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Intro to Elements Workspace

So this is what it looks like. It my place right now thes air. The flat irons of Aldrin's is where my husband and I live. And I just wanted to use a pretty image to give you Ah, little overview of the elements workspace that we're gonna be working with you. There's a few things that are important to note. First of all, one of the most important things is we're gonna talk about this bar right here that goes along the top. Now, I'm in the edit workspace case so you can see these three tabs over here. They used to be color coordinated or are colored. So you know where you are in the previous version elements. But now they're all just nice charcoal gray. So this is the edit workspace, and you can see you've got three different modes to edit in which we're gonna look at in a moment. But here in full edit mode, I want to point out this guy up here of the top. It's called the Options Bar. Let me just zoom in a little bit. There we go. This is the options bar at the top of your screen and you'...

re going to see all kinds of different options up here. And what it does is it allows you to customize the currently active tool. And the currently active tool is the one that's currently selected or activated, rather over here in your tools panel. And that's another thing that I love about elements. Is the tools actually look like their real world counterparts? Okay, so this Bigelow Hawk and Pink Eraser, that's the vehicle honking. Pick a racer. You had an elementary school, so you would use that to erase things. He wanted to do that. So elements is very, very friendly. So for whatever tool you've got activated over here, we'll just click the eraser tool to change it, and we'll go back and look at the Options bar, See how they changed. Now I've got an option. Well, I've got a pesky tool tip coming out here and yellows what I've got. But I've got an option to change the size of my eraser. I've got a little poppet menu that lets me tell elements what kind of mode I want to put the eraser in, Whether I want it to behave like a block or a pencil or a brush brush is a good one toe. Leave it on and you can control the opacity of the eraser. So as we're changing tools, be congressman of this options bar. And probably the biggest troubleshooting tip I can give you is if a tool ever seems to have lost its ever lovin mind or is misbehaving in some crazy way. We're doing something unexpected. Nine times out of 10 you've changed something in the options bar and not changed it back. Okay, that's the big deal about the options bar. Is these setting stay changed until you change them back. Okay, so just kind of be aware of that here. You'll see. I've got two little tabs. I've got two images open so you can open a ZMA any images and elements as you want, and they will open as a series of tab documents. You can also see the images that you have opened in the project been which is at the bottom of the interface, solve Zuman and cruise on down here so you can see that so you can choose from the file menu and she's open to open your images, or you can double click your images, or you can drag and drop your image icon onto the elements icon to open them. And however many images you open up will show down here in the project. Been This is gonna be real handy when we start making collages and combining multiple images into a single elements document. That's where that's gonna come in handy. But for right now I'm going to collapse it all these different little panels or pains or whatever the heck you want to call them. They used to call pallets. Now they're pains. They're all collapsible and expandable. So if I give a quick double click to this dark grey bar next to the Project band not clicking on the Project Band Tab in the dark grey area next to it, see how the panel collapsed. Okay, it's not gone. It's just collapse like window shade. So if I want to expand it, all I have to do is double click in that same area to pop it back open. So until we get into collages, I'm gonna go ahead and keep mine collapse so that I get more real estate for editing. Now, These panels over here on the right hand side. Work exactly the same way. See, here's our effects panel. We talked about that briefly and are intro. So if I want to collapse it, I would need to double click the dark gray area right in here. Okay. Not on the tab. Just in that dark gray area to expand or collapse it. So if you for those of you at home, if you don't see exactly what I'm seeing, appear on screen, don't panic. Which is this ticket rule of thumb. Anyway, Don't panic and see if your panel is perhaps collapsed. Okay, if you don't see the panel at all, you can open these panels up again by going up to the window menu and choosing them from this list right here. So those are all the different panels that you can have open and elements at one time. So if one of them gets close, don't worry about it. You can open it up in the window menu now. I spoke about closing one of the panels. Well, how the heck do you do that? You're not stuck with these panels being nested or docked rather on the right hand side. you can put those suckers anywhere you want. So, for example, let's say I want to move my layers panel, which we will be using a lot when we get into full edit mood. Let's say I want to move it somewhere else. Maybe you've got two screens hooked up. You can move those panels over onto the other screen. All you do is click and drag their tab, and you can set them free and put them anywhere you want. And as soon as you let go, they are undocked now, and you can move it anywhere you'd like. And if you wanted to close it, you could click this tiny little microscopic round circle at the top lift. And if you want to re dock it back to the right hand side of your screen, you can click and drag this top area. This will area right here slightly darker than the expander collapsed area, and you can drive that little guy back over into that side of the screen and see how that blue line appeared. Soon as you see the blue line you can release and the panel will dock again. And as you can see you conduct them next to the original set. However you'd like to do that. I'm gonna go ahead and get mine back Over here. There we go. Lisa, have a quick question from the Internet. Uh, Joe Robbins has asked, Can you make the panel menu narrower to expand the display? Let me see if I know what he's talking about. You're talking about making the layers panel wider. Narrower? That was the question. Can you can you make the panel menu narrower to expand? I guess that doesn't like you can't were working in full screen mode. I think right here. Normally, when you have your cursor next to the lips next to the edge of the panel, you'll get a double headed arrow and you can click in drag either way to make it larger or smaller. Thanks, sir. All right. Any questions on the general workspace overview? OK, one more thing I wanted to talk about before we get away from this image is I wanted to spend just a couple more minutes talking about resolution and how you change it. I want to show you all something that I hope is going to make the resolution conundrum make a lot of sense for you. If you'll look down here at the bottom, left