) In Windows 7, you can keep eitherpart of the program in the Taskbar at the bottom of your screen. To do that, whenElements is running, right-click its icon in the Taskbar and choose “Pin this programto taskbar”.Mac folks are spared this extra housekeeping, because you don’t see the Welcomescreen unless you go looking for it, as described in.

If You Have a MacOn a Mac, navigating between the Editor and the Organizer works just as described above, except that you don’t normally haveto go through the Welcome screen to get to them. Double-clicking the Adobe Photoshop Elementsicon (in either Applications→Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 or in the Dock) sends youdirectly to Elements’ Editor, described on. Organizing Your PhotosThe Organizer is where your photos come into Elements and go outagain when it’s time to print or email them. The Organizer catalogs and keeps track ofyour photos, and you automatically come back to it for many activities that involvesharing your photos, like emailing them or creating anonline gallery of them. The Organizer’s main window, which is sometimes calledthe Media Browser, lets you view your photos, sort them into albums,and assign keyword labels to them.

(In some previous versions of Elements it was calledthe Photo Browser, so you may hear that term, too.)The Organizer has lots of really cool features you’ll learn about throughout this bookwhen they’re relevant to the task at hand. The next chapter shows you how to use theOrganizer to import and organize your photos, and online Appendix B covers all theOrganizer’s different menu options. What’s more, if you sign up for a Photoshop.comaccount , then you can access and organize your photosfrom any computer, not just at home.

Figure 1-3. Adobe’s Photo Downloader is yet another program you get when you installElements. Its job is to pull photos from your camera (or other storage device) intothe Organizer. In Windows, to use the Downloader, just click “Organize and Edit usingAdobe Elements Organizer 9.0” (circled) in Windows 7’s or Vista’s AutoPlay dialog box.(If you use Windows XP, you’ll see a dialog box with similar options.) After theDownloader does its thing, you end up in the Organizer.On a Mac, you launch the Downloader from the Organizer by going to File→“Get Photosand Videos”→“From Camera or Card Reader”. There’s no way to make the Downloader runautomatically on a Mac—you have to go through the Organizer to start it.You can read more about the Downloader in. If you plan to use the Organizerto catalog photos and assign keywords to them, then reading the section on theDownloader can help you avoid hair-pullingmoments. Up To Speed: Where the Heck Did Elements Go?If you’ve installed Elements but can’t seem to figure out how to launch it, noproblem.Windows automatically creates a shortcut to Elements on your desktop when youinstall the program. (If you need help installing Elements, turn to Appendix A.) Youcan also go to the Start menu, and then click the Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 icon.If you don’t see Elements in the Start menu, then click the arrow next to AllPrograms, and you should find it in the pop-up menu.On a Mac, go to Applications→Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 and double-click AdobePhotoshop Elements to start the Editor.

To launch the Organizer, it’sApplications→Adobe Elements 9 Organizer instead. And you can create permanent Dockicons for either component, as explained on. Figure 1-4. The Media Browser is your main Organizer workspace. Click the Create tab in theupper right and you can choose to start all kinds of new projects with your photos,or click the Share tab for ways to let other people view your images.

Click thearrow to the right of the Fix tab (circled) for a menu that gives you a choice ofgoing to Quick Fix, Guided Edit, or Full Edit. The Fix tab gives you access to somequick fixes right in the Organizer, too. The Organizer also gives you another way tolook at your photos, Date view, which is explained in Chapter 2.Automatically back up and sync your photos.Worrywarts and travelers, prepare to be amazed: You can set Elements to sync thephotos from your computer to storage space on Photoshop.com, providing you with a backup, just in case. What’s more, youcan upload photos to your albums from other computers, and theyautomatically appear in the Organizer the next time you start Elements. See for more about how to use this niftyfeature.Access your photos from other computers.

Photoshop 9.0 Cs2 Free Download

When you’re not at home, pop over to your Photoshop.com account to see and even organize your photos. That way, whenyou visit friends, you don’t need to lug your computer along—just log into youraccount from their computers.Download lots of extra goodies. The Content panel displays thumbnails foradditional backgrounds, frames, graphics, and so on, that you can download right fromPhotoshop.com.Get lots of great free advice. Call up thePhotoshop Inspiration Browser ,and you can choose from a whole range of helpful tutorials for all sorts of Elementstasks and projects. NoteThese Photoshop.com features are available only in the United States, though Adobesays it plans to expand these offerings worldwide.

