You may be perfectly happy using Elements only in Quick Fix mode. And that’s fine, as long as you understand that you’ve hardly scratched the surface of what the program can do. Sooner or later, though, you’ll probably run across a photo where your best Quick Fix efforts just aren’t enough. Or you may simply be curious to see what else Elements has under its hood. That’s when you finally get to put all your image-selecting and layering skills to good use.
Elements gives you loads of ways to fix photos beyond the limited options in Quick Fix. This chapter guides you through fixing basic exposure problems, shows you various ways of sharpening your photos, and (most importantly) helps you understand how to improve the colors in your images. You’ll also learn how to use the amazing Smart Brush tool that lets you apply many common fixes by just brushing over the area you want to correct.
To get the most out of Elements, you need to understand a little about how your camera, computer, and printer think about color. Along with resolution (Changing the Size of an Image), color is one of the most important concepts in Elements. After all, almost all the adjustments that image-editing programs make involve changing the color of pixels. So quite a bit of this chapter is about understanding how Elements—and by extension, you—can manipulate your images’ color.
Tip
Most of Elements’ advanced-fix dialog boxes have a Preview checkbox that lets you watch what’s happening as you adjust the settings. It’s a good idea to keep these checkboxes turned on so you can decide whether you’re improving things. And for a handy “before” and “after” comparison, toggle the checkbox on and off.
Incorrectly exposed photos are the number one problem that photographers face. No matter how carefully you set up your shot and how many different settings you try on your camera, it always seems like the picture you really want to keep is the one that’s over- or underexposed.
The Quick Fix commands (Different Views: After vs. Before and After) can really help your photo, but if you’ve tried to bring back a picture that’s badly over- or underexposed, you’ve probably run into the limitations of what Quick Fix can do. Similarly, the Shadows/Highlights command (Shadows and Highlights) can do a lot, but it’s not intended to fix a photo whose exposure is totally botched—just ones where the contrast between light and dark areas needs a bit of help. And if you push Smart Fix (Smart Fix) to its limits, the results may be a little strange. In those situations, you need to move on to some of Elements’ more powerful tools to help improve the image’s exposure.
Tip
In this section, you’ll learn about the more traditional ways of correcting exposure in Elements, as well as how to use the Smart Brush tool for corrections. But be sure to also check out the Elements Camera Raw Converter (The Raw Converter), which can help with your JPEG and TIFF images, too. Your results with non-Raw photos may vary, but the Raw Converter just might turn out to be your best choice.
When you open a poorly exposed photo in Elements, the first thing to do is figure out what’s wrong with it, just like a doctor diagnosing a patient. If the exposure’s not perfect, what exactly is the problem? Here’s a list of common symptoms to help figure out where to go next:
Everything is too dark. If your photo is really dark, try adding a Screen layer, as explained on Fixing Major Exposure Problems. If it’s just a bit too dark, try using Levels (Using Levels).
Everything is too light. If the whole photo looks washed out, try adding a Multiply layer (Fixing Major Exposure Problems). If it’s just a bit too light, try Levels (Using Levels).
The photo is mostly OK, but your subject is too dark or the light parts of the photo are too light. Try the Shadows/Highlights adjustment (The Shadows/Highlights Command) or the Smart Brush tool (Correcting color with a brush).
Of course, if you’re lucky (or a really skilled photographer), you may not see any of these problems, in which case, skip to Using Levels if you want to make your colors pop. If you’re lucky enough to have bracketed exposures (multiple exposures of exactly the same image), check out the Exposure Merge feature (Blending Exposures), which makes it simple to blend those into one properly exposed image.
Note
You may have noticed that Brightness/Contrast wasn’t mentioned in the preceding list. A lot of people jump for the Brightness/Contrast controls when facing a poorly exposed photo. That’s logical—after all, these dials usually help improve the picture on your TV. But in Elements, about 99 percent of the time, you’ve got a whole slew of powerful tools—like Levels and the Shadows/Highlights command—that can do much more than Brightness/Contrast can, but feel free to give it a try when you need to make only very subtle changes.
If your photo is completely over- or underexposed, you need to add special layers to correct the problems. You follow the same steps to fix either problem, the only difference is the layer blend mode (Blend Mode) you choose: Multiply darkens your image’s exposure while Screen lightens it. Figure 7-1 shows Multiply in action (and gives you a sense of the limitations of this technique if your exposure is really far gone). You can download the file brickwindow.jpg from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds if you’d like to try the different exposure fixes for yourself.
