As you’ll learn in this section, the Quick Fix window’s tools are pretty easy to use. You can try one or all of them—it’s up to you. And whenever you’re happy with how your photo looks, you can leave Quick Fix and go back to the Full Edit window or the Organizer.
Tip
If you want to rotate your photo, click the Rotate buttons below the image preview area. (See Straightening Individual Photos for more about rotating photos.)
Figure 4-5. The Quick Fix window’s before-and-after views make it easy to see how you’re changing your photo. Here you see “Before and After - Horizontal,” which displays the views side by side. To see them one above the other, choose “Before and After - Vertical” instead. If you want a more detailed view, use the Zoom tool to focus on just a portion of your picture.
If you’re tweaking an image in Quick Fix and decide you don’t like how it’s turning out, click the Reset button at the bottom right of the Elements window to return your photo to the way it looked before you started working in Quick Fix. Keep in mind that this button undoes all Quick Fix edits, so don’t use it if you want to undo only a single action. For that, just use the regular Undo command: choose Edit→Undo or press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z.
Anyone who’s ever taken a flash photo has run into the dreaded problem of red eye—those glowing, demonic pupils that make your little cherub look like a character from an Anne Rice novel. Red eye is even more of a problem with digital cameras than with film, but luckily Elements has a simple and terrific tool for fixing it. All you need to do is click the red spots with the Red Eye Removal tool, and your problems are solved.
This tool works the same whether you use it in Quick Fix or Full Edit. Here’s what you do:
Open a photo (Opening Stored Images).
Zoom in so you can see where you’re clicking.
Use the Zoom tool to magnify the eyes. You can also switch to the Hand tool if you need to drag the photo around so the eyes are front and center.
Activate the Red Eye Removal tool.
Click the red eye icon in the toolbox or press Y.
Click the red part of the pupil (see Figure 4-6).
That’s it! Just one click should fix the problem. If it doesn’t, press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z to undo it, and then try dragging the Red Eye Removal tool over the pupil. Sometimes one method works better than the other. And as explained in a moment, you can also adjust two settings for this tool: Darken Amount and Pupil Size.
Click the red part of the other eye.
Repeat the process on the other eye, and you’re done.
Figure 4-6. Zoom in when using the Red Eye Removal tool so you get a good look at the pupils. Don’t worry if your photo is so magnified that it loses definition—just make the red area large enough so you can hit it right in the center. The left eye here has already been fixed. Notice what a good job this tool does of keeping the highlights (called catch lights) in the eye that’s been treated.
Tip
You can also apply the Organizer’s Auto Red Eye Fix in Quick Fix and Full Edit. In either window, just press Ctrl+R/⌘-R or go to Enhance→Auto Red Eye Fix. (In Full Edit, you can also activate the Red Eye Removal tool, and then click the Auto button in the Options bar.) The only tradeoff to using Auto Red Eye Fix in the Editor is that you don’t automatically get a version set like you do when using the tool from in the Organizer. But you can create a version set when you save your changes, as explained on File Formats Elements Understands.
If you need to adjust how the Red Eye Removal tool works, the Options bar gives you two controls, although 99 percent of the time you can ignore them:
Darken Amount. If the result is too light, increase the percentage in this box.
Pupil Size. Adjust the number here to tell Elements how large an area to consider part of the pupil.
Tip
You can also fix red eye right in the Raw converter (Rotating, straightening, and cropping) if you’re dealing with Raw files.
The Quick Fix window’s secret weapon is the Smart Fix command, which automatically adjusts a picture’s lighting, color, and contrast, all with one click. You don’t have to figure anything out—Elements does it all for you.
You’ll find the Smart Fix command in the aptly named Smart Fix panel, and it’s about as easy to use as hitting the speed-dial button on your phone: Click the Auto button, and if the stars are aligned, your picture will immediately look better. (Figure 4-7 gives you a glimpse of its capabilities. If you want to see for yourself how this fix works, download this photo—iris.jpg—from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.)
Tip
You’ll find Auto buttons scattered throughout Elements. When you click one, the program makes a best-guess attempt to apply whatever change the Auto button is next to (Smart Fix, Levels, Contrast, and so on). It never hurts to at least try clicking these buttons; if you don’t like what you see, you can always perform the magical undo: Edit→Undo or Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z.
