Photoshop Elements for the Digital Photographer II

If you've taken the first Photoshop Elements for the Digital Photographer course, or if you have a basic working knowledge of Photoshop Elements, this course will help you take your skills to the next level. You'll gain ability and confidence as you master the advanced features of this software, specifically designed for photo enthusiasts. Packed with hands-on activities and step-by-step instructions, this course will make you an accomplished editor.

Photoshop Elements gives you room to grow while allowing you to create exciting effects right from the beginning. Because it offers you more features and tools than you'll find in simpler programs, it broadens the options available to you as an amateur photographer. With the techniques you'll learn here, you'll be able to edit and enhance your photos with ease, and you'll have the power to transform any shot from "okay" to "wow!".

What you will learn

• Learn how to use specific tools and correct distortion for portrait editing
• Use the various tools available to restore and enhance old and damaged photos
• Learn to incorporate the many special effects and filters that Photoshop Elements offers for photographic projects
• Add patterns to images, and integrate them with advanced layer techniques and custom text options
• Create animations from still images, and build slideshows with Photoshop Elements
• Blend exposures from multiple images of the same subject for high definition range, correct vignettes, and resize images using various methods

How you will benefit

• Gain confidence in your ability to use Photoshop Elements to enhance your digital photography
• Learn through hands-on experience and feedback from an expert instructor as you practice the techniques taught in the course

Outline

A Photographer's Workflow

Photoshop Elements is an excellent program for photographers to enhance and edit digital images, and in this class, you'll move into the advanced features for photographers. In this lesson, you'll dive into a workflow for digital editing. Photographers often wonder where to start when working with an image, so this lesson will give you a good idea of the options available and a sequence to follow.

Portrait Perfection Tools

In this lesson, you'll look at tools you can use to perfect portraits. Although you can use these tools to fine-tune any type of image, you'll find them especially helpful with the detail work associated with portraiture. You'll see how to smooth away wrinkles with the Surface Blur filter, remove red eye, and even turn gray hair brown! If only it were so easy in real life. . . .

Distortion for Photographers

Distortion. It's not something you'd think would be desirable in photography, but with the options in Elements, you'll discover how distortion can help you work wonders! In this lesson, you'll see how to slim a waistline, trim loose edges, and accentuate the positive with distortion tools. You'll also find out how to correct an image by combining parts of two different photos, and you'll have a chance to get creative with the many brushes available in Elements.

Restoring Old Photos

By this point, you'll be familiar with lots of the options Photoshop Elements provides for editing images. In this lesson, you'll turn to the task of restoring old and damaged photographs. You'll see how to turn back the effects of time as well as how to add hints of color to black-and-white images.

Text Variations and Clip Art

Many computer programs allow you to include clip art in your documents. But did you know that with Photoshop Elements, you can make your own? In this lesson, you'll see how to extract small portions of a photograph without any surrounding border and how to use them in other images and documents. You'll also find some great ways to merge text and imagery to create outstanding photographic impressions and how to customize the Elements panel display.

Artwork, Effects, and Filters

Editing your images isn't all about painstaking details and procedures. It can be a lot of fun, too! Photoshop Elements offers countless special effects, filters, and styles that you can use to show off your images. In this lesson, you'll explore how to add frames, backgrounds, clip art, and shapes to expand your creativity. You'll see how to sharpen and blur photos as well as how to salvage an image with these miraculous fixes!

Layers and Layer Styles

Working with layers is one of the most powerful aspects of Photoshop Elements. In this lesson and the next, you'll see how layers work from beginning to end. You'll build a quickly modifiable business card and a collage as you learn how to use Adjustment and Fill layers to your advantage. You'll also put the Smart Brush tools to work with quick edits that leave you with stunning images.

Patterns and More Layers

As you continue to learn about layers, you'll see how to add patterns, blend layers with colors and effects, and group them for great framing options using Elements' tabbed windowing feature. Photoshop Elements with layers is like supercharging a race car—and you'll be in the driver's seat. You'll also have a chance to work with Photoshop Elements' features, Text on Shape and Text on Custom Path—it just gets better and better!

Moving Pictures

So far, you've done a lot with still photos, but in this lesson, you'll look at moving pictures. You'll see how to create an animated presentation from a sequence of images. And if that isn't enough, you'll also see how to create dazzling slideshows with animation, text, and music to showcase your images.

Bigger Pictures

In this lesson, you'll learn how to achieve beautiful ranges of color and contrast (sometimes referred to as High Definition Range) by combining multiple exposures of the same subject using Photomerge Exposure. You'll also learn how to enlarge any image, correct vignettes, and create custom, colored borders of many sizes and shapes around your work. Your friends and family will be impressed by the professional-looking enlargements you create!

Merging Images

Panoramas are a beautiful way to show off wide scenic shots, but did you know that you don't need a special camera or lens to get these shots? In this lesson, you'll see how the Photomerge feature in Elements helps you blend several photos to provide seamless panoramic imagery, as well as other Photomerge options. You'll also look at some quick options for watermarking groups of photos all at once, including the Elements Recompose tool—an exciting feature with fast and easy results—as well as the new Content Aware Move tool.

Tools, Tricks, and Raw Images

The last lesson will fill you in on a few remaining tools, like the Cookie Cutter tool and the Shape tools, and you'll see how to use both to create more variations of clip art. You'll also work with Adobe's Camera Raw tool and discover the benefits of working with these large, uncompressed files. You'll find yourself with lots of knowledge and hours of practice under your belt as you finish up this class about the advanced features of Photoshop Elements.

Prerequisites:

You should feel comfortable acquiring digital images, either with a digital camera, a device such as a cell phone or tablet, or a scanned image. Basic computer skills, such as creating and accessing folders, and downloading and saving files will be briefly reviewed in this course, but should be familiar to you.

This course uses the Windows version of Photoshop Elements to demonstrate the software. In the vast majority of cases the Mac version is identical or very similar. Windows and Mac keystrokes and menus are included in the course material and any significant differences are noted in the materials.