As of this writing, folks outside theUnited States can get some of the same features, like the ability to create onlinealbums and galleries, at Adobe’s Photoshop Showcase site. (See formore about the regional differences.)You automatically get your Photoshop.com account when you register Elements. If youcreated an Adobe ID the first time you launched Elements (Windows) or when you installedElements (Mac), or entered an existing Adobe ID, you’re all set.If you didn’t create an account or log in, here’s how to sign up for a free account.Tell Adobe you want an account.Just click the Create New Adobe ID button on the Welcome screen or at the top of either the Organizer or theEditor’s main window. (FYI, this also registers Elements—see ).In the window that opens, fill in your information to createyour Adobe ID.You need to enter the usual—address, phone, email, and so on—and pick what you’dlike as your unique Adobe web address. (Hint: something like is probably already taken, so you mayneed to try a few alternatives. When you click Create Account, you get a message ifthe web address you chose is already in use.) Turn on the checkbox that says you agreeto Adobe’s terms and conditions. Finally, for security purposes, you need to enter thetext you see in a box on the sign-up screen.Create your account.Click the Create Account button.

Adobe tells you if it finds any errors in whatyou submitted and gives you a chance to go back and fix them.Confirm your account.You’ll get an email from Adobe that contains a link. Just click the link toconfirm that you want to create an account, and you’re all set. (You need to click thelink within 24 hours of creating your account, or you may have to start the wholeprocess again.)Once you have an account, you can get to it by clicking Sign In at the top of theEditor or Organizer. After you sign in, you see “Welcome ”instead of “Sign In”, and you can click that to go to your account settings. (You can alsolook at the bottom of the Welcome screen to see how much free space you have left, asshown in.). Figure 1-5. Once you sign into your Photoshop.com account, the bottom of the Welcome screentells you how much of your online storage space you’re currently using and includes alink for managing backups and syncing.

You also see a link to your personalized webaddress (a helpful reminder).A free Photoshop.com account is a pretty nice deal. It includes 2 GB of space onAdobe’s servers for backing up and storing your photos. You can also upgrade to a paid account (calledPlus), which gives you more of everything: more template designs for Online Albums, moredownloads from the Content panel, more tutorials, and more storage space (20–100 GBdepending on what level membership you choose).

However, the Plus account costs $49.99 peryear for 20 GB, and more storage costs more than that, so you might want to try the freeaccount first to see whether you’ll really use it enough to justify the expense. Becausethis service has been available for a few years now, you can also investigate Adobe’sPhotoshop.com support forum as well as the independentforum sites to see what people think aboutit. TipIf you haven’t bought Elements yet, Adobe tends to promote the combination ofElements and a Plus account on their website. You have to hunt around a bit to findwhere to purchase Elements with just the free account, so look carefully before you buyif you don’t want to start off with the paid version.Once you sign into your account, Elements logs you in automatically every time youlaunch the program. If you don’t want that to happen, just click your name at the top ofthe Elements window (in either the Organizer or Editor), and then, in the window that opens, choose Sign Out. The Full Edit window gives you access toElements’ most sophisticated tools.

You have far more ways to work on your photo inFull Edit than in Quick Fix, and if you’re fussy, it’s where you’ll do most of yourretouching work. Most of the Quick Fix commands are also available via menus in the Full Editwindow.Quick Fix. For many Elements beginners, Quick Fix ends up being theirmain workspace.

It’s where Adobe has gathered together the basic tools you need toimprove most photos. It’s also one of the two places in Elements where you can chooseto have a before-and-after view while you work (Guided Edit, described below, is theother). Gives you all the details on using QuickFix.Guided Edit. This window can be a big help if you’re a newcomer to Elements. Itprovides step-by-step walkthroughs of popular projects such as cropping your photosand removing blemishes from them. In Elements 9, it also hosts some fun specialeffects and workflows for more advanced users, too (see ).The rest of this chapter covers some of the Editor’s basic concepts and key tools.

