This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Making Touch Up Edits
A few tools in the Quick Fix editor are designed to easily fix some specific situations. In the Quick pane, note the addition of four tools in the Tools pane: Red Eye Removal Tool, Whiten Teeth, Make Dull Skies Blue, and Black and White–High Contrast (Figure 4.11).
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Figure 4.11 New Touch Up tools.
Unlike the other Quick Fix edits, which apply their adjustments to the entire image or to an area that you first specify using the Quick Selection tool, these Touch Up tools perform the selection and apply the edit in one step.
To make a Touch Up edit:
- With a photo active in the Editor, click one of the Touch Up tool icons to select it.
- Click and drag to define the area to be edited; for example, with the Make Dull Skies Blue tool active, drag in the sky area. Elements makes a selection and applies the effect (Figure 4.12).
Figure 4.12 The Make Dull Skies Blue applies a blue gradient to the selected area.
- Adjust the affected area using the selection tools (Figure 4.13).
Figure 4.13 Use the selection tools to refine where the effect is applied.
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Tips
- You can apply multiple Touch Up tool edits to the same image. When you click an icon, any adjustment you've already made is highlighted for further editing.
- The Touch Up tools are actually simplified versions of edits that the Smart Brush makes. You can apply one and then edit it further in the Full Edit mode later. See Chapter 6 for more information.
Run Automated Actions with the Guided Edit Action Player
The Action Player is a feature found in the Guided Edit pane for applying preset effects such as creating captions or applying combination edits like changing a photo's colors to sepia and adding grain to the image. In the Guided Edit pane, click Action Player under Automated Actions to reveal a set of automated effects that ship with Elements (Figure 4.14). Choose a set, pick a specific action, and then click the Play Action button.
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Figure 4.14 The Action Player can run automated combinations of adjustments.
That's not the whole story, though. The Action Player can run any action created in Photoshop CS. So, for example, if