9
 
Editing your images
There are many tools in Adobe Elements that will allow you to correct
problems with alignment and exposure, enhance
colours, remove blemishes
and generally modify your images in ways limited only by your imagination.

When you become an experienced user of the program, you will find
that you tend to work in the same way with all of your
images. This
is called
a workflow. A good workflow will mean you modify an image in a logical
sequence that makes the
changes you need. Of course, not every image
needs the same changes, so it will vary but you'll find yourself
using the
same tools in roughly the same order because it "feels" right.
Even if you don't use Elements, much of this applies to any
other image
editing software.

A suggested order for a workflow

Rotate correct horizontal or vertical

misalignment
Crop create the composition you want (keep an eye on
the resolution)
Contrast and correct any exposure problems
Brightness
Adjust colours correct any colour cast or other colour problems
Sharpen the editing process can soften the image somewhat.
Sharpening can restore crispness, but be
careful not to overdo
it! (Filter>Sharpen)

Elements gives you a quick way to achieve these changes, using the
Enhance>Quick Fix... command. This can give you
very good results in
very little time. However, you may want to have more control over the
changes and using the
individual controls will give you that.

Undo, revert and undo history

Almost certainly there will be times when you will want
to reverse a change that you have made. Elements provides several
methods
to do
this.

The Undo control

Edit>Undo will take you back to the way the image was
before the last change. This is a one-change at a time process. By
using the Undo button on the Shortcut bar you can go back a number
of steps – most of the time. Be aware there are some
things that
you cannot undo. So always remember to keep an original copy of the
image.

Revert

If you are unhappy with all the alterations you have made
since you have opened the file, use File>Revert to replace the
image
you are editing with the version saved on disk.

Undo History palette

This provides complete control over the alterations made

to your image. Each action is recorded as a separate step in the
palette.
Reversing
any change is a simple matter of selecting the previous step.
These steps can also be accessed through
the Edit>Step backwards and Edit>Step
forwards options.

Saving an image after editing

If your file has not be saved before, from the File menu, click
on Save (or just click the Save icon). This will display a
dialog
box which will allow you to
specify a name and a location for your file. After you have saved your
file for the first
time, you can click on
Save and the existing
file will be updated. If you want to save a copy of the file (under a
different
name or in a different location or both) then choose the
Save As option
form the
File menu.

It is good practice to work on a copy of a file so that, should

you make a mistake that cannot be rectified, you still have the
original
file
to
go back to (work on a new copy of it!!).
There are very many image file formats that you can choose to save
an image in. The ones you are likely
to find most
useful are:

PSD Photoshop's own format. The image

is saved in full quality and many advanced features (such as
layers)
are
preserved. It's a good idea to save in this format if you're
halfway through an edit and have to stop. It
does, however,
create a very large file.
JPG Significantly smaller than PSD files, but only saves
the picture data. All of the advanced Photoshop
features are lost.
You also lose some quality, but you can control how much to a large
extent.
TIF A popular image format that doesn't sacrifice
quality with compression, but file sizes are large.
GIF Very useful for graphics images with few colours
(can only store 256 different colours, whereas a JPG
stores up
to 16 million).