Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Photoshop Elements for Photography Enthusiasts

By David Peters

Photoshop Elements computer software is perfect for altering and applying special effects to your digital images as well as helping you prepare your photographs for the web. If you wish to resize your images, add filters and styles, Adobe Photoshop Elements is the software for you.

There are a variety of versions of Photoshop, but the for the amateur photographer or the professional who is new to digital photography, Photoshop Elements is easy to learn and comes with a low price tag and a host of creative tools that help with image manipulation.

If you wish to retouch your image there are a massive amount of choices of brushes available in Photoshop. Images can be changed by painting with the brushes over the area you want to change. Red eye in a photo can be removed in less than two minutes. You can also remove unwanted items from an image. If you have photos that have poor quality there is a sharp tool to sharpen certain areas of an image.

There are 15 types of file format that you can save your images to, giving you the possibility of creating images for a large amount of different projects. This includes images for the web, for slideshows, and for many different forms of printing.

Photoshop elements also help you create images for the web easily. Most photographers at some time during their career will want to create a website, and with Photoshop, preparing images is simple. It also helps you to resize images that are being attached to an e-mail.

Creating a web gallery can be a lot of work but Photoshop can open a group of images, resize them, create a thumbnail gallery and create all the navigation HTML buttons for your site. It will create a folder for your web files and save it on your computer.

Elements 2 also contains a slide show, which is a convenient way of presenting images. Slideshow presentations are saved in PDF format making them easy to e-mail or download. To view a slideshow you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer.

Also included is a video frame capture tool. This feature allows you to capture any frame from a video and save it as a stand-alone image. Images created using frame capture can be edited the same as any standard image.

If you need to work on the color in your image Photoshop has a wide range of tools that will help. You can also turn your color images into black and white shots in less than five minutes. You can also work with filters to images to warm colors up or create different tones.

The most important feature of Photoshop is the Toolbox. The Toolbox contains all the editing tools that you need in order to burn, dodge, clone, blur, sharpen or smudge an image. This box also contains handy tools to crop and zoom in on an image.

There are many artists worldwide who make a living by retouching images with advanced image software. Learning how to use Photoshop correctly will be a massive help to your digital photography, and if you are a keen photographer it should become part of your digital darkroom. - 15437

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