Panels, Bins, and TabsWhen you first open the Editor, you may be dismayed at how cluttered it looks.There’s stuff everywhere, and maybe not a lot of room left for the photos you’reediting, especially if you have a small screen. Don’t fret: One of Elements’ bestfeatures is the way you can customize the Editor’s workspace. There’s practically nolimit to how you can rearrange the Editor. You can leave everything the way it is if youlike a cozy area with everything at hand. Or, if you want a Zen-like empty workspacewith nothing visible but your photo, you can move, hide, and turn off almost everything.shows two different viewsof the same workspace.What’s more, you can hide everything in your workspace exceptfor your images and the menu bar: no tools, panels, or Options bar. This is handy whenyou want a good, undistracted look at what you’ve just done to your photo. To do that,just press the Tab key; to bring everything back into view, press Tab again.

Figure 1-8. Two different ways of working with the same images, panels, and tools. You canuse any arrangement that suits you. Top: The panels in the standard Elementsarrangement, with the images in the regular tabbed view (page 101). Bottom: Thisimage shows how you can customize your panels. Here, the Project bin has been combinedwith other floating panels and the whole group is collapsed to icons.

Click a panel’sicon and that panel pops out so you can work with it, like the Project bin here. Theimages here are in floating windows (page 101). NoteYou may notice that in Elements 9 for Windows, the menu bar at the very top of theprogram’s window changes a little depending on the size of your monitor and whetheryou’ve got the Elements window maximized to fill your screen.

You’ll either see asingle row above the Options bar with the PSE logoat the left and the Arrange menu and the Photoshop.comlogin area at the middle of the screen (as in ), or these items may be in aseparate row above the menus that say File, Edit, Image, and soon (as in ). Both areperfectly normal, and you’ll see both arrangements in this book’s illustrations, aswell as seeing the Mac version, where the menu bar (the one that says File, Edit,Image, etc.) is at the top of the screen instead of being attached to the mainElements window. NoteIn older versions of Elements and Photoshop, panels were called “palettes.” Ifyou run across a tutorial that talks about the “Content palette,” for example,that’s exactly the same thing as the Content panel.You might like the Panel bin, but many people don’t. If you have a small monitor,you may find it wastes too much desktop acreage, and in Elements you need all theworking room you can get. Fortunately, you don’t have to keep your panels in the bin;you can close the bin and just keep your panels floating around on your desktop, or you can minimize them.Unlike in previous versions of Elements, you can’t close the Panel bincompletely in Elements 9, but you can pull the panels out ofthe bin and put them someplace else to give yourself more working space. If you usetabbed image windows , you can’t expand the image area to include the empty bin space, though—you haveto switch to floating windows to make use of that space. TipWhile you can’t collapse the Panel bin the way you could in previous versions ofElements, you can reclaim its space by pulling your panels out of the bin and goingto Window→Panel Bin to turn it off.

The downside of this technique is that you losethe ability to switch from Full to Quick to Guided Edit if you do this. You have togo back to the menu and turn the Panel bin on again to get those navigation buttonsback.To pull a panel out of the bin, drag the panel’s top tab; you’ve now got yourselfa floating panel. (You can float panels even if you haven’t turned on floating imagewindows.) shows how to makepanels even smaller once they’re out of the bin by collapsing them in one of two ways.You can also combine panels with each other, as shown in; this works with both panels inthe bin and freestanding panels.When you launch Elements for the first time, the Panel bin contains three panels:Layers, Content, and Effects. To see how many more panels Elements actually gives you,check out the Editor’s Window menu (the one at the top of your screen): Everything listed in themenu’s middle section—from Adjustments to Undo History—is a panel you can put in thePanel bin. Figure 1-9. You can free up even more space by collapsing panels accordion-style oncethey’re out of the bin.

Top: A full-sized panel. Bottom left: A panelcollapsed by double-clicking where the cursor is. Bottom right: The same panelcollapsed to an icon by double-clicking the very top of it (where the cursor ishere) once. Double-click the top bar again to expand it.When you select a new panel from the Window menu, it appears in the Panel bin if you’re using the bin, or floating on the desktop. In additionto combining panels as shown in, you can also collapse anygroup of panels into icons (see ). Then, to use a panel, clickits icon and it jumps out to the side of the group, full size.

