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The creative tutorial home of image wrangler, Lesa Snider.

Photoshop Elements

Pushing photos through text and other shapes - FREE

In this FREE video, I'll teach you how to easily use Photoshop to push photos through text and shapes. This technique works exactly the same way in Photoshop Elements, too. I hope you enjoy it!

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Photoshop Elements 9 for Photographers

In this class, you'll learn practical editing techniques you'll use every day with the affordable Adobe Photoshop Elements. By the end of this informative day of learning, you'll be able to turn the photos you have into the photos you need. You'll also learn how to move throughout the program and editing modes to suit your specific skill level and discover how to easily perform basic edits such as fixing animal white-eye, mastering Levels for color correction and understanding resolution once and for all.

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Blur Baby Blur!

Few techniques can draw a viewer’s eye to a focal point—or save a busy photo—like selective blurring. However, what we're really talking about here is creating a shallow depth of field, which is the result of shooting in macro or portrait mode, or from using one of your camera's manual modes to specify a small f-stop (f1.8, f2, f2.8 and so on). This opens your camera’s lens (or aperture) wide, thereby reducing the size of the area which can be in focus.

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Learning to Love Levels

Ed. Note: This article first appeared in the most amazing magazine ever, called Elements Techniques. It's packed full of tutorials just for Elements users, along with all kinds of photography tips. You can subscribe to it by clicking this link.

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Goin' Borderless!

Imagine gazing upon the perfect picture on your screen. You've cropped the distracting bits out of the background, color corrected it to perfection, smoothed a wrinkle here and zapped a bag there, and last but not least you've applied just the right amount of sharpening. It's breathtaking and quite possibly the best shot you've ever snapped in your life. Your skin begins to tingle, goosebumps travel up your spine and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the photo must live in print!

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Fun with Elements Effects

Photoshop Elements is such a wonderfully friendly program to use, though with all the little flippy triangles, buttons, and so on, it can be a challenge to find some of the built-in effects. Today we'll do a little digging and take a peek at how you can easily turn a full-color photo into an aged sepia tint, complete with a burned-in (darkened) edge vignette. Read on!

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Creating Coloring Book Art

It's easy to get caught up making creative projects for grown-ups like calendars, photo books, and scrapbook pages... but what have you made for the little ones lately? The next time the creative bug bites, consider converting your photos into art for the coloring book crowd instead.

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Burn baby burn!

So many filters, so little time. Oh sure, you may have perused The Almighty Filter Menu from time to time, but do you really understand their power and the plethora of special effects they unlock? Of course you don't. Nobody really does. Aside from texturizing text and creating cool edge effects, you can use filters to create realistic fire (it takes three of them to be exact).

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Retouching People

Last night I had the pleasure of doing a little ditty on photography and Elements for the Danbury Area Computer Society, and consequently meeting John Leko and his lovely mom Judy. John's wife Mayra couldn't make it so we took a photo to commemorate the gloriously geeky event (though she couldn't be there, she sent brownies--what a woman!). I took a peek at the photo and unfortunately, both John and I suffered from an acute case of shiny skin. You know, those hot spots that are a touch overexposed and leave you looking as if you're glistening when you've got no cause to be.

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