Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction

How did everybody thanks for joining me for Photoshopped Elements nine for photographers, as you are about to find out, I absolutely love elements as we were talking earlier. It's fabulously user friendly and will help you do all kinds of things. And with the different editing modes that elements has, you can start out at one skill level, and the program lets you grow with your skill level through the different editing loans that were going to be checking out. So but first, I have a few things that I want to share with you. First of all, who the heck am I? Well, I've written a couple of books. I wrote a Vigo Honkin book called Photo Shop CS five, The Missing Manual pickle page thing, and my most recent book was I Photo 11. The Missing Manual and that's actually class we're gonna be having on Thursday. The publisher arrive. Lee has given me permission to give you all a fabulous discount, 40% off the print books, and that's really good, because that photo shop one is really expensive. A...

40% off the print books and 50% off of the E books with a special coupon code, you have to purchase it from O'Reilly dot com and then it check out enter the super secret code. Which is it gonna be secret anymore? Off de au th d to get that discount. Also, if you have not planned your family vacation yet when a child come on the day and you with me way are gonna have one heck of a fun trip, It's my first annual Danube digital photography, Cruz. And we're gonna be cruising from Budapest over to Nuremberg during all the holiday markets. So imagine the shopping that is gonna take place is gonna be fabulous. I'm gonna be teaching three of photo editing classes on board. We're going to talk about how to take better pictures, no matter what camera you have editing and elements and I photo and then I'm gonna be leading to photo walks on Teoh. Some level stops that we go into to put theory into practice. So if you're interested in that trot on over to photo Cruise with Lisa with an e dot com, also, I've got a slew of tutorials on my own website. Graphic reporter dot com There's probably 100 elements tutorials on there. So to find them simply go to the tutorials and quick tips, link at the top and then choose your software and you have a slew of step by step by step tutorial. So no matter your your proficiency level, you can absolutely follow along with that. Also, I'm pleased to say that I'm the chief evangelist for istock photo dot com, The world's most fabulous resource for royalty free imagery, vector illustrations, flash components, video and audio. It's really a multimedia one stop shop, so I always tell folks, you know, for photographers, Why would you need to purchase images from Istock Photo? Well, we're going to get into creating a lot of really neat collages. And if you had a shot of a romantic couple and you wanted to blend it in with a bed of roses, well, you might not actually have the bed of roses shot. So that's a good reason to use stock photography in conjunction with your own to create unique pieces of art. And I always tell folks if better roses is inappropriate, well hit, you can find anything that would be appropriate, even if it's a better nail on Istock photo. And speaking of Istock photo, the folks that creative life have a fabulous deal. If you goto istock photo dot com slash creativelive dot p h p creativelive dot PHP Then you can get 20% off of Istock photo credits. Yeah, that's a good deal there. Also, we mentioned that we're gonna be given away a couple of subscriptions to Elements Techniques magazine. This is a fabulous magazine. I absolutely love it. It's one of the few that I read religiously. When it comes in every month, it's thin enough that it's not overwhelming, so you don't get magazine stress, and it's got just enough advertising in it, I guess, to keep the publication afloat because the darn thing is filled up with tutorials and photography tips and all kinds of wonderful things. So do take check that out at Fulham Photoshopped elements user dot com. All right, so we're gonna like I should look at all the different editing modes that elements has. We're going to start out and guided edit mood, which is elements kind of friendly, like having a teacher sit beside you that we're going to move on to quick fix mood. Which elements took all the most frequently used correction tools for lighting and color and stuck them down on the right hand side of your screen as a Siris of sliders. And they were going to get into some really pro level stuff using full edit mode. But first we need to go through a spot of image editing theory, and it won't be too much. But there's a few concepts that will make your elements life easier if you understand going into and the 1st 1 is, what the heck are these digital images made out of anyway? Well, if you're looking here on the screen, we've got a cross section of this sunflower that I've blown up really far, and I've zoomed in probably about 600% or so. And at that zoom level, you can actually see the square dots of color, basically, for lack of a better way to put it that the image is made up of Okay, so this is what's getting captured in your camera blocks of color now, normally, those blocks of color so small that