To shrink it back to anicon, click its icon again. You can combine panels in the bin by dragging their iconsonto each other. Then those panels open as a combined group, like the panels in. Clicking one of the icons inthe group collapses the opened, grouped panel back to icons. (Combined panel iconsdon’t show a dark gray line between them in the group the way separate icons do.) Youcan also separate combined panels in icon view by dragging the icons away from eachother.Adobe sometimes refers to floating panels as “tabs” in Elements’ menus.

To close afloating tab, click its Close button (in Windows, the X at its upper right; or on aMac, the dot at its upper left) or click the little white square made of fourhorizontal lines in the panel’s upper right, and then choose Close from the menu thatappears. If you want to put a panel back in the Panel bin, drag it over the bin and let go when you see a blue line, ordrag it onto the tab of a panel that’s already in the bin to create a combined panelwithin the bin.Show Open Files. This menu at the bin’s upper left lets you determine what theProject bin displays: the photos currently open in the Editor, selected photosfrom the Organizer, or any of the albums you’vemade. If you send a bunch of photos over from the Organizer at once, you may thinksomething went awry because no photo appears on your desktop or in the Projectbin. If you switch this menu over to “Show Files from ElementsOrganizer”, then you’ll see the photos waiting for you in the bin.Bin Actions.

Photoshop 9 Remove Shadows

This is where the Project bin gets really useful, but it’s not easyto spot this menu. You get here by clicking the little four-lined square in thebin’s upper right. You can choose to use the photos in the bin in a project (viathe Create tab), share them by any of the means listed under the Task panel’s Share tab, print them, or make an album right there in theProject bin without ever going to the Organizer.

(You can also use this menu toreset the style source images you use in the new Style Match feature, explained on.). Figure 1-10. You can combine two or more panels once you’ve dragged them out of the Panelbin. Top: Here, the Histogram panel is being pulled into, and combined with,the Layers panel.

To combine panels, drag one of them (by clicking on the panel’sname tab) onto the other panel. When the moving panel becomes ghosted and you seethe blue outline shown here, they’ll combine as soon as you let go of your mousebutton.

(You can also make a vertical panel group where one panel appears aboveanother by letting go when you see a blue line at the bottom of the of the hostpanel, instead of an outline all the way around it like you see here.) Bottom:To switch from one panel to another after they’re grouped, just click the tab of theone you want to use. To remove a panel from a group, simply drag it out of thegroup.

If you want to return everything to how it looked when you first launchedElements, click Reset Panels (not visible here) at the top of your screen. Figure 1-11. The Project bin runs across the bottom of the Editor’s screen. It holds athumbnail of every photo you have open, as well as photos you’ve sent over from theOrganizer that are waiting to be opened. Here you see the bin three ways: as itnormally appears (top), as a floating panel (bottom left), and collapsed to an icon(bottom right). You can also click the Close button (in Windows, that’s the X at itsupper right; on a Mac, it’s the dot at its upper left), or right-click its tab andthen choose Close to hide it completely. To bring it back, go to Window→Projectbin.

Photoshop 9 How To Put Someone On Mt Rushmore

TipIf you don’t use the Organizer, then the Project bin is a particularly greatfeature because it lets you create groups of photos you can call up together: Justput them in an album , and then, from thebin’s Show Open Files menu, select the album’s name to see that groupagain.You can drag your photos’ thumbnails in the bin to rearrange them if you want touse the images in a project.The Project bin is useful, but if you have a small monitor, you may prefer to usethe space it takes up for your editing work. The Project bin behaves just like any ofthe other panels, so you can rip it loose from the bottom of the screen and combine itwith the other panels. You can even collapse it to an icon or drag it into the Panelbin.

(If you combine it with other panels, the combined panel may be a little widerthan it would be without the Project bin, although you can still collapse the combinedgroup to icons.) If you’ve used older versions of Elements, you know this is agreat improvement over the old, fixed Project bin. Image windowsYou also get to choose how you want to view the images you’re working on. Olderversions of Elements used floating windows, where each image appears in a separate window that youcould drag around. Elements 9 starts you out with a tabbed view, which uses something like the tabs in a web browser, or thetabs you’d find on paper file folders, but you can still put your images into floating windows, if you prefer (explains how).The advantage of tabbed view is that it gives you plenty of workspacearound your image, which is handy when you’re working near the edges of an image, orusing a tool that requires you to be able to get outside the image’s boundaries. Manypeople switch back and forth between floating and tabbed windows as they work,depending on which is most convenient at the moment.

