Saturday, December 27, 2008

Photoshop Elements for Photographers

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.

For the amateur photographer or the professional who is new to digital photography and computerized graphics, Photoshop Elements is easy to learn and comes with a low price tag and a host of creative tools that assist with manipulating and altering your images.

The brushes available in Photoshop give a massive choice for retouching images. Images are adjusted by painting with the brushes over the area you want to change. Red eye in a image can be removed in less that two minutes. Items can be removed from an image. For poor quality images 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.

Elements can also create images specifically for the web. Preparing your images for your website is simple and easy with Photoshop Elements. It also helps you to resize and compress images that are being attached to an e-mail.

Creating a web gallery can be a lot of work but using Photoshop you can open a group of images, resize them, create a thumbnail gallery and create all the navigation HTML buttons for your site. It also creates a folder for your web files and saves 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 world wide who make a living by retouching images with advanced image software. Learning how to use Photoshop correctly will be a massive boast to your digital photography, and if you are a keen photographer it should become part of your digital darkroom. - 16003

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