Photoshop Elements

Summer is the time to get out and have fun. Enjoy the beautiful weather, maybe visit a family reunion or two (or not!), and take a wonderful vacation to an exotic locale (perhaps the next city over) with a friend or your significant other. Whatever gets you out and about taking people photos, it's important know what to do with those pictures once you have them.

You've seen the photo effect everywhere, but perhaps couldn't call it by name: The original color has been drained from the photo, and replaced by a dramatic blue-ish, yellow-ish, green-ish, or purple-ish color cast. This is called a duotone, and it's been a favorite of Photoshoppers for years.

In the full-blown version of Photoshop there's a specific command for this effect; however I'm here to tell you that it's easily recreated in Elements. Oh yes, dear grasshopper; let me show thee how :)

I'm continually amazed at the functionality and goodies buried within Photoshop Elements. Take the Cookie Cutter tool for example. It's sole purpose in life is to place your photo inside a shape, just as if you'd taken a real-life cookie cutter and firmly pressed it onto your photo: you get a "cut-out" photo with that shape (scrapbooking, anyone?).

Now, at first glance the built-in Cookie Cutter shapes (which are really Custom Shapes) probably won't light your fire. There's a heart, a butterfly, a snowflake and 27 other non-exciting choices:

I have the attention span of a gnat. Seriously. I get bored easily, I rarely enjoy leftovers, and I make faces when I'm forced to do the same thing over and over again. That's why you'll see me using different frames -- edge effects, rather -- on photos throughout this site. I'll do the Black Hairline Pixel Edge thing for a bit, followed by the Soft Fluffy Feathery edge thing for a while, and I've even been known to hop over to iStockphoto and download real picture frames to plop photos into. Just anything to jazz things up.

The weather is warming here in Nashville, TN, and back home in The Great Country of Texas the Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes will soon be colorfully dotting the hillsides and medians. I do miss my home state, and with that in mind, a quick search on iStockphoto for "bluebonnets" yielded a gorgeous photo for use in today's tutorial.

In order to show off these bountiful blooms, I'm going to illustrate how to easily use Photoshop Elements to convert this image into grayscale, then bring back just a bit of color in the areas of your choice.

Adding color to a grayscale image is a neat little effect you see all over the place. Recently I saw it on a congratulatory wedding card where two cute little kids were all dressed up in pastel formal wear, while the rest of the background was draped in shades of gray. I've also seen it in movie posters, like Schindler's List.

Have you ever wanted to float a piece of text behind a portion of an image? It's really easy to do using layer masks in Photoshop, though Photoshop Elements doesn't support layer masks. Never fear for clipping groups are here!

Both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements come with some pretty cool brushes. Today I'm going to show you how to get creative and use them to paint in a photo, or rather, give it painted edges. The technique is very simple, we'll use Photoshop Elements' Group with Previous command to create a layer mask. It's also a non-destructive process, meaning we'll harm nary a pixel in the process.

With Macworld right around the corner (my favorite time of year!), I thought it appropriate to use this box of crabs I shot while strolling around Fisherman's Wharf last January.

Last week we chatted about pixels and resolution, and the importance of deciding what an image's purpose in life shall be. "To print, or not to print," that was the question. This week, I'll show you how to navigate inside the Image Size dialog box, enabling you to tweak image resolution and sizes at will. Though this tutorial is done in Photoshop Elements, the steps are nearly identical in the full-blown version of Photoshop.

To illustrate how tweaking the resolution of an image affects its document or physical size, let's take a peek at resizing a web image.

So you bought a cool new Firewire scanner, and a piece of software named Photoshop Elements came nestled snuggly in the box. Sweet! Now you can do fun things with photos! There's just one little problem: you have absolutely no idea where to start. Never fear, for the Beginner's Guide to Image Editing is here (thanks for the idea Kirk!).