All the things you can do withimage windows—including how to switch between tabbed view and floating windows—areexplained on. (Incidentally,clicking Reset Panels doesn’t do anything to your image windows or tabs; it onlyresets your panels.).

Figure 1-12. Like any good toolbox, Elements’ Tools panel has lots of hidden drawers tuckedaway in it. Many Elements tools are actually groups of tools, which are represented bytiny black triangles on the lower-right side of the tool’s icon (you can see severalof these triangles here).

Right-clicking or holding the mouse button down when youclick the icon brings out the hidden subtools. The little white square to the left ofthe regular Eraser tool here indicates that it’s the active tool right now. TipTo explore every cranny of Elements, you need to open a photo (in the Editor,choose File→Open). Lots of the menus are grayed out if you don’t have a fileopen.The long, skinny strip on the left side of the Full Edit window (shown back in on page 24) is the Tools panel.It stays perfectly organized so you can always find what you want without ever having tolift a finger to tidy it up. If you forget what a particular tool does, just hover yourcursor over the tool’s icon, and a label (called a tooltip) appearstelling you the tool’s name. To activate a tool, click its icon. Any tool that youselect comes with its own collection of options, as shown in.As the box on explains, you can have either a singleor double-columned Tools panel.

Other windows in Elements, like Quick Fix and the RawConverter, also have toolboxes, but none is as complete as the one in Full Edit. Power Users’ Clinic: Doubling UpIf you have a single-column Tools panel and you’d prefer a double-columned version or vice versa(maybe you don’t want your tools spread out so much, for example), just drag the Toolspanel downward to tear it loose from the Options bar, and then click the double arrowsthat appear at the top of the panel. If you had a single-row panel when you clicked,it changes to a nice, compact double-column panel with extra-large color squares (see). If you had two columnswhen you clicked, it becomes one long, svelte column.Be careful, though—you can close the Tools panel just like any other panel byclicking the Close button (the X) at the panel’s upper right (on a Mac, it’s the dotat the panel’s upper left).

(To bring it back, go to Window→Tools.) You can also movethe Tools panel like any other panel, but you can’t combine it with other panels orcollapse it. If you want to hide it temporarily, press the Tab key and it disappearsalong with your other panels; press Tab again to bring it back.

NoteIf you’ve used Elements 5 or earlier, you’ll notice an important difference ingetting to subtools in Elements 9: You can’t switch from one tool in a subgroup toanother by using the Options bar anymore. Now you can choose a tool from a group onlyby using the tool’s pop-out menu in the Tools panel, or by pressing its shortcut keyrepeatedly to cycle through the tool’s subgroup.

Stop tapping the key when you see theicon for the tool you want.Don’t worry about learning the names of every tool right now, but if you want to seethem all, they’re on display in. It’s easier to remember what a tool is once you’ve used it.

And don’t be overwhelmedby all of Elements’ tools. You probably have a bunch of Allen wrenches in your garagethat you only use every year or so. Likewise, you’ll find that you tend to use certainElements tools more than others. Figure 1-14. The mighty Tools panel. Because some tools are grouped together in the same slot(indicated by the little black triangles next to the tool icons), you can’t ever seeall the tools at once. For grouped tools, the icon you see is the one for the lasttool in the group you used. (This Tools panel has two columns; the box on page 32explains how to switch from one column to two.

In Elements 9, a double-columned paneldoesn’t save you any space, though, since the Tools panel is just as long—it simplyhas a lot of empty space at the bottom.). TipYou can save a ton of time by activating tools with their keyboard shortcuts, since you don’t have to interrupt what you’re doing totrek over to the Tools panel. To see a tool’s shortcut key, hover your cursor over itsicon. A label pops up indicating the shortcut key (it’s the letter to the right of thetool’s name). To activate the tool, just press the appropriate key. If the tool youwant is part of a group, all the tools in that group have the same keyboard shortcut,so just keep pressing that key to cycle through the group until you get to the toolyou want.

