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Quick Edit Mode

Lesson 4 from: Photoshop Elements® 9

Lesa Snider

Quick Edit Mode

Lesson 4 from: Photoshop Elements® 9

Lesa Snider

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Lesson Info

4. Quick Edit Mode

Lesson Info

Quick Edit Mode

All right, let's pop over into quick fix mode. It's all canceled this. I'm gonna close my image. I'm gonna open up another one to play with. But before you that I'm gonna give you a little bitty tip I mentioned I'm a fan of keyboard shortcuts. So as I'm closing these windows, you're going to see me doing those with a keyboard shortcut. I'm pressing command of you on a Mac or controlled every on a PC, and that is the close window commands. Well, when you do that, if you've done any editing to your photo elements wants to you to save it. You know? Well, you haven't saved this photo yet. It doesn't want you to lose any of its changes. The changes that you've made Well, I'm a little bit lazy in that I don't want a mouse all the way up to this dialog box to click on these buttons here. So I'm triggering each one of these buttons by pressing the first letter of the button itself so I can trigger. Don't say by pressing D or cancelled by pressing C or save by. Pressing s just a little bit of i...

t a time saver for you. So I'm gonna press d to close that. And I mentioned earlier There's oodles and gobs ways to open photos and elements. I'm just gonna go ahead and choose the file Open Command and come over here into my cleverly named quick edit mode folder. And we're gonna open this picture right here. And like I said, you could click and drag the icon of the photo onto the elements application icon if he wanted to. You can open photos that way. All right, so here we have a photo, and we've already got our before and after environment set up. But we are over in quick mode. Quick edit mode. Rather, you can see that you have the same kind of before and after tools down the bottom left right down here. Okay, so those air only available in quick fix mode and in guided edit mode, Unfortunately, you cannot do the before and after in full edit mode. Dad, government. I know adobe. Okay, so let's go ahead and change that too. Not the vertical before and after horizontal their video. And incidentally, you can mouse around inside of these previews and your cursor will change to a little hand, which allows you to click and drag around to another portion of that image. That's a handy thing to do while you're zoomed in. Okay, so in quick fix move, we have the most frequently used at its over here as a series of sliders. And nothing is easier to use insiders. So it's very, very friendly way to edit your images. Any of your familiar with light room. This is very light room esque. Okay, over here on the right hand side, there is a scroll bar here on the right that I'm clicking and dragging. So if you don't see all the different panel areas that I'm seeing, then you can just scroll down. You'll also notice that there are little flippy triangles. It's very technical term flippy triangle, and you can expand or collapse these panels as well. Okay. See how balance collapsed in the nucleus clip that will triangle again to expand it. So all right, the way used this mode is that Adobe would very much like for you to just trot down these list of sliders and they've cleverly placed them in the order in which you want to use them, which is nice. Okay. However, Adobe would tell you that if you start out with the smart fix panel right here, which is supposed to be your way of telling elements Hey, elements. I don't care what you think. You need to do this image. Just look at it in Do whatever That's the I don't have time to mess with this slider. Theoretically, if you use this smart fix panel, you should not have to use the rest of these suckers. Uh, disagree of that because it's your picture, you know? So don't feel like if you use this one and you can't use the wrist, use those sliders until the photo looks get to you. Okay, so I'll just show you what smart fix is all about. We mentioned earlier there six ways to do the same darn thing. And that carries over into the quick, quick editing mood so you could click the little auto button right here in that really would be telling elements. Do whatever you think. OK, apply all the in. Theoretically, it goes through all the list of panels that you saw a moment ago. Color balance lining all that stuff so you can click the auto button and elements will apply whatever it thinks to the image. Or you can use this little slider here. We'll notice that there's a whole hash marks. Okay, there's these little baby hash marks here. That's all well and fine. But the question becomes, Well, how do you know which one to land on? How do you know how much of this smart fixed apply to your image image? Because that's what's happening here. These air, different strengths of the tool, different strengths of smart fix. Okay, So as I'm clicking and dragging the cider you're seeing, the change happened on my after image Over here can really handy to have both of these up now, so that's the second way to use it. So I'll drag that all the way back to the lift. Let's say that you'd really like to see previews, perhaps, of what all those different strengths of a smart fix might look like on your image. Will. You can absolutely do that. This was a change between elements eight and version nine inversion A. There used to be a little tick tack toe grid over here that you could click, and it would share your preview of different strengths of that tool. In version eight, we get a little triangle, OK, so you can still do it. So if I click that little triangle, then Elements is going to show me what that photo would look like at the different levels of smart fix. And you can see how I'm just holding or hovering over these thumbnails rather and the tick mark or the sliders changing. And I'm also getting a nice big preview on the left here, showing me what my image looks like at that strength of smart fix. So that's the third way to use that. So if you want Teoh, pick one of these to start out with, you could give it a single click and then a synergy. Click it. It applies that to your image. Okay, but I say apply. It's applied it temporarily because there's a