adobe elements help!! i want nice pics too!!

[brandinzac]

hello all,

i love to take pictures and now do so enough to justify the expense of some "extras". a few weeks ago i picked up adobe elements 5 and tried to edit some of my pictures. i see on the board here many of you get wonderful results by editing pictures, however, when i try to edit them, they end up worse than i started with. i would really like to learn some elements basics. does anyone have any reccomendations on websites, books, or have any tips or hints for me? any help would be greatly appreciated! thanks!

[zackiedawg]

Check out this site:

 

http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com

 

It has tutorials, walk throughs, projects, etc., as well as links to some good books for beginners.

 

A few suggestions right off the bat -

 

1. Do not ever edit, then save over, your original. Whenever you work on a shot, save it as a new file, that way you can always go back to the undamaged original.

 

2. Avoid multiple resaves - JPEG is a compressed format, so each time you resave a photo, it goes through another round of compression. Open an edited photo to change one thing and resave it, and you've just knocked down your file size and overall quality by another notch.

 

3. Make sure you are set to the highest JPEG quality setting. Usually, when you click 'save as', you have an 'option' or 'preferences' button. Click that, and make sure the JPEG quality slider is all the way to the maximum setting (least compression).

 

The rest is more advanced - and a good tutorial to know how to use the many tools should be helpful. But those three things above are the most important things for me - I let all my beginner friends know up front.

 

Good luck!

[brandinzac]

zackiedawg,

thanks for the helpful tips and the links! sounds like great information. regarding the link i see there is some free info, as well as some you have to be a subscriber for an additional charge. have you subscribed? do you find it to be worth the price? thank you for all of your help!

[zackiedawg]

I don't subscribe - not because I don't feel it is worth it, but because I don't use Elements that often, and what I do use I am already fairly familiar with as I've been using Paint Shop Pro for many years; I learned most of the tools and techniques on that system, so picking up Elements was just a matter of figuring out where the tools and icons were located - the functions themselves are very similar between the two.

 

I found that site when I first got Elements a year ago - it came with a software bundle. I had PSP8 for 3+ years, and had gotten pretty accustomed to it - it is slightly more fully featured than Elements 3, which is the version I got. I have used it on occasion, just to get used to it, and see if there were any differences. I just checked out some of the tutorials and such. The site was mentioned by a few members over on dpreview.com, who gave it pretty good reviews - I think some of them had subscribed.

 

Check out dpreview.com as well - there are a fair number of threads you can dig up on the Retouching forums that can walk you through stuff, and if you post questions about how to do something, I'm sure you'd get answers - they're usually pretty helpful over there. I visit the Sony boards there often - same screenname as here - and learned much of what i know about photographic technique and post processing from those boards.

[angelsfort]

believe it or not, youtube is another resource... type in "photoshop elements" in the search box, and you'll come up with videos on how to do certain things...

[kevrab]

Most of the items in PS 5.0 to help with photo quality are under the enhance column.

 

Here are a few tips that I have learned----

 

--If your photos are a little soft use unsharp mask. Go to adjust and try to stay in the 50-60% range or your photos start getting too grainy.

--Also to adjust your photos (be they light or dark) go to adjust lighting, then to levels. Now use the arrows (left for darker, middle--midtones, right to make lighter)to adjust the amount you need to make your photo better.

 

Our newspaper photo staff uses PhotoShop and those are the basics. If you just play around with things under the enhance column you'll get the hang of adjusting color, contrast, etc. Hope this helps.

[brandinzac]

thank you for the tips guys! my pictures are finally starting to come out like i want them to! thanks again!

[pierces]

I posted this response under the wrong thread the other day.

 

oooops...:p

 

These are a keyboard shortcuts that may help:

 

In photoshop products, one big shortcut is Ctrl + Left Click. If you hold down the Ctrl key and click on a layer (photo), the layer will automatically be selected. Ctrl + T will activate Free Transform and let you resize a photo (layer) or text. When re-sizing, holding down Shift will lock the aspect ratio so your pictures don't get stretched horizontally or vertically (unless you want the horizontal compressed to take a few pounds off of Aunt Betsy!) Moving a layer to the front is done with Ctrl + Shift + ] and to move it to the back use Ctrl + Shift + [ If you have a lot of layers and just want to move a layer forward or back one step, use Ctrl + [ or ].

 

 

 

Dave