Frequently Asked Question: The Always-On ToolboxDo I always need to have a tool selected?When you look at the Tools panel, you’ll probably notice that one tool’s icon is highlighted,indicating that the tool is active. You can deactivate it by clicking a differenttool. But what happens when you don’t want any tool to be active?How do you fix things so that you don’t have a tool selected?You don’t. In the Editor, one tool always has to be selected, so you probably wantto get in the habit of choosing a tool that won’t do any damage to your image if youclick it accidentally. For instance, the Pencil tool, which leaves a spot or linewhere you click, probably isn’t a good choice.

But the Marquee selection tool , the Zoom tool , and the Hand tool areall safe bets. When you open the Editor, Elements activates the tool you were usingthe last time you closed the program. Choose Help→Photoshop Elements Help or press F1/⌘-? When you do, Elementslaunches your web browser, which displays Elements’ Help files, where you can searchor browse a topic list and glossary. The Help menu also contains links to onlinevideo tutorials and Adobe’s support forum for Elements.Tooltips. When you see a tooltip pop up underyour cursor as you move around Elements, if the tooltip’s text is blue, that meansit’s linked to the appropriate section in Elements’ Help.

You can click blue-texttooltips for more information about whatever your cursor is hovering over.Dialog box links. Most dialog boxes have a fewwords of bright blue text somewhere in them.

That text is actually a link toElements Help. If you get confused about what the Remove Color Cast feature does,for instance, then, in the Remove Color Cast dialog box, click the blue words “colorcast” for a reminder.

Figure 1-15. Guided Edit gives you step-by-step help with basic photo editing. Just usethe tools that appear in the right-hand panel once you choose an activity, likethe ones shown here. As with the Quick Fix, you can change the view to Before& After; simply use this pop-out menu (where the cursor is) to selectthe view you want.Choose what you want to do.Your options are grouped into major categories like Basic Photo Edits andColor Correction, with a variety of specific projects under each heading.

Justclick the task you want in the list on the right side of the window, and the paneldisplays the relevant buttons and/or sliders for the task you selected.Make your adjustments.Simply move the panel’s sliders and click its buttons till you like what yousee. If several steps are involved, then Elements shows you only the buttons andsliders you need to use for the current step, and then switches to a new set ofchoices for the next step as you go along. If you need to adjust your view of yourphoto while you work on it, Guided Edit has a little toolbox with the Hand and Zoom tools tohelp you out.If you want to start over, click Reset. If you change your mind about thewhole project, click Cancel.Click Done to finish.If there are more steps, then you may see another set of instructions.

If yousee the main list of topics again, you’re all through. Don’t forget to save yourchanges. To close your photo, pressCtrl+W/⌘-W, or leave it open and switch to another tab to share it or use it in aproject. The Inspiration BrowserYou’ve probably noticed the little text alerts that zip in and out at the bottomof both the Editor and the Organizer windows. If you click one, up pops the AdobeElements Inspiration Browser, a mini-program that lets you watch tutorials, as you cansee in.

You need aPhotoshop.com account (available only to U.S. Residents; see ) to use the Browser.

(If you call up the Browser andyou change your mind about using it, or if you don’t have an account, press the Esckey to close it.) It’s well worth checking out, because the Browser is a directconnection to a slew of tutorials about things you might want to do with PhotoshopElements or Premiere Elements (Adobe’s movie-editing program). Figure 1-16. The Inspiration Browser offers a wealth of tutorials on many differentElements-related topics. Some are videos, and others are in PDF format.The first time you start the Inspiration Browser, you may see a license agreement for yetanother program: Adobe AIR, which lets other programs show you content stored onlinewithout you having to launch a web browser and navigate to a website.