you can't see them individually. However, if you've ever printed anything off of the great interwebs, then it probably like it was made from Legos. So what controls the size of these pixels? That is the measurement called Resolution, and that's all resolution, really. Isso pixels can be any size at all, but it's the resolution measurement that controls how bigger has how small they are. And when you're sending an image to a printer, you want those pixels to be small enough so that you can't see them so it doesn't look like it's made out of Legos. But if you're not going to print that image, you're just gonna have it available online, like on screen or on your computer display in a slide show. Or if you're just gonna posted on the Web, then the pixels can be bigger because our eyes can only see so much detail and the screen works out about 72 pixels per inch, give or take, So 70 pixels branch is a pretty good size pixel, but on the screen, our eyes can't see the individual ones. But printers are capable of much more finer detail. So you want to make those pixels really, really tiny before you print. So all that bulls down to say that resolution doesn't make a hill of beans difference in anything until that image is headed to a printer. You just don't have to worry about that measurement at all, no matter what anybody tells you. So what we've been talking about here is high resolution for a printer is when you squish those pixels down where they're really, really small impact a lot of an into a tiny space. Another an analogy that I've come up with. Its kind of funny kind of goofy, kind of funny to explain resolution is if anybody has ever made cookies or anything involving brown sugar, you know how you can pour brown sugar into a measuring cup. And if you don't pack it down, let's say that the loose Granules come up to about the one cup line. That's kind of like low resolution, right? So then if you put your hand in that measuring cup and you pushed the sugar down, you've got the same volume of Granules, OK, but now they're smashed together. They're compressed and they're a little bit smaller, and they take up less surface space. So now that what was a one cup full of brown sugar now looks about like 1/2 a cup of brown sugar, and that's kind of what's going on in the whole resolution thing. So the higher the resolution number, the tiny year those pixels are and the more tightly compressed they are in your little measuring cup. Now I'm craving cookies, so low resolution is more like the brown sugar before you compress it down. The Granules are kind of big, loosely packed, so that's low resolution, which is great for on screen now. The reason this becomes so confusing is cause you can't see the difference on the screen. Remember how we set our eyes can only see so much detail. A 72 pixels per inch image looks exactly like a 300 pixels per inch image, and I love this photo. It's from I stopped with business people with Antanas, so that's why it's so confusing. But we're going to talk about exactly how to find out what the resolution is of your image, how many pixels you've got in your image, because that's really the most important thing. How many pixels do you have to work with by with and high? Okay, so we're gonna look at all that I wanted to touch on file types just a little bit before we get into editing, because that's also helpful because there's so many file types. Which one do you need to use? Win. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Most of the time, you're gonna be dealing with J pegs Okay, which is the 1st 1 here on this list. They can hold tons of color, which makes them perfect for photographs, any kind of continuous tone image. They're great for transferring over email or posting on the Internet. The only problem with J pegs is it's a lossy final type. So what happens always describe it as a stair step of quality. So if you were capturing J pigs with their digital camera, let's say that we start out on the top step of our quality staircase here. If you open up that J peg and you do some editing to it and in elements and you save it as another J peg, well, there's another level of compression that happens. Okay, so now you're dealing with a quality level that the lube it less than the 1st 1 If you were to open that J peg up, do some editing. Save it as a J peg. You're going down another staring quality, and you keep on going down. That's why when we first opened up, R J pegs and we start doing editing and elements were going to save them is what's called a Native Photoshopped Elements document. That way, no compression takes place. Know fine details getting thrown out. Um, so that's what we're going to be using. So the top one is J. Pig, and I've got a little example of what each one looks like, and I'm really not that vain. It's just the only picture I had in all three file formats back in my blonde days. So the next file type of my encounter is called Jif That's great for line are for email or web. It also has compression, so it will make the file size nice and small so you can transfer it things like that, always like Teoh described gifts as cartoons, they look like cartoon artwork to me, so solid blocks of color. You think of it like that. Ah, great thing about Jim is that it supports