Figure 4-7. Top: This photo, taken in the shade, is pretty dark. Bottom: The Auto Smart Fix button improved it significantly with just one click. You might want to use the tools in the Balance section (page 140) to really fine-tune the color.
If you’re happy with Auto Smart Fix’s changes, you can move on to a new photo, or try sharpening your photo a little if the focus appears a bit soft (see Sharpening). You don’t need to do anything to accept the Smart Fix changes, but if you’re not thrilled with the results, take a good look at your picture. If you like what Auto Smart Fix did but the effect is too strong or too weak, press Ctrl+Z/ĩ-Z to undo it, and then try playing with the Fix slider instead. Or click the little triangle to the slider’s right to try out one of the tool’s presets.
The Fix slider does the same thing as the Auto Smart Fix button, only you control the degree of change. Watch the image as you move the slider to the right. (If your computer is slow, there’s a certain amount of lag, so go slowly to give it a chance to catch up.) If you overdo it, sometimes it’s easier to click the Reset button at the bottom of the Panel bin and start again. Use the checkmark and X buttons that appear next to the Smart Fix label (they look like the ones in Figure 4-8) to accept or reject your changes.
Tip
Usually you get better results with a lot of little nudges to the Smart Fix slider than with one big sweeping movement.
Incidentally, these are the same Smart Fix commands you see in the Editor’s Enhance menu: Enhance→Auto Smart Fix (Alt+Ctrl+M/Option-⌘-M), and Enhance→Adjust Smart Fix (Shift+Ctrl+M/Shift-⌘-M).
Figure 4-8. When you move a slider in any of the Quick Fix panels, accept and cancel buttons appear in the panel you’re using. Clicking the accept (checkmark) button applies the change to your image, while clicking the cancel (X) button undoes the last change you made. If you make several slider adjustments, the cancel button undoes everything you’ve done since you clicked accept. (Clicking the light bulb icon takes you to the Elements Help Center.)
Sometimes Smart Fix just isn’t smart enough to do everything you want, and sometimes it does things you don’t want. (It works better on photos that are underexposed [too dark] than overexposed [too bright], for one thing.) Fortunately, you still have several other editing choices, covered in the following sections. (If you don’t like what Smart Fix has done to your photo, undo it before making other changes.)
Tip
Auto Smart Fix is one of the commands you can apply from within the Organizer, so there’s no need to launch the Editor if you want just this tool. See the box on Quick Fixes in the Organizer for more about making fixes from the Organizer.
The Lighting panel lets you make sophisticated adjustments to the brightness and contrast of your photo. You might be surprised: Sometimes problems you thought stemmed from exposure or even focus can be fixed with these commands.
If you want to understand how Levels works, you’re in for a long, technical ride. But if you just want to know what it can do for your photos, the short answer is that it adjusts the brightness of your image by redistributing its color information. Levels changes (and hopefully fixes!) both brightness and color at the same time.
If you’ve never used any photo-editing software before, this may sound rather mysterious, but photo-editing pros will tell you that Levels is one of the most powerful commands for fixing and polishing your pictures. To find out if its magic works for you, click the Auto button next to the word “Levels.” Figure 4-9 shows what a big difference it can make. Download this photo (ocean.jpg) from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com if you’d like to give it a try.
Figure 4-9. A quick click of the Auto button for Levels can make a dramatic difference. Left: The original photo isn’t bad, and you may not realize that the colors could be better. Right: Here you can see how much more effective the photo is once Auto Levels has balanced the colors.
What Levels does is complex. Chapter 7 has loads more details about what’s going on behind the scenes and how you can apply this command much more precisely.
The main alternative to Auto Levels in Quick Fix is Auto Contrast. Most people find that their images tend to benefit from one or the other of these options. Contrast adjusts the relative darkness and lightness of your image without changing its color, so if Levels made the colors go all goofy, try adjusting the contrast instead. You use Contrast the same way you do the Levels tool: just click the Auto button next to its name.
The Shadows and Highlights tools do an amazing job of bringing out details that are lost in the shadows or bright areas of your photo. Figure 4-10 shows what a difference these tools can make.
Figure 4-10. Left: This image has overly bright highlights and shadows that are much too dark. Right: After a little shadows and highlights adjusting, you can see there’s plenty of detail here. (Use the color sliders—described next—to get rid of the orange tone.)
The Shadows and Highlights tools are a collection of three sliders, each of which controls a different aspect of your image:
Shadows. Nudge this slider to the right, and you’ll see details emerge from murky black shadows as you lighten the dark areas of your photo.
