Elements gives you some other useful ways of drastically changing the look of your image. You can apply these effects as Adjustment layers (Layer→New Adjustment Layer) or by going to Filter→Adjustments (there’s much more about filters in Chapter 13). Either route gives you the same options (except for Equalize, which is only available as a filter); you can see them in action in Figure 9-22.
Figure 9-22. You can get some interesting special effects with the Adjustment commands, whether you apply them as filters or Adjustment layers. (If you want to run them as filters, it’s not a bad idea to do so on a duplicate layer.) Top row (left to right): The original photo, Invert, Equalize. Bottom row (left to right): Posterize and Threshold.
In most cases, you use these adjustments as steps along the way in a more complex treatment of your photo, but they’re effective by themselves, too. Here’s what each one does (listed in the order they appear in the Filter menu):
Equalize makes the darkest pixel in your photo black and the lightest one white, and then redistributes the brightness values for all the colors in the photo to give them all equal weight. When you have an active selection, Elements brings up a dialog box that lets you choose whether you want it to simply equalize your whole photo or equalize it based on the selection. For example, say you have an image with dark woods and bright sky and you’ve selected part of the sky. If you tell Elements to equalize based on your selection, the program brightens your whole image to the level of the pixels in the sky selection without including the dark wooded areas in its calculations. So the resulting, equalized photo is much brighter than it would have been if you’d told Elements to use the whole photo as the basis for its calculations. Equalize doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does a great job of increasing the brightness of a dim photo.
Gradient Map is pretty complicated. According to Adobe, it “maps the grayscale range of an image to the colors of a specified gradient fill.” (If you want to know what the heck that means, turn to Saving Gradients.) Basically, it lets you apply a gradient based on the light and dark areas of your photo; the gradient’s colors replace the existing colors. Give it a shot and see whether you like the result.
Invert makes your photo look like a negative. It’s so useful in doing artistic things to your photos that Elements lets you invert images anytime just by pressing Ctrl+I/⌘-I. (If you want to invert just part of an image, check out the Smart Brush tools [Correcting color with a brush], which have some interesting variations on inversion in their Special Effects menus, or use a duplicate layer with a layer mask [Layer Masks] and edit the area that’s covered by the mask.)
Note
If you think choosing the Invert option sounds like a great way to turn negatives you scanned in with a basic flatbed scanner into positive images, that won’t work unless your negatives are black and white. Color negatives have an orange mask on them that Elements can’t easily undo, so you’re best off with a dedicated film scanner that’s designed to cope with negatives, or at least a scanner that has software for dealing with the mask.
Posterize reduces the total number of colors in your photo, creating a less detailed, more poster-like image. The lower the number you enter in the dialog box, the fewer colors you get and the more extreme the result. If you want blocky, poster-like edges in your photo, try Filter→Artistic→Poster Edges instead of—or in addition to—this adjustment.
Threshold turns every pixel in your photo pure white or pure black—you won’t find any shades of gray here. Figure 9-23 explains how to tweak this adjustment’s settings.
Figure 9-23. This slider controls the dividing point between black and white pixels in a Threshold adjustment. Slide it to the left if you want more white pixels, or to the right for more black ones. The graph you see here is a histogram (page 245) showing the light-to-dark distribution of the pixels in your image.
Photo Filter makes color corrections, like removing color casts from your photos. You can read about it in detail on Photo Filter.