transparency as well, so if you've ever needed to erase the background oven image and save that transparency so that when you posted up on the Web, you can see through that image to whatever is on the background, you would use a Jif or a relatively new file format called a peeing. PNG, P and G has been around for probably 789 years. Now it's starting to get a lot more support. It used to be for years. Internet Explorer would not support transparency, pings or pings that had transparency, so it's taken a little while for them to really get on board. But people are now using pings more than gifts. Another great thing about Pings is that it's a lossless file format, meaning it's full quality. Okay, so that's a really great thing. So for photographers, you know, we want our photos to look as good as we can, you know, on the Web. So I I use pings more often than not these days for to get the best quality available. The other kind of file format you're gonna encounter is one that's been used for print my graphic designers forever and ever, and it's called tiff, and that is a lossless file format. But to be honest, you can print straight from elements. So unless you're having to send the image to somebody else to print that doesn't have fun shop elements, then you probably won't have to use tips at all because you can print like I said, straight from elements. So we're gonna be opening up the J pegs or raw file format images. Elements can open up a raw file as well. And But as soon as we start doing anything to those files were going to save them as a native Photoshopped document. And the extension is PSD that actually stands for photo shop document. And it's the same file format that the big, expensive version of photo shop uses. So that's this. A little ditty on file formats. They were just about to hop into elements. I wanted to spend just a couple of seconds on a suggested workflow. Now, that's all. This is a suggested workflow. Yala grownups, you have your own workflow. I'm not trying to change it. In Texas, we have a thing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it so but my own work so that I find that works good for me is to import. Obviously the photos first hard to edit them. If you have not yet imported them, then you're going to crop them. Because why spend time editing out a blemish or fixing a background or taking out? You know, whatever it is, if that part of the federal isn't gonna be in there to begin with. So I always cop, you know, get rid of the distracting elements and then I go into color correction, lighting correction. You want to get the color and tone looking right, and then that's when we're going to start retouching. We're gonna go in there and zap those bags and blemishes all the things that I wish I could do in the mirror in the morning. And then we're gonna look into special effects and my special effects. I mean things like color effects. One of my favorite things to do and I cannot wait to share with you guys is a partial color effect, and elements were re drain all the color out of the image and then reveal it Onley in certain areas. So that's the kind of effects that we're gonna be talking about in this handy enough. The effects actually live in a panel and elements called the effects panel. Thank you, Adobe, for making it clear. And then the last thing we want to do is sharpen our images. And we always say that for last because it's probably the most destructive thing that you'll do to your images when you're sharpening, just to spend the moment on what is happening when you're sharpening when you're sharpening and image elements goes in and tries to find edges. Now, when I say edges is looking for areas of really high contrast on this screen, the high contrast areas would be, you know, the white text next to the charcoal gray background. Well, when elements finds great areas of contrast like that thinks it's an edge. So it goes along in a very small with around what it has determined to be an edge, and it makes the bright part a little bit brighter along the edge, and it makes the dark park a little bit darker along that edge. So with that much change in your image, you can ruin your image in a hurry. So that's why we save sharpening for the very last step. Okay, so now it's hop on into elements. One more little note here. If anybody in the audience is using I photo for your organization. I photo is a fabulous. It's kind of like a database with the image editor plopped on top of it just kind of how I think of light room Teoh database with an editor plopped on top of it. You can use I photo for your important organization and tell it to do your editing in elements. So if that's of use, we've got when gentlemen here with it with a beautiful Mac book pro over here. So if you wanted to do that, you could pop open. I photo and you want to open I photos preferences that use I photo going onto preferences and click the advanced button on the top. Right, And you're going to see a little poppet menu next to you. The tagline Edit photos. If you give that a click, then I photo is gonna open up this open window that you see back here. And that's where you can go. Choose that other editor and that could be anything you want. Okay, so that's how you would do that. If that is of interest