Midtones. After you’ve adjusted a photo’s shadows and highlights, the image may look flat and not have enough contrast between dark and light areas. This slider helps you bring a more realistic look back to your photo. Use it last of the three sliders in this group, after you’ve adjusted the shadows and the highlights.
Highlights. Use this slider to dim the brightness of overexposed areas.
Tip
You may think you need only lighten shadows in a photo, but sometimes just a smidgen of Highlights may help, too. Don’t be afraid to experiment by using this slider even if you’ve got a relatively dark photo.
Go easy: Getting overenthusiastic with these sliders can give your photos a washed-out, flat look.
The Color panel lets you—surprise, surprise—play around with the colors in your image. In many cases, if you’ve been successful with Auto Levels or Auto Contrast, you won’t need to do anything here.
Here’s another one-click fix. Actually, in some ways Auto Color should be up in the Lighting section. Like Levels, it simultaneously adjusts color and brightness, but it looks at different information in your photos to decide what to do with them.
When you’re first learning to use Quick Fix, you may want to try Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color to see which generally works best for your photos. Undo the changes after you use each one and compare your results. Most people find they prefer one of the three most of the time.
Auto Color may be just the ticket for your photos, but you may also find that it shifts your colors in strange ways. Click it and see what you think. If it makes your photo look worse, just click Reset or press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z to undo it, and go back to Auto Levels or Auto Contrast. If they all make your colors look a little wrong, or if you want to tweak the colors in your photo, move on to the Color sliders instead.
If you want to adjust the colors in your photo without changing its brightness, try the Color sliders. For instance, your digital camera may produce colors that don’t quite match what you saw when you took the picture; you may have scanned an old print that’s faded or discolored; or you may just want to change the colors in a photo for the heck of it. Whatever the case, the sliders below the Auto Color button are for you:
Saturation controls the intensity of your image’s color. For example, you can turn a color photo to black and white by moving this slider all the way to the left. Move it too far to the right, and everything glows with so much color that it looks radioactive.
Hue changes the color from, say, red to blue or green. If you aren’t aiming for realism, you can have fun using this slider to create funky color changes.
You probably won’t use both these sliders on a single photo, but you can if you like. Remember to click the accept checkmark that appears in the Color panel if you want to accept your changes. And don’t forget that, as with the other Quick Fixes, Elements gives you presets as starting points if you need some help; just click the triangle to the right of either slider to see them. To fine-tune the color, you may want to move on to the next panel: Balance. In fact, in many cases you’ll only need the Balance sliders.
Photos often have the right amount of saturation, but suppose there’s something about the color balance that just isn’t right, and moving the Hue slider makes everything look funky. The Balance panel contains two very useful controls for adjusting the overall colors in your image:
Temperature lets you adjust colors from cool (bluish) on the left to warm (orangeish) on the right. Use this slider for things like toning down the warm glow you see in photos taken in tungsten lighting, or just for fine-tuning your color balance.
Tint adjusts the green/magenta balance of your photo, as shown in Figure 4-11.
There are presets for these adjustments, too, but you may find that they’re all much too exaggerated if you’re after realistic color, so you’re probably better off using the sliders.
Tip
In early versions of Elements, these sliders were grouped with the Color sliders, since you’ll often use a combination of adjustments from both groups. Chapter 7 has lots more about how to use the full-blown Editor to really fine-tune your image’s colors.
Figure 4-11. Left: The greenish tint shown here is a common problem with many digital cameras, especially cellphone cameras. Right: A little adjustment of the Tint slider clears it up in a jiffy. It’s not always as obvious as it is here that you need a tint adjustment. If you aren’t sure, the sky can be a dead giveaway: Is it robin’s egg blue like the left photo here? If so, tint is what you need.
Now that you’ve finished your other corrections, it’s time to sharpen your photo, so move down to the Sharpness panel. Sharpening gives the effect of better focus by improving the edge contrast of objects in your photo. Once again, an Auto button is at your service: Click the Sharpness panel’s Auto button to get things started. Figure 4-12 shows what you can expect.
Figure 4-12. Left: The original image. Like many digital photos, it could stand a little sharpening. Middle: What you get by clicking the Sharpness panel’s Auto button. Right: The results of using the Sharpen slider to get stronger sharpening than Auto Sharpen applies.