(Adobe AIR gotinstalled automatically along with Elements.)This process may seem like a lot of work, but it’s well worth the effort, sinceyou can find tutorials on everything from beginner topics like creating albums toadvanced subjects like working with Displacement Maps (a sophisticated technique usedfor things like making your photo look like it’s painted on a brick wall, or making apage of text look like a crumpled newspaper). The tutorials are all in either PDF orvideo format. You’ll see tutorials from well-known Elements gurus here, butanyone can submit a tutorial for the Inspiration Browser. So ifyou figure out how to do a project you think might be useful to others, you can createa tutorial and send it in for approval by clicking the “Submit a Tutorial” button andentering the requested information in the window that appears. (You need to createyour tutorial as either a PDF or, for a video, in the Flash FLV format.)You can search for tutorials using the box on the Browser’s left, or click AllTutorials and then filter them by category or product (so you don’t see PremiereElements topics if you have only Photoshop Elements, for example). You can also clickon one of the column headings to see the available tutorials arranged by title,author, difficulty, date posted, category, type (video or PDF), or the average starrating people have given it. Use the buttons at the window’s upper right to change theview from a list to thumbnails (info about each tutorial appears below itsthumbnail).The Inspiration Browser is a wonderful resource and may well give you most of theElements help you need beyond this book.

UndoNo matter where you are in Elements, you can almost always change your mind aboutwhat you just did. Press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z, and the last change you made goes away.

PressingCtrl+Z/⌘-Z works even if you’ve just saved your photo, but only while the image isstill open—if you close the file, your changes are permanent. Keep pressing Ctrl+Z/⌘-Zand you keep undoing your work, step by step.If you want to redo what you just undid, press Ctrl+Y/⌘-Y.These keyboard shortcuts are great for toggling changes on and off while you decidewhether you want to keep them. The Undo/Redo keystroke combinations work in both theOrganizer and the Editor.

Figure 1-17. For a little time travel, just slide the pointer on the left (it’s below thecursor here) up and watch your changes disappear. You can only go back sequentially.Here, for instance, you can’t go back to the Crop tool without first undoing whatyou did with the Paint Bucket and the Eraser. Slide the pointer down to redo yourwork. You can also hop to a given spot in the list by clicking the place where youwant to go instead of using the slider.This panel holds a list of the changes you’ve made since you opened your image.Just drag the slider up and watch your changes disappear one by one as you go. Likethe Undo command, Undo History even works if you’ve saved your file: As long as youhaven’t closed the file, the panel tracks every action you take.You can also slide the pointer the other way to redo changes that you’ve undone.Be careful, though: You can back up only as many steps as Elements is set toremember. The program is initially set up to record 50 steps, but you can change thatnumber by going to Edit→Preferences→Performance→History & Cache/PhotoshopElements→Preferences→Performance→History & Cache and adjusting the HistoryStates setting.

You can set it as high as 1,000, but remembering even 100 steps mayslow your computer to a crawl if you don’t have a superpowered processor, plenty ofmemory, and loads of disk space. If Elements runs slowly on your machine, thenreducing the number of history states it remembers (try 20) may speed things up abit. The one rule of ElementsAs you’re beginning to see, Elements lets you work in lots of different ways.What’s more, most people who use Elements approach projects in different ways. Whatworks for your neighbor with her pictures may be quite different from how you’d workon the very same shots.

But you’ll hear one suggestion from almost every Elementsveteran, and it’s an important one: Never, ever work on your original.Always, always, always make a copy of your image and work on thatinstead.The good news is that if you store your photos in the Organizer, you don’t need toworry about accidentally trashing your original. If you save your files asversion sets , Elementsautomatically creates a copy when you edit a photo that’s cataloged in the Organizer,so that you can always revert to your original.

You can search for Help topics within Photoshop Elements 9.Key Concepts: When you choose Help→Key Concepts, a Web page opens in your default Web browser and provides many Web pages with definitions of terms and concepts.Support: This menu command takes you to the Adobe Web site, where you can find information about Photoshop Elements, problems reported by users, and some work-around methods for getting a job done.You can find additional Web-assisted help information by clicking Photoshop Elements Online and Online Learning Resources. The vast collection of Web pages on Adobe’s Web site offers you assistance, tips and techniques, and solutions to many problems that come with editing images.

Be sure to spend some time browsing these Web pages.Video Tutorials: Choose Help→Video Tutorials to open a Web page where videos for common tasks are hosted on Adobe’s Web site.Forum: Choose Help→Forum to explore user comments and questions with answers to many common problems.Using ToolTipsWhile you move your cursor around tools and panels, pause a moment before clicking the mouse. A slight delay in your actions produces a ToolTip. Photoshop Elements provides this sort of dynamic help when you pause the cursor before moving to another location.