Be careful, though: If only part of your photo is out of whack, using Multiply or Screen can ruin the exposure of the parts that were OK to start with, because these layers increase or decrease the exposure of the whole photo. For example, your properly exposed areas may blow out (see the box on Working with Profiles) and lose the details if you apply a Screen layer. So, if your exposure problem doesn’t affect the entire image, try the Smart Brush (Correcting color with a brush) or Shadows/Highlights (The Shadows/Highlights Command) first. You can also use a layer mask to restrict your changes to only part of the image; see Layer Masks to learn how.
If your whole photo needs an exposure correction, here’s how to use layers to fix it:
Open your photo and press Ctrl+J/⌘-J or go to Layer→Duplicate Layer. Check to be sure the duplicate layer is the active layer.
In the Layers panel, change the mode for the new layer.
Use the drop-down menu in the panel’s upper-left corner to choose Multiply if your photo is overexposed or Screen if it’s underexposed. (Make sure you change the duplicate layer’s mode, not the original layer’s.)
Figure 7-1. In photography terms, each Multiply layer you add is roughly equivalent to stopping your camera down one f-stop, at least as far as the dark areas are concerned. Top: This photo is totally overexposed, and it looks like there’s no detail there at all. Bottom: Multiply layers darken things enough to bring back a lot of the washed-out areas and bring out quite a bit of detail. But as you can see here, even Elements can’t do much in areas where there’s no detail at all, like the sky and the white framing around the windows.
Adjust the opacity of the layer if needed.
If the effect of the new layer is too strong, in the Layers panel, move the Opacity slider to the left to reduce the new layer’s opacity.
If you decide that part of your image was actually better exposed before you added the new layer, mask out the areas where the exposure was okay.
Apply a mask to the duplicate layer, and then paint out the areas where the original image was properly exposed, so that the background layer shows through (Editing a layer mask explains how). Remember that you can also paint with shades of gray to control how much of the original shows through. That can be very helpful in getting the most realistic results from this technique.
Repeat as necessary.
You may have to use as many as five or six layers if your photo is in really bad shape. If you need extra layers, you’ll probably want them at 100 percent opacity, so you can just keep pressing Ctrl+J/⌘-J to duplicate the current top layer, including the layer mask (if you applied one). You’re more likely to need several layers to fix overexposure than underexposure. And, of course, there are limits to what even Elements can do for a blindingly overexposed image. Overexposure is usually tougher to fix than underexposure, especially if the area is blown out, as explained in the box on Understanding Exposure.
The Shadows/Highlights command is one of Elements’ best features. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for adjusting only the dark or light areas of your photo without messing up the rest of it. Figure 7-2 shows what a great help it can be.
Figure 7-2. The Shadows/Highlights command can bring back details in photos where you were sure there was no information at all—but sometimes at a cost. Left: The sky and the grass aren’t bad, but you’d never know there were oranges on these trees. Right: A dose of Shadows/Highlights unearths plenty of details, although the overall effect is a bit flat when you push the tool this far. This photo needs lots more work, but at least now you can see what kind of trees they are.
The Shadows/Highlights command in Full Edit works pretty much the same way it does in Quick Fix (Shadows and Highlights). The single flaw in this great tool is that you can’t apply it as an Adjustment layer (Adjustment and Fill Layers), so you may want to apply Shadows/Highlights to a duplicate layer. Then, later on, you can discard the changes if you want to take another whack at adjusting the photo. In any case, it’s easy to make amazing changes to your photos with Shadows/Highlights. Here’s how:
Open your photo and duplicate the layer (Ctrl+J/⌘-J) if you want to.
If you haven’t edited your photo before, this is usually the Background layer, but you can use this command on any layer. Duplicating the layer makes it easier to undo Shadows/Highlights later if you change your mind.
Go to Enhance→Adjust Lighting→Shadows/Highlights.
Elements opens the Shadows/Highlights dialog box and makes your photo about 30 shades lighter. Don’t panic. As soon as you select this command, the Lighten Shadows setting automatically jumps to 25 percent, which is way too much for most photos. Just shove the slider back to 0 to undo this change before you start making your corrections.
Move the sliders in the Shadows/Highlights dialog box around until you like what you see.
The sliders do exactly what they say: Lighten Shadows makes the dark areas of your photo lighter, and Darken Highlights makes the light areas darker. (Midtone Contrast is discussed in a moment.) Dragging the sliders to the right increases their effect.
Click OK when you’re happy.
Tip
If you’re applying Shadows/Highlights on a duplicate layer, you can use a layer mask (Layer Masks) to restrict your changes to only certain areas of your image.