big old reset button down there at the bottom of this work space, so you can still get out of these changes if you want. Okay, you'll also notice here in the smart fixed panel that as soon as I started messing around with this slider a check mark in an X appeared to the right of that panel name. This lets you apply what you did in that panel or to reject what you did in that panel. Okay, so not only do you have the big reset button at the bottom, but you can get out of these edits individually. Okay. However, if you move to any other panel, let's say I come down. Teoh, my lighting painful here. And I decide I want to use the shadows slider to maybe brightened my shadows. Or I want to use the highlight slider to dark in my highlights. Watch those check marks. They're going to disappear as soon as I make a change in the next box. See how they disappeared? They were automatically applied. Que samba undo one level there actually to you. Here we go. So you can either accept them on a panel by panel basis or automatically apply them if you move down to another panel. Okay. All right. So talk. Just a second here about shadows and highlights. This one's really useful. Let's say you've got an image that has zero detail in the shadows, or let's say you you shot somebody's photo that was backlit. And so they're incomplete shadow and everything else is well exposed. You can try to fix that using these sliders right here. So the sliders themselves give you an idea of what they do. See how the shadows slider. This was the original position. So it starts out on the dark end of it. Well, the slider is telling you what's gonna happen if you drag it in that direction. So if we drag it to the right towards the lighter end of the slider, and that's what's happening to your images. Well, okay. Causing back out this a little bit so you can keep playing around with that until you get it looking just right. So here I'm darkening the highlights. Okay, looks terrible. But if they needed a little bit of darkening that that would certainly get it done. OK, so my shadows to you can kind of see the difference in their really, really light shadows in the darker shadows. So again, no right or wrong with this, do what looks good to you. Your mid tones are gonna be your about 50% gray. Okay, so if you're thinking of highlights is pure. Why in your shadows or pure black, then your midterms you're gonna be about in between white and black. Okay, so I like to think of mid tones as my contrast boosters. Okay, so you can experiment with this slider to introduce a little bit more contrast into your image by dragging it to the right. And if you want a decrease contrast in your image, you could drag it to the left. So when you get it looking good, you can again click the little check mark to apply that panels changes or move on to the next panel. So I'm gonna cruise on down Teoh color. Then this was a fun one. Here again, we've got a saturation bar in a hue bar. You already know that Hugh is another word for pure color. So if we were to drag the hue slider around, we would actually be changing color. That's in our image. Now you might wonder why the color of the monument didn't change. That's because it really doesn't have any color in it. It's white. Okay, so you can actually change the color that's in your image by dragging that huge slider around come. It was something really psychedelic. And with the saturation bar, you can change the intensity of that color. How bright, or how light do you want it to be? And so let's say, for example, that I don't want to keep those color changes so I can just click the little X right here, and that's going to zero out the changes I made in that one panel. But keep everything else that I did earlier, which is handy. So let's go ahead and click that Little X, and then we go back to the more normal looking color that we had, and the next we've got down here is color balance. I wish this said color of light because that's really what it is. You're changing the color of light that you had when you captured the image. Because I don't know. The sun when it's out, has a color, you know, kind of a golden. And when it's cloudy, that's a different kind of color cast. So that's all that's going on here so you can change the temperature in the tent. Now I like my images toe look a little bit golden. I like it to look like the sun was actually out. So I like grabbing the temperature slider and dragon it a little bit to the right. See how, as I'm dragging it to the right, the images warming up, that's just my own personal preference. So you they like Your image is a little bit cooler. So as I drag that slider to the left more towards the blue tones and my image starts cooling off. So that's a great way to add a little bit of an artistic treatment to your image. Or, you know, further correct the color that you thought should have been captured in the image intent. You can change the the lighting Teoh be more tended towards green or more tinted towards magenta hot pink. And then last but not least, the very bottom slider here is sharpening. You remember when we were talking about suggestive workflow earlier, that sharpening is always the last thing you do because it's pretty darn destructive. Well, this particular slider is a great one to pop open those little previews because it's really hard to tell what the different levels of sharpening might live like on your image. So I'm gonna go ahead and click that little triangle to the right of the sharpened slider. And then I'm gonna have to scroll down a little bit more to reveal that. Don't forget about this scroll bar, Okay? So if you click just like I did, if you click that right triangle next to sharpen and you don't see all the previews don't panic. Just know that you have to scroll down in order to see them, and then I'll zoom in a little bit and we can see what the different levels of sharpening would look like on her image. Okay, so I'm gonna pick this one in the center here and then zoom back out siac and actually see it. So we've come a long way. I personally think the photo on the right looks a heck of a lot better than the one on the left. But again, it's your own personal opinion here. And when it comes to sharpening its OK, if your image looks a little bit too sharp on screen, like just a hair