Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual [Paperback]

Barbara Brundage (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 2009 | Series: Missing Manual

Ideal for scrapbookers, serious and casual photographers, and budding graphic artists alike, Photoshop Elements 8 is more powerful and easier to use than previous versions. But figuring out how and when to use the program's tools is still tricky. With this book, you'll learn not only what each tool does, but also when it makes the most sense to use it and why. You get easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for everything from importing photos to organizing, editing, sharing, and storing your images. And if a feature isn't all that it's cracked up to be, we'll tell you.

How do you use the Photomerge Exposure? How do Quick Fix previews work? With a gentle introduction to get you started quickly, and advanced tips to help you produce really creative work, this Missing Manual provides the answers you need.

• Get crystal-clear and jargon-free explanations of every feature
• Learn to import, organize, back up, and fix photos quickly and easily
• Repair and restore old and damaged photos, and retouch any image
• Jazz up your pictures with dozens of filters, frames, and special effects
• Remove unwanted objects from images with the new Recompose tool
• Learn advanced techniques like working with layers and applying blend modes
• Download practice images and try new tricks right away

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Photoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your digital images. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove red-eye, or distort shapes. With easy, step-by-step instructions, Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual gets you ready to make the most out of all the features available.

Photoshop Elements 8 Tips and Tricks

1. Highlight an object with color. It’s super easy to turn a color photo to a black and white image with only one colored object in it. In the photo on the left below, the waterlily looks fine but the dying leaves are distracting, so it might look better with only the flower in color. It’ll take you only a few seconds to get that effect. Just pick one of the Black & White settings for the Smart Brush and then drag over the lily. Elements does a pretty good job of finding the edges of the flower and makes it black and white, leaving the rest of the image in color. But if you turn on the Inverse checkbox before you drag, the lily stays colored and the rest of your image becomes black and white, saving you a lot of work.

2. Get rid of empty space. The new Recompose tool is great for fixing photos where squabbling siblings or cranky coworkers refused to stand close together. It’s also handy if you ever have to do how-to illustrations—you can easily get rid of extra space in a screenshot of a dialog box, for instance. You can also use Recompose to squish out unwanted elements in the middle of your photos, like in this seascape. In the pictures below, it brought the boats closer together and got rid of some of the condo sprawl in the background. Doing this left a little debris behind—a couple of stick-like lines from the largest condo—but one quick drag with the Healing brush, and there’s a lot more undeveloped beach left in the world.

3. One photo, two ways. The new Exposure Merge feature is great for blending together multiple (bracketed) exposures of the same scene, but if you only managed to get one good shot, you can process it twice in Elements’ Raw Converter—once for good shadowy areas, once for good highlights—and then merge the two into one image with good exposure throughout. You don’t even have to have a Raw format photo—it works with JPEG images, too. This is a JPEG photo where the interior was so underexposed that the lawn outside disappeared into a white glare when the interior was properly adjusted. So I made two versions, one for the indoor areas and one for the outside, then did the simplest exposure merge in Elements: an automatic merge. If I’d wanted to get fancy I could have had more control over the end result, but even the automatic merge is a big improvement over the first photo.

About the Author

Barbara Brundage is the author of Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual, and Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual, an Adobe Community Expert, and a member of Adobe's prerelease groups for Elements 3, 4, 5, and 6. She's been teaching people how to use Photoshop Elements since it first came out in 2001. Barbara first started using Elements to create graphics for use in her day job as a harpist, music publisher, and arranger. Along the way, she joined the large group of people finding a renewed interest in photography thanks to digital cameras. If she can learn to use Elements, you can, too!

Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (October 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596803478
• ISBN-13: 978-0596803476
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #139,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Algorithms > Digital Image Processing

More About the Author

Barbara Brundage is an Adobe Community Professional and a member of Adobe's prerelease groups for Photoshop Elements versions 3 through 10. She's been teaching people how to use Elements since it first came out in 2001. Barbara first started using Elements to create graphics for use in her day job as a harpist, music publisher, and arranger. Along the way, she joined the large group of people finding a renewed interest in photography thanks to digital cameras. If she can learn to use Elements, you can, too! Visit her blog at http://barbarabrundage.com for tips on using Photoshop Elements.