Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Photoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your digital images. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove red-eye, or distort shapes. With easy, step-by-step instructions, Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual gets you ready to make the most out of all the features available.

Photoshop Elements 8 Tips and Tricks

1. Highlight an object with color. It’s super easy to turn a color photo to a black and white image with only one colored object in it. In the photo on the left below, the waterlily looks fine but the dying leaves are distracting, so it might look better with only the flower in color. It’ll take you only a few seconds to get that effect. Just pick one of the Black&White settings for the Smart Brush and then drag over the lily. Elements does a pretty good job of finding the edges of the flower and makes it black and white, leaving the rest of the image in color. But if you turn on the Inverse checkbox before you drag, the lily stays colored and the rest of your image becomes black and white, saving you a lot of work.

2. Get rid of empty space. The new Recompose tool is great for fixing photos where squabbling siblings or cranky coworkers refused to stand close together. It’s also handy if you ever have to do how-to illustrations—you can easily get rid of extra space in a screenshot of a dialog box, for instance. You can also use Recompose to squish out unwanted elements in the middle of your photos, like in this seascape. In the pictures below, it brought the boats closer together and got rid of some of the condo sprawl in the background. Doing this left a little debris behind—a couple of stick-like lines from the largest condo—but one quick drag with the Healing brush, and there’s a lot more undeveloped beach left in the world.

3. One photo, two ways. The new Exposure Merge feature is great for blending together multiple (bracketed) exposures of the same scene, but if you only managed to get one good shot, you can process it twice in Elements’ Raw Converter—once for good shadowy areas, once for good highlights—and then merge the two into one image with good exposure throughout. You don’t even have to have a Raw format photo—it works with JPEG images, too. This is a JPEG photo where the interior was so underexposed that the lawn outside disappeared into a white glare when the interior was properly adjusted. So I made two versions, one for the indoor areas and one for the outside, then did the simplest exposure merge in Elements: an automatic merge. If I’d wanted to get fancy I could have had more control over the end result, but even the automatic merge is a big improvement over the first photo.