The Shadows/Highlights dialog box is a cinch to use, because you just make decisions based on what you’re seeing. When you’re using it, keep these tips in mind:
You may want to add a smidgen of the opposite tool to balance things out a little. In other words, if you’re lightening shadows, you may get better results by giving the Darken Highlights slider a teeny nudge, too.
Midtone Contrast is there because your photo may look kind of flat after you’re done with Shadows/Highlights, especially if you’ve made big adjustments. Move the Midtone Contrast slider to the right to increase the photo’s contrast. It usually adds a bit of a darkening effect, so you may need to go back to one of the other sliders to tweak your photo after you use it.
You can overdo the Shadows/Highlights tool. When you see halos around the objects in your photo, you’ve pushed the settings too far.
Tip
If the Shadows/Highlights tool washes out your photo’s colors—making everyone look like they’ve been through the laundry too many times—adjust the color intensity with one of the Saturation commands, either in Quick Fix or Full Edit (as described on Making Colors More Vibrant). Watch people’s skin tones when increasing the saturation—if the subjects in your photo start looking like sunless-tanning-lotion disaster victims, you’ve gone too far. Also check out the Vibrance slider in the Raw Converter (Adjusting Vibrance and Saturation), or try adjusting colors with Elements’ Color Curves feature (Color Curves: Enhancing Tone and Contrast).
Shadows/Highlights is great if you want to adjust all the light or dark areas of a photo, but what if you want to tweak the exposure only in certain areas? Or what if you like the photo’s background just fine, but you want to tweak the subject a little? You can use a layer mask on a duplicate layer and make adjustments there, or make a selection in your photo (see Chapter 5 for more about selecting), copy the selected area to a new layer, and then make adjustments to that layer. But Elements gives you a super simple way to apply a correction to just the area you want: the Smart Brush tools.
The Smart Brush is actually two different tools (the Smart Brush and the Detail Smart Brush) that work just like the Quick Selection tool and the regular Selection brush, respectively. Only instead of merely selecting part of your photo, they also edit it as you brush. So you may be able to make targeted adjustments to different areas of your photo just by drawing a line over them. (The Smart Brushes don’t always work, but they’re truly amazing when they do.)
In this section you’ll learn how to use the Smart Brush to correct exposure, but you have a whole menu of different things you can do with the Smart Brush: Change the color of someone’s jacket, apply different special effects, put a little lipstick on people, convert an area to black and white—the list goes on and on. As a matter of fact, if you’ve been using Quick Fix, you may well have met the Smart Brush already, although it doesn’t go by that name there: The Touch Up tools in Quick Fix all use the Smart Brush to apply their effects.
Here’s how to put this nifty pair of tools to work:
Open a photo in Full Edit, and then activate the Smart Brush.
Click its icon in the Tools panel (it’s the brush with the gear next to it) or press F. Use the pop-out menu to be sure you have the regular Smart Brush. It shares its Tools panel slot with the Detail Smart Brush, which works like the Selection brush in that it changes only the area directly under the brush instead of automatically expanding your selection to include the whole object you brush over. For now, see if the regular Smart Brush is smart enough to select the area you want.
Choose the correction you want to apply.
Go to the Options bar, and then choose from the rightmost drop-down menu. (Both Smart Brushes have the same Options bar settings, discussed below. The important one is explained in Figure 7-3.) Adobe calls these choices Smart Paint.
Figure 7-3. Your Smart Paint options (the things you can do with the Smart Brush) are grouped into the categories listed in this drop-down menu. Each thumbnail image shows that option applied to a photo. For exposure issues, start by looking at the choices in the Lighting section (choose Lighting from the drop-down menu at the top of the list). You can choose to make the area darker, brighter, make the contrast low or high, or even put a spotlight effect on it. Just scroll through the list to find the effect you want, click it, and then click somewhere outside your photo to hide the menu. You can also drag the menu loose from the Options bar and put it where you want, if you’d like to keep it available and out of the way of your photo.
Drag over the area you want to change.
This step is just like using the Quick Selection tool (Selecting Rectangular and Elliptical Areas). You don’t need to make a careful selection, since Elements calculates the area it thinks you want to include and creates the selection for you. A simple line should do it.
Tweak the selection, if necessary.
If Elements didn’t quite select everything you want, then add to the selection by brushing again. If you still need to modify the selection, then use the selection editing tools explained in Figure 7-4. If you’re really unhappy with the Smart Brush’s selection talents, then head back to the Tools panel and try the Detail Smart Brush instead.