with this image, open with me, zoom in and show you elements has given me some information about the image here. So I can see here that I'm at a 33.33% zoom level. That's how far inter out I'm zoomed in my image. I can also see the physical dimensions of my image. Should I choose to print it? Okay, that's what this is telling me. If I wanted to print this image right now, it would be, uh, nearly 14 inches by 9.5 inches. Okay, so let's take a look at that information in another way. I'm gonna open up what's called the image size dialogue box, and this dialog box will become important to you because it's gonna let you experiment with the resolution measurement to see how big of a print you can actually get. So let's say, for example, I took this image. I didn't, but let's say I did, and I wanted to print it really, really big. Well, I would need to know how many pixels I had in the image to know if I had enough of him to make small enough so that I'm not going to see them individually in the print. A great way to experiment with that is to open the image size dialogue box. And you can do that by choosing the image menu, going down to resize and then choosing image size. Now, these little, uh, crypt is looking icons to the right. Those your keyboard shortcuts. Okay, so if you are a fan of keyboard shortcuts and I am so I'm gonna load you up on a slew of those today you can press command option I and open that dialogue boxes well, So let's go ahead and pop that baby open. And let's talk about some of the things that we're seeing in here. First of all, this style of box gives you a wealth of really important information. I will start at the top here where it says pixel dimensions Elements is telling us that the current file size of our documents, that's how much room is taking upon your hard drive is 21.3 megabytes. Okay, that's pretty honkin big. That's a hefty image, and I can see here that we've got ah, little over 3200 pixels by pixels. Okay, so it's probably captured at a you know, best quality setting on your digital camera. This second area right here, I really wish would be changed to, say print size because that's all it's talking about. Should you choose to print this document at this current resolution measurement, you would need a piece of paper that's about 9.5 by 14. Okay. And as you can see, these boxes are live, so I can change those measurements if I want to. Now there's another option down here that I won't talk about. Briefly. It's called re sample Image. Let me just zoom in so you can actually see it. I think by default, this setting is actually turned on, which means that if you make any changes to this information right here, the pixel dimensions of your image will actually change. Okay, so watch what happens here. So I believe it's usually on by default. So when I turned that on now I have got I can edit the with, I can edit the heights and of course I can edit the print size and the resolution. However, when you are changing resolution to try to get a print size that you want, you really don't want to throw away any pixels. Okay, so you want to keep this re sample image check box turned off, and that way you're gonna lock the pixel dimensions that piers the top like they were a second ago. OK, so I'm gonna go ahead and turn it off and look how the width and height boxes are no longer creditable. That gives you the ability to experiment with the resolution measurement all day long until the cows come home. I like to say, without ever altering your image quality because the pixel dimensions air locked. So let's take a look at what happens to our image if we were to change the resolution measurement to 72. And you all know that the higher the number, the tiny or the pixels. OK, so we're going to change it to lower resolution of 72 or not to be confused with 27. So at 72 pixels per inch, where they're fairly large, look how big the physical print size of that document would actually be so. That kind of helps illustrate that whole brown sugar in the measuring cup, how low resolution images can take up larger surface space with the pixels or big. When you start making those pixel small, you get much less physical surface space. So if we wanted to print us at 72 PP, I would need a piece paper 45 inches by 31 inches. That is a really large piece paper. So now let's take a look at what happens when we go up to 600 pixels per inch. So now, with a higher number, we're making the pixels super tiny and see how now we would only be able to get a print that's about 5.5 by four. So as the pixels get smaller, so do the print size that you can create. Okay, so that's just a little bit about resolution, and this is a fabulous box. Like I said, Teoh, go in an experiment and see how big you can print that image, because you may not be able to get it. Ah, high enough resolution with the pixels that you have to print in the size that you want, and that's a great way to say, Oh, well, maybe instead of an eight by 10 I think I'll settle with five by seven. Did you have questions? Ideal print size? Our resolution for printing? That's a great question. What is the ideal print resolution? I would say anything over 240 pixels per inch. Actually, you can go lower than that. The best way to find out is to do some experimentations on your own inkjet printer. But agents do a great job, really anything over pixels prints. But if you wanted to be on the safe side anywhere around 240 pixels. Prentice fun. For a long time, the gold standard for resolution for print has always been 300. A little bit of overkill on agents, but it certainly doesn't hurt, you know, to try 300. So if you can remember 300 great if not to forties, get Lisa. Yes, I have a question from Amy Do in the chat room, and a couple people have had asked, How do you get all the tools to show? People are saying they can't see all the tools that you have on their elements. Is there some? Is there something they're missing? Um, they may not be in full edit mode. Okay, so I must go ahead and cancel out of this. Any questions on the resolution? Okay, so I mentioned earlier. The elements has three different editing modes. So in two of those modes, you're not going to see all the tools panels in the layers, panels and all that kind of things. That's probably they're not in full edit mode. So let's just go ahead and take a peek at these other modes. SOG, wedding, click, quick. And this one, like I said earlier with quick fix mod elements, goes and grabs all the most frequently used adjustments for color and lighting. And it slaps him down on the right hand side of your screen as a series of sliders. Can You can use a little scroll bar, Teoh scroll up and down, but you'll notice over here on the left hand side that a whole lot of things disappeared on us. First of all, our options bar, I kind of got a little bit smaller and our tools panel, like half of our tools got tossed away. So elements in its own, you know, meaningful way is trying to keep you from being show overwhelmed by five million options, which, you know, it definitely can be overwhelming. All of these programs can. So is trying to hide options from you to keep you from being distracted. So that's quick, fix mood, and we're going to spend a little bit more time in that later on.