Our goal in this book is to present an introduction to Photoshop Elements that lets you master those aspects of the program most useful to digital photographers. From this single perspective, the program becomes a great deal easier to master because you follow a single main road through the program. Detours along the many back roads of the program are for another time and another book.
We recognize that digital images can be edited in a wide variety of ways. In some cases you’re a photographer trying to improve an image by eliminating or reducing its flaws. In other cases you are a graphic artist taking an image to a new place, making it something it never was, or incorporating it as one element in a larger project. In this book we focus on the photographic aspects, but teach you the tools you need to do graphic arts.
This book is divided into six chapters.
- Chapter 1 Getting Started introduces you to Photoshop Elements’ screen display, tools, and basic procedures such as opening, saving and printing images. This chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book.
- Chapter 2 Fixing Your Images shows you how to evaluate tones, colors, sharpness, and other characteristics of an image and how to select the tools you use to fix or improve it.
- Chapter 3 Working with Selections shows you how to select areas of an image to copy, move, or enhance.
- Chapter 4 Working with Layers discusses how you use layers to adjust your images.
- Chapter 5 Painting and Drawing shows you how to use the program’s painting, drawing, and erasing tools used to improve selected areas of an image.
- Chapter 6 Applications is where you put the program to work to create images for the Web, create animated GIFs, send images by e-Mail, create a Web photo gallery, merge images into a panorama, create a PDF Slide Show, transform images, and much more.
