The previous sections taught you how to remove flaws and objects you don’t want in your photos by manually covering them up bit by bit. But maybe you’re thinking, “It seems so last-century to have to drudge away like that. There’s got to be an easier way!” You’re right—there is.
The Recompose tool is one of the coolest features in Elements. It lets you eliminate unwanted objects and people from your photos by just scribbling a line over them, and then moving the edges of your photo to reshape it. Amazingly, Elements can keep the rest of the photo undistorted as it makes the unwanted objects vanish. Take a look at Figure 9-11 to see what this tool can do. Want to get rid of your daughter’s ex-boyfriend in that group shot? Just draw a line on him in the photo, push the image’s edges closer together, and he’s history. Couldn’t get your feuding coworkers to stand close together in the holiday party photo? No problem—you can easily remove the empty space between them.
Figure 9-11. Top: What do you do if you only have a wide photo of your great grandparents, but you want to put it in a narrow frame? You could shrink it down till it fits, but then the image would be too small. Instead, just make a few marks on it with the Recompose tool (the green marks mean “Keep this”). To turn on the tool’s Quick Highlight feature—shown here (it automatically covers the whole area you drag over, the way the Quick Selection tool’s selection expands to cover the whole object with one drag—just right-click/Control-click your photo and choose it from the menu. The Normal Highlight (Elements’ starting setting for this brush) usually produces fairly similar results, but Quick Highlight makes it easier to see exactly what you’re choosing. To recompose the image, just drag one of its edges toward the middle of the photo. Bottom: The end result. Your ancestors will now fit nicely into their new frame.
You can also use the Recompose tool to alter the shape of your photo without cropping it. Have a landscape-oriented photo that you wish were portrait-oriented instead? Recompose can fix that. There are limits to what it can do, but with a suitable photo, you can just shove it into the proportions you want, and Elements will keep everything looking perfectly normal and not at all distorted.
It takes an awesome amount of computer intelligence to make this tool work, but it’s actually one of the easier Elements tools to use:
Open a photo and activate the Recompose tool.
There are two ways to call it up:
Tell Elements which parts of the photo you don’t want to change.
You use the Recompose tool’s Protection brush to indicate which areas you want preserved. To select this brush, click the leftmost icon in the Options bar—the green paintbrush and lock—and then drag over the areas you want to keep. This is something like using the Quick Selection tool in that you don’t have to select everything; just make enough marks so that Elements knows which objects you mean. This tool is more literal-minded than the Quick Selection tool, so you may need more marks when using it.
Tip
The Recompose tool has a hidden menu to speed things up: Right-click/Control-click your photo when the tool is active and you can choose Quick Highlight (shown in Figure 9-11), which makes the whole process of telling Elements what to keep and what to eliminate go much faster. You tend to get better results with this method, too.
To automatically select the people in your photo, in the Options bar, click the “Highlight Skin tones” icon (the little green man). However, this feature doesn’t work on sepia images like the one in Figure 9-11.
Tell Elements what you want to get rid of.
To delete specific objects or areas, drag over them with the Removal brush (click the Options bar icon that looks like a red paintbrush and an X).
Tip
You don’t always need to use both of the Recompose tool’s brushes. You can even try not marking anything at all, but you’ll likely get better results if you give Elements a little guidance. If you make a mistake with either brush, use the corresponding eraser (the icon just to the brush’s right) to remove the stray marks.
Recompose your photo.
Once you’re through marking up your photo, you can use the familiar bounding box around the image to resize it. It works just like the Move tool’s bounding box: Grab a handle or a corner and drag to change the shape of your image. There are several Options bar settings that can help you out if you need to make the photo a specific size; they’re explained in a moment.
Watch as the unwanted areas disappear as you drag the edges closer together.
Tip
If you want to make your image wider or taller than it is now (to make a portrait-oriented photo into a landscape one, for example), you first need to add canvas (Adding Canvas) to give the new width or height someplace to go. Just keep in mind that Elements isn’t as good at removing objects when you’re making the image larger as it is when you’re shrinking it down.
Finish up.
When you’re happy with your image, click the Commit button (the green checkmark) or press Enter/Return. If you decide you don’t want to recompose after all, or if you need to go back and adjust the marks you made on the picture, click the red Cancel button. When you’re done, crop off any extra blank space on the edges of your photo. (Cropping is explained on Cropping Pictures.)
Tip
You may find that some remnants of removed objects reappear after you press Enter/Return. Just use the Clone Stamp or the Healing Brush to get rid of them.
The Recompose tool has several Options bar settings to make your job easier:
Brushes. There are four brushes at the left end of the Options bar. From left to right they are: the “Mark for Protection” brush, “Erase highlights marked for protection” (for erasing Protection brush marks you don’t want), the “Mark for Removal” brush, and “Erase highlights marked for removal” (for erasing Removal marks you made by mistake).
Size. This is just like the size setting for any brush tool: Enter a size in pixels, scrub on the Options bar (Different Views: After vs. Before and After), or use the bracket key shortcuts to change the size (Picking and Using a Basic Brush). Chapter 12 covers brushes in detail.
Highlight Skin tones. Click this icon and, if you’re lucky, Elements selects the people in your photo. It’s kind of dicey, though—you may find Elements prefers other objects to the folks in your pictures, but it’s worth a click, since you can always undo Elements’ selection.
Preset. Normally this option is set to No Restriction, which lets you drag any way you like, but you can also choose to recompose to the photo’s current aspect ratio to one of several popular photo-paper sizes or the 16:9 aspect ratio popular for images used in high-definition videos. If you make a choice here or in the width and height boxes (explained next), Elements recomposes your photo to that size.
W (width) and H (height). If you want to enter a custom size, do that here. Click the arrows between the boxes to swap the numbers, just as you can with the Crop tool.
Amount. This tells Elements how much you want to protect the details from distortion. For best results, leave it at 100%.
What’s most amazing about this tool is the way your background still looks real when you’re done. Someone seeing your Recomposed photo would never guess that it didn’t start out looking just like it does now. Recomposing doesn’t work for every photo, but when it does, the results are almost magical.