too sharp, because especially if you're printing it, the printing process itself is going to soften it. Okay, so I usually have my images look a little too sharp in them, and I print them that usually end up looking perfect. Okay, any questions on that part? Quick fix mode is really amazing. Used to be called quick fix mode. Now it's just quick edit, but it really is amazing. And it's no matter your your level of proficiency, you can take a you know, terrible flat picture like the one we started out with and create something beautiful, just the sliders. And again, you know, if you get down to the bottom and you think, well, that looks terrible, then you can just get out of it by resetting the whole menace or just by closing the document before before you save it. And then again, to preserve this image. Let's say you wanted to print it, and you might want to come back and do some more at its to it later. Definitely save it as a Photoshopped document. There was a question from, uh, Libera Nesa, who had asked, How did you get the thumbnails when you were doing smart fix? How did you get the thumbnails? The thumbnails will appear if you click any of these little triangles to the right. Now, if you're in elements nine, you are gonna get thes triangles. If you're in elements eight, you're gonna have a tick tack, toe looking grid lift of the slider, and it will pop open the same set of thumbnails. But if you don't have the triangle and you don't have a little tick tack toe greater than you're probably using elements six or seven, which didn't have that future quick question from a J. C I. NPV. What is the lightbulb icon on the far right for? Oh, it brings up the help the elements help. Thank you. Help, Warren Variety had asked, Can use the erase tool to modify your adjustments. Can you use the erase told a. Modify your adjustments? No, but that would be pretty clever. A question from Hadiya, uh, is sharpening done on Portrait's, too Yes, yeah, I like to sharpen everything. You every image. Lee needs a little bit of sharpening. Certainly portrait. It's since you know faces air, usually soft in nature. You wouldn't apply as much sharpening as you might to a photo like this, which has a lot of hard edges, hard lines, a lot of detail in it. Usually, when you sharpen portrait's too much, the client I'll let you know about it in a hurry because you know extra, Scharping brings out poor's and blemishes and everything. I've had a couple questions here, one from Amy Do who said the quick mode is grayed out. Another one from I Am Unique said the smart fixes grayed out. Do you know what could be going on with these people's shop elements? Why there are no I know it's going to be. They could check your check your image mode so you could go up to the image menu and choose mode. And make sure that your images in RGB color mode, which just stands for red, green and blue if your images in any other color mode, let's say, for example, if you gosh, if you've gotten ahold of a Jiff image and you've opened it, it may be an indexed color, and I don't believe any of these edits will work in invest color. So you may have to change that. That would be the first thing I would check. Great, thank you. Another question from a couple of folks Amy and Tory King can you batch at it and elements you cannot bet at it in elements. So And the reason why is that Adobe considers elements to be a consumer or that's a mere mortal image editor and batch processing is something that professionals would do. So unfortunately, you cannot match at it. That being said, if you happen to have a copy of elements for the Mac version eight or prior, then you got Adobe Bridge with it. It installed. He may don't even know sitting there on your hard drive, you can do some batch automation through bridge. So if you have bridge on your system and again, this would only be Fermat. Then you can do, um, batch editing through bridge. It's like you're tunneling through bridge to get the elements. Okay, I have another question from creative. Do you have to click restart immediately after each change for to take you back to your original? Do you have to restart immediately After each change, you have to click restart immediately after each change for to take you back to your original. I'm sorry. What did I say? Reset. Thank you. Reset is gonna take you back to the state your image was in when you entered the quick fix mode. Okay, So to get out of each individual panel change, you would need to click that little X that appears next to so, like, if I want to change the shadows here, see how now I've got the X next to the lighting that panel that I made the change in, then you would have to say no to that as it happens, but the reset button on the bottom is going to take you back to the state of the image. When you entered this mode, now that's still going to keep anything else you might have done to the image since you opened it. Okay, So like, if you were tooling around and guided edit mode, maybe you did some fun color effects or whatever, and then you came into quick fix mode and you hit reset, Then your image would go back to the state. It waas right when you entered quick fix mode with all that stuff that you did and guided it. But if you want to just bail out of everything and you know, not save anything and just get back to square one, then you could just close the darn image window and reopen it

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Adobe Photoshop Elements for Photographers
Keynote Slides

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing class, Lisa is fun to listen to and she knows her stuff. She made the confusion over so many parts of PSE march in straight lines so I could understand.

John Carter
 

Because Lesa did such a good job showing off the new features in Elements 9, I just had to buy it. And here I thought I would be happy with Elements 8 forever. Thanks, Lesa.

a Creativelive Student
 

How refreshing. I have taken Photoshop classes at photographic centers, community colleges, and online but they all left something to be desired. Lesa has designed a class that makes it all work. As a "hands on" learner, I am now be able to use the tools in Elements with confidence. Awesome! Just what I needed.

Student Work

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