Photoshop Editor-basic

Basic Workflow:

Workflow: Under Enhance

1) Auto Contrast
2) Auto Color
3) Auto tone
4) Adjust Lighting > Shadows and Highlights
5) Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Sat

Burning an Dodging

Using the dodge and burn tools you can darken and lighten parts of your image with a brush tool.


Basic Adjustments and tools:  Use this image

Crop Tool
Use this tool to crop your image, and correct for crookedness.

  1. Click and drag to define an area to crop
  2. The darkened area outside your "bounding box" will be eliminated
  3. Put you cursor beyond one of the corners to activate the rotate feature, then simply click and drag to rotate the bounding box in such a way as to compensate for the crookedness in your image

Rotate Function
Image>Rotate
Use this to rotate a photograph 90degrees at a time

Color Variations
Enhance > Adjust Color > Color Variations
This will provide the most comprehensive color correction tool in photoshop elements.  You will notice that it not only offers you examples of what you image will look like with different choices, but will allow you control over shadows/midtones/highlights, as well as saturation.

Remove Color Cast
Enhance > Adjust Color > Remove Color Cast
This is a great way to correct color when you have a sample of something that should be grey or black.  Try zooming in for this feature and clicking with the eyedropper on the grey camera.  It may take a couple of tries.  Zoom in with the zoom tool.

Unsharp Mask
Enhance > Unsharp Mask
This is the professional's choice for the best sharpening tool in photoshop.  Once you're in the dialog, you can control the manipulating the way the sharpen algorhythm works.  Avoid over sharpening.

Shadows and Highlights  (No use this image)
Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Shadows and Highlights
For an image that has too much contrast, you can use the Shadows and highlights to bring it back to normal.  Watch out not overdo it.

Adjust Levels
enhance > adjust lighting > levels
For an image with too low amount of contrast.  Notice that you can independently change the shadows, midtones, and highlights.

Adjust the arrows under the histogram to change the contrast.  Don't adjust the output levels.  You can tell that this image needs more contrast simply be looking at the histogram becuase it doesn't extend to the extremes.

Drag the arrows at the extremes to line up with the extremes of the histogram and you can "normalize" the contrast of your image.

Auto levels (auto button) can be nice, but can also affect your color.