The sad truth is that there really isn’t any way to improve the focus of a photo once you click the shutter. Photo-editing programs like Elements sharpen by increasing the contrast where they perceive edges of objects, so sharpening first can have strange effects on other editing tools you apply later.
Tip
If you see funny halos around objects in your photos, or strange flaky spots (making your photo look like it has eczema), those are a sure sign of oversharpening; reduce the Sharpen settings till they go away. In fact, many modern cameras apply a pretty hefty dose of sharpening right in the camera, so you may decide you like your photo best with no extra sharpening at all.
Always look at the actual pixels (View→Actual Pixels) when you sharpen, because that gives you the clearest idea of what you’re doing to your picture. If you don’t like what Auto Sharpen does (a distinct possibility), you can undo it (press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z) and try the Sharpen slider instead. Zero sharpening is all the way to the left; moving to the right increases the amount of sharpening Elements applies to your photo. As a general rule, you want to sharpen photos you plan to print more than images destined for use online. You can read lots more about sharpening on Saving colors in the Swatches panel.
Note
If you’ve used photo-editing programs before, you may be interested to know that the Auto Sharpen button applies Adjust Sharpness (Adjust Sharpness) to your photo. The difference is that you don’t have any control over the settings, as you would if you applied Adjust Sharpness from the Enhance menu. But the good news is that if you want Adjust Sharpness, or if you prefer to use Unsharp Mask (Unsharp Mask), you can get that control—even from within Quick Fix. Just go to the Enhance menu and choose the sharpener of your choice.
At this point, all that’s left to do is crop your photo; Cropping Pictures tells you everything you need to know. However, you can also give your photo a bit more punch by using the Touch Up tools explained in the next section.
Tip
If you have a Mac, OS X has some pretty sophisticated sharpening tools built right in. Preview lets you apply Luminance Channel sharpening, a complex technique you might like better than Elements’ sharpening options. Open a photo in Preview and give it a try (Tools→Adjust Color→Sharpness) to see whether you prefer it to what Quick Fix can do.
At bottom of the Quick Fix toolbox are four special tools to help improve your photos. You’ve already learned how to use one of them—the Red Eye Removal tool (Fixing Red Eye). Here’s what you can do with the other three:
Whiten Teeth. As you can guess from its name, this tool makes teeth look brighter, as shown in Figure 4-13. What’s especially nice is that it doesn’t create a fake, overly white look.
Make Dull Skies Blue. It’s a common problem with digital cameras: Your subject is correctly exposed, but the sky looks washed out. Unfortunately, if your sky is really gray or blown out (white-looking), this tool won’t help much—it should probably have been called “Make Blue Skies Bluer.” It is useful for creating more dramatic skies, though.
Black And White – High Contrast. You’re probably wondering what the heck this tool’s name means. It’s Adobe’s way of saying, “Transform the area I choose from color to black and white.” (“High Contrast” refers to the style of black-and-white conversion this tool uses.) This tool is a great timesaver when you want to create a photo where only part of the picture is in color.
All three tools work pretty much the same way—just draw a line over the area you want to change, and Elements makes a detailed selection of the area and applies the change for you:
Open a photo and make your other corrections first.
If you’re an old hand at using Elements, use the Touch Up tools before sharpening. But if you’re a beginner and not comfortable with layers (see Chapter 6), sharpen first. (See the note on Note for more about why.)
Click the icon for the tool you want to use.
If you aren’t sure which is which, put your cursor over the icons (without clicking) to see pop-up tooltips with their names.
Draw a line over the area you want to change.
When you click one of the Touch Up tools, your cursor turns into a circle with crosshairs in it. Just drag that over the area you want to change. Elements automatically expands the area to include the entire object it thinks you want. (It works just like the Quick Selection tool [Selecting Rectangular and Elliptical Areas], only it also applies the changes to your image.) You’ll see the marching ants appear (Cropping with the Marquee Tool) around the area Elements is changing.
If Elements included too much or too little, tweak the selection’s size.
In the Options bar, you’ll see three little brush icons. Click the left icon to start another new selection, click the middle one and drag to add to the selection, or click the right one and drag over an area you want to remove from the selection. (You don’t have to use the Options bar: You can also just drag to extend your selection, or Alt-drag/Option-drag if Elements covered too much area and you need to remove some of it.)
Once you’re happy with the area covered by the change, you’re done.