Figure 7-4. Once you’ve used the Smart Brush, a little icon called a pin (circled, bottom) appears in your photo to let you know that the selected region is now under the power of the Smart Brush. Click the pin and you see a trio of icons (circled, top) that let you edit the selected area. From left to right, the icons mean New Selection, “Add to Selection,” and “Remove from Selection.” If you’re pressed for time, there’s an even quicker way to modify your selection: Just drag again to add to the area affected by the Smart Brush (or to use the same adjustment on another part of your photo), or Alt-drag to remove changes from an area. You’ll see the pin anytime the Smart Brush is activated again, even after you’ve closed and saved your photo.
You can invert a selection by turning on the Options bar’s Inverse checkbox. Then what you select with the brush is excluded from your selection, and everything else is included. You can turn on the checkbox before or after using the Smart Brush, as long as it’s still the active tool. If you come back to the Smart Brush after using another tool, then you need to reactivate your Smart Brush selection by clicking the pin shown in Figure 7-4 before you can invert the selection, thus inverting the area covered by the effect.
Once you like the selection, adjust the effect (if you want).
The Smart Brush gives you several ways to change what it’s done:
Change what happens to the selected area. While the selection is active, just head to the Options bar and choose a different Smart Paint adjustment. Elements automatically updates your image.
Add a different kind of Smart Paint. At the left end of the Options bar, click the tiny triangle and choose Reset Tool. Then the Smart Brush puts down an additional adjustment when you use it, instead of just changing what you’ve already done. You can also use this to double-up an effect—to add Lipstick twice, for instance, if you thought the first pass was too faint. Each Smart Brush adjustment gets its own pin, so if you have two Smart Brush adjustments in your photo, then you’ll have two pins in it, too. (Each pin is a different color.)
Change the settings for Smart Paint you’ve already applied. Rather than adding another Smart Paint layer to increase the effect, you can adjust the settings for the changes you’ve already made. Right-click (or Control-click with a one-button mouse) the pin in your image, and then choose Change Adjustment Settings. The Layers panel changes to show the settings so you can adjust the effect you’re brushing on. The Smart Brush uses Adjustment layers to make its changes, so the available settings are the same as they would be if you created a regular Adjustment layer. For example, if you’re using the Brighter option, as shown in Figure 7-3, then you get the settings for a Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layer.
Note
If you’re using certain of the black-and-white adjustments, you may not be able to edit them afterwards, just as when you use the Black and White tool in Quick Fix (see Touch-Ups).
When you’re happy with what you have, you’re done.
You can always go back to your Smart Paint changes again. Just activate the Smart Brush (click it in the Tools panel or press F) and the pin(s) appear again to let you easily change what you’ve done. You can eliminate Smart Brush changes by right-clicking (Control-clicking with a one-button mouse) the adjusted area and then choosing Delete Adjustment (the Smart Brush needs to be active), or by going to the Layers panel and discarding their layers (you can do this anytime, whether the Smart Brush is active or not). You can also edit a Smart Brush adjustment’s layer mask the way you’d edit any other layer mask, as described on Editing a layer mask. But usually it’s easier just to click the pin and then adjust your selection.
The Smart Brush is especially handy for projects like creating images that are part color and part black-and-white, or even for silly special effects like making one object from your photo look like it’s been isolated on a ’60s-style psychedelic background.
Tip
Check out the new textures available for the Smart Brushes in Elements 10. They’re very handy for creating backgrounds for isolated subjects. You’ll find them in their own category in the Options bar’s presets drop-down menu.
The Smart Brush has several Options bar settings, but you usually don’t need to use them:
New selection. Click the left brush icon to add the same effect elsewhere in your photo. (Just clicking someplace else with the brush does the same thing. Be careful, though: The brush may think that the new area is a continuation of your previous selection, so it may combine the two. If that happens, try using a smaller brush.)
Add to selection. Click this next brush icon to put the Smart Brush in add-to-selection mode (the brush enters this mode automatically even if you don’t click this icon).
Subtract from selection. Did the Smart Brush take in more area than you wanted? Click this final brush icon before brushing away what you don’t want, or just Alt-drag/Option-drag.
Brush Picker. You can change the brush’s size, hardness, spacing, angle, or roundness here.
Inverse. If you want to apply the correction to the area you didn’t select with the Smart Brush, then turn on this checkbox.
Refine Edge. Use this if you want to make the edges of your effect sleeker. See Refine Edge for details.
Smart Paint. Click this thumbnail image for a pop-out menu of all the possible Smart Brush adjustments, grouped into categories. (If you hover your cursor over the thumbnail, the tooltip that appears says “Choose A Preset,” but Adobe calls these settings Smart Paint in the Help files and elsewhere.)
If you like the idea of the Smart Brush but never seem to find exactly the adjustments you want, or if you always want to change the settings you apply, then you can create your own Smart Paint options, as described in the box on Correcting color with a brush.