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Having used the exercises in my previous lessons, I would now like to take you on to some more easy things to do in Elements. Don't worry, things are not as complicated as you may think, and when you have finished these exercises, you will wonder what on earth you were worried about! Let's take a nice simple picture, a new born baby, wrapped up against the elements, but with some distracting bits in the picture which shouldn't really be there:-  First of all, we will do the normal adjustments, as already learnt; resize the image to give a print 6" wide - if this is a print from a normal digital camera, the depth will now be 4.5". Control L will bring up the levels pallet, which in this case shows a good spread of tones, so no adjustment is necessary (your picture may well need some adjustment). Control U brings up the Hue/Saturation options, but as this picture is quite well exposed, again no adjustments are necessary (again, your picture may need some boost to saturation). Now give the picture a little sharpening using Filters>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask (75-2-3 will be fine in this case but use your judgement for your own picture) and click OK. Using the Crop Tool You will see from above that my picture was resized to 6" x 4.5", the
standard 4:3 ratio that most digital cameras use. A you will be aware, this does
not fit on standard 6" x 4" printing paper, so rather than allowing the printer
driver to decide what to print (i.e. what it is going to chop off!) we should
crop the picture to the 6" x 4" format ourselves. If you are happy that you have applied the correct crop, simply double-click inside the picture (or press Enter) and the revised picture will appear. If you are not happy with your crop, note there are ways to adjust the cropped area - notice at each corner of the copped area, and also along each side, a small square. If you place the cursor on any of these squares, you can drag the square to adjust the crop. One word of warning - if you drag the corner squares; you will affect the shape of the print; so that the print keeps its proportions, i.e. 6" x 4" or 3:2, hold down the "Shift" key before commencing your adjustment. You should now have a 6" x 4" picture on your screen. The Clone Tool This is a very useful tool; it allows you to delete bits of the picture that you find intrusive (e.g. the odd crisp packet, etc that you did not notice in the viewfinder when you took the picture) and replace them with bits from another part of the picture. In the case of my picture, there is an awful silver lump on the right-hand side. I could crop this out, as outlined above, and then resize the picture to get back to my 6" x 4" required size, or I could take pixels from another part of the picture and "clone" them over the offending area. Let's do a bit of cloning. The Clone tool looks like a rubber stamp (it is sometimes called the Rubber Stamp tool) and is in the left-hand column of the Tools pallet, just above the "Hand" icon. Click on the Clone tool. You will notice a change in the toolbar at the top of the screen - the clone tool is showing, and just to its right is what looks like a worm; this is the size of the "brush" you will be working with. The brush can be almost any size and can have a hard or soft edge. Click on the inverted triangle to the right of the Worm, and move the slider up and down to see your options. Select a brush type/size. At this point, I would like to deviate to Elements Preferences, because some settings in Preferences can make working with tools much easier. Click on Edit>Preferences>Displays and Cursors, where you will see some options for Painting Cursors and Other Cursors. Ensure that Painting Cursors have the Brush Size option button selected and that Other Cursors have the Precise option button selected. This will make it much easier to see what area you are selecting from with the clone tool, and the size of the area you are cloning to. Click OK to accept the changes. Before you start cloning, ensure that the box called "Aligned" on the Toolbar is ticked, as this will make cloning easier, because as you paint in your pixels, the source point moves with your cursor. Back to our picture. With the clone tool selected, select an area from which you wish to clone pixels; to do this, hold down the "Alt" key and left-click on an area. Move to cursor over the offending object and, holding the left mouse button down, paint over the offending object. You should now see the object disappear and be replaced by the pixels you selected. You may have to make the selection of pixels several times if the offending object is quite large - you may also find that, if you are cloning, say, grass over a crisp packet, be careful not to duplicate patterns in the grass. Cloning, whilst comparatively easy, should be done in small steps, reselecting your source pixels at intervals so that the result looks as natural as possible. If you make a good job of cloning, it can make all the difference to the look of a picture.  The offending object has now disappeared. The Marquee Tools This has nothing to do with Tents. These tools are to be found in the Tools
pallet at the top left-hand corner. The default tool is the Rectangle Marquee
and the alternative is the Elliptical (Oval) Marquee. To access the alternative
marquee, click on then little black triangle at the bottom right-hand corner of
the marquee icon and select the required marquee tool with your cursor. Marquee
tools are selection tools, which enable you to select a part of a picture for
various uses. For example, you may wish to put an oval vignette on the picture,
or you may wish to select a large area to copy over another part of the picture
as an alternative to using the Clone tool. Let's put an oval marquee on our
picture, as this is the easiest to do, all other uses being a similar principle. Before deleting our selection to leave an oval picture, we must now decide whether we want a hard or soft edge to the oval. Most vignettes work best with a soft edge, so we will use the "Feather" facility to make a gradual change from the picture to toe vignette border. Click on Select>Feather and choose a radius of, say, 25 pixels, and click on OK. Ensure that the Foreground and Background colours at the bottom of the Toolbar are at their default settings (black foreground, white background) and press the "Delete" key. The selected area will turn white (the default background colour) and there will be a soft edge between the picture and the vignette. Click on Select>Deselect (or hold down the Control key and press "D") to see your picture with its vignette. Incidentally, you do not have to have a white background, it may be any colour you choose, whatever fits in with the picture.  Borders It is quite nice to put a border around your picture, or a "key line". This is especially useful if your picture has light areas near the edge of the picture. Whilst Elements has pre-prepared borders which you can use (see Effects Tab>Frames), you may want to make a simple border to enclose your picture. The easiest way to do this is by using the "Stroke" facility. First select all your picture, Select>All (or hold down the Control key and press 'A'). Then click on Edit>Stroke, choose your border size in pixels - anything from 1 pixel for a "key line" to almost any border width that looks right (say 15 pixels as used in this example). Then choose your border colour by clicking the "Colour" box and picking the colour you want your border to be. The next box gives the option of putting the border "Inside", "Centre" or "Outside" your picture. For this exercise, click on "Inside", leave the Blending Mode at Normal and the Opacity at 100%. Click OK and your border appears magically around your picture. Deselect the image by clicking on Select>Deselect (or hold down the Control key and press 'D') and there you have it!
Conclusion Now you have four more options for using on your pictures. Good Luck. Roy Phillips |