You can back up by pressing Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z to undo your changes step by step. Just keep going to eliminate the change completely if you don’t like it. (Clicking the Reset button doesn’t undo the Touch Up tools’ changes.)
The Touch Up tools can be very helpful, but they work based on the colors in your photo, so they may not always give you the results you want, as you can see in Figure 4-14. If you want to use the Color sliders (Color) to adjust things instead, you’ll need to switch away from the Touch Up tools and use the Selection brush to re-select the area you’re trying to fix. That’s because the Saturation and Hue sliders aren’t available when the Touch Up tools are active.
Figure 4-14. The Touch Up tools can help punch up the sky color in your photos—sometimes. Left: Smog makes the sky in this photo look really dull. Right: One quick drag across the sky with the Make Dull Skies Blue tool produces a much more vivid sky—maybe even too vivid (and a tad green). Elements used a gradient (see page 460) to give a more realistic shading to the new color.
Note
The Touch Up tools create a layered file. If you understand layers (Chapter 6), you can go back to Full Edit and make changes after you use these tools and do things like adjust the opacity or blend mode of the layer. You can always discard your Touch Up changes by discarding the layer they’re on. And you can even edit the area affected by the changes by editing the layer mask, as explained on Layer Masks, or use the Smart Brush tool (Selecting with a Brush) in Full Edit. (The one exception is the “Black and White – High Contrast” tool: You can’t change the settings for the adjustments it makes. If you try to, you just see a weird message telling you that your layer was created in the full version of Photoshop, even though you know it wasn’t.)
Also, if there isn’t enough color in your photo to begin with, the Touch Up tools may not produce any visible results. For example, Whiten Teeth may not do anything if your subject has super-white dentures, and Make Dull Skies Blue may prove to be a dud if your sky is solid gray or completely overexposed.
As mentioned above, after you work with one of the Touch Up tools (except for the Red Eye Removal tool), Elements leaves you with a layered file. Normally that isn’t a problem, even if you don’t know anything about layers, but once in a while you may find that nothing happens when you try to make further changes to your photo.
In that case, click the Edit tab at the top of the Panel bin and then click Full below it to go back to Full Edit, and then find the Layers panel (it should be in the Panel bin unless you’ve removed it; if you can’t find it, go to Window→Layers to bring it back). In the Layers panel, look for the word “Background” and click it. Once you do, that part of the panel should be darker gray (if you’re on a Windows computer) than the rest of the panel or blue (if you’re on a Mac). If it isn’t, click it again. Now you can go back to the Quick Fix window (click the Edit tab and then click Quick) and do whatever you want to your photo. However, the part you used the Touch Up tools on may behave differently than the rest of the photo. If that happens and you haven’t closed the photo since using the Touch Up tools, use Undo History (Escape Routes) to back up to before you used the Touch Up tools.
There are no hard-and-fast rules for what order you need to work in when using the Quick Fix tools. As mentioned earlier, Elements lays out the tools in the Panel bin in the order that usually makes sense. But you can pick and choose whichever tools you want, depending on what you think your photo needs. If you’re the type of person who likes a set plan for fixing photos, here’s one order in which to apply the commands:
Rotate your photo (if needed).
Use the buttons below the image preview to do this.
Fix red eye (if needed).
See Fixing Red Eye.
Crop the image.
If you know you want to crop your photo, now’s the time. That way, you get rid of any problem areas before they affect other adjustments. For example, say your photo has a lot of overexposed sky that you want to crop out. If you leave it in, that area may skew the effects of the Lighting and Color tools on your image. So if you already know where you want to crop, do it before making other adjustments for more accurate results. (It’s also okay to wait till later to crop if you aren’t yet sure what you want to trim.)
Try Auto Smart Fix and/or the Smart Fix slider; use the Undo command if you don’t like the results.
Pretty soon you’ll get a good idea of how likely it is that this fix will do a good job on your photos. Some people love it; others think it makes their pictures too grainy.
If Smart Fix didn’t do the trick, work your way down through the other Lighting and Color commands until you like the way your photo looks.
Read the sections earlier in this chapter to understand what each command does to your photo.
Sharpen your image.
Try to make sharpening your last adjustment, because other commands can give you funky results on photos you’ve already sharpened. But if you’re a beginner and not comfortable with layers, you can sharpen before using the Whiten Teeth, Make Dull Skies Blue, or “Black and White – High Contrast” tools. (See Touch-Ups for more about why you’d wait to use these.)