You may want to create a new, blank document when you’re using Elements as a drawing program or when you’re combining parts of images, for example.
To create a new file, go to the Editor, and choose File→New→Blank File or press Ctrl+N/⌘-N. Either way, you see the New dialog box. You have lots of choices to make each time you start a new file, including what to name it. All your other options are covered in the following sections.
Tip
You can’t create a new, blank file in the Organizer, but Elements gives you a quick shortcut from the Organizer to the Editor so you can open up a new file there. In the Organizer, choose File→New→ Photoshop Elements Image File, and Elements sends you over to the Editor and creates a virgin file for you. If you want to create a new file based on a photo that’s in the Organizer, select the image’s thumbnail, press Ctrl+C/⌘-C to copy the image, and then choose File→New→“Image from Clipboard.” Elements switches you to the Editor, where you’ll see your copied photo awaiting you, all ready to work on.
After you type a name for your file in the New dialog box, the next thing you need to decide is how big you want it to be. There are two ways to do this:
Start with a Preset. The Preset menu, the second item in the New dialog box, lets you choose the general kind of document you want. If you want to create a file for printing, pick from the menu’s second group. The third group contains choices for onscreen viewing. Once you make a selection here, the next menu—Size—changes to show you suitable options for your choice. Figure 2-6 shows you how it works.
Figure 2-6. Elements helps you pick an appropriate size when you use the Preset menu. Here, Photo is selected, so the Size menu includes standard sizes for photo paper, each available in either landscape or portrait orientation. (What Elements calls the “Default Photoshop Elements Size” is 4″x6″ at 300 pixels per inch, which works well if you’re just playing around and trying things out.)
Enter the numbers yourself. If you prefer, just ignore the Preset and Size menus, and type what you want in the Width and Height boxes. The drop-down menus next to the boxes let you choose inches, pixels, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, or columns as your unit of measurement.
If you decide not to use one of the size presets, you’ll need to choose a resolution for your file. You’ll learn a lot more about resolution in the next chapter (Resizing Images for Email and the Web), but a good rule of thumb is to go with 72 pixels per inch (ppi) for files that you’ll look at only on a monitor, and 300 ppi for files you plan to print.
Elements gives you lots of color choices throughout the program, but color mode is probably the most important one because it determines which tools and filters you can use on your document. Your options are:
RGB Color. Choosing this mode (whose name stands for red, green, and blue) means that you’re creating a color document, as opposed to a black-and-white one. (Choosing a Color Space has more about color in Elements.) You’ll probably use this mode most of the time, even if you don’t plan on having color in your image, because RGB gives you access to all of Elements’ tools. That’s right: You can use RGB Color mode for black-and-white images—and many people do, since it gives you the most options for editing your photo.
Bitmap. Every pixel in a bitmap mode image is either black or white. Use Bitmap mode for true black-and-white images—shades of gray need not apply here.
Grayscale. Black-and-white photos are technically called grayscale images because they’re really made up of many shades of gray. In Elements, you can’t do as much editing on a grayscale photo as you can on an RGB one (for example, you can’t use some of the program’s filters on a grayscale image).
Tip
Sometimes you may need to change the color mode of an existing file to use all of Elements’ tools and filters. For example, there are quite a few things you can do only if your file is in RGB color mode. So if you need to use a filter (Using Filters) on a black-and-white photo and the menu item you want is grayed out, go to Image→Mode→RGB Color. Don’t worry, changing the color mode won’t suddenly colorize your photo; it just changes the way Elements handles the file. (You can always change back to the original color mode when you’re done.) If you use Elements’ “Convert to Black and White” feature (Method One: Making Color Photos Black and White), you’ll still have an RGB-mode photo afterward, not a grayscale mode image.
If your image is in RGB and you still don’t have access to the filters, check to see if the file is 16 bit (Choosing bit depth: 8 or 16?). If so, you need to convert it to 8-bit color to get everything working. Make that change by choosing Image→Mode→8 Bits/Channel. You’re most likely to have 16-bit files if you import your images in Raw format (The Raw Converter), and some scanners also let you create 16-bit files. JPEG files are always 8-bit.
The last choice you have to make when creating a new file is the file’s background contents, which tells Elements what color to use for the empty areas of the file, like, well, the background. You can be a traditionalist and leave the New dialog box’s Background Contents menu set to white (almost always a good choice), or choose a particular color or transparency (more about transparency in a minute). To pick a color other than white, use the Background color square, as shown in Figure 2-7, and then select Background Color from the New dialog box’s Background Contents menu.
Figure 2-7. To choose a new Background color, just click the Background color square in the Tools panel (here, that’s the red one) to bring up the Color Picker. Then select the color you want. Your new color appears in the square, and the next time you do something that involves using a Background color, that’s the shade you get. The color-picking process is explained in much more detail on page 254.
“Transparent” is the most interesting option. To understand transparency and why it’s such a wonderful invention, you need to know that every digital image is either rectangular or square. Digital images can’t be any other shape, but they can appear to be a different shape—sunflowers, sailboats, or German Shepherds, for example. How? By placing an object on a transparent background so that it looks like it was cut out and only its shape appears, as shown in Figure 2-8. The actual photo is still a rectangle, but if you placed it into another image, you’d see only the shell and not the surrounding area, because the rest of the photo is transparent.
Figure 2-8. This checkered background is Elements’ way of indicating that an area is transparent. (It doesn’t mean you’ve somehow selected a patterned background.) If you place this photo into another image, all you’ll see is the seashell, without the checkerboard or the rectangular outline of the photo. If you don’t like the size and color of the checkerboard, you can adjust them in Edit→Preferences→Transparency/Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor→ Preferences→Transparency.
To keep the clear areas transparent when you close your image, you need to save the image in a format that allows transparency. JPEGs, for instance, automatically fill transparent areas with solid white, so they’re not a good choice. TIFFs, PDFs, and Photoshop files (.psd), on the other hand, let the transparent areas stay clear. Image Formats and the Web has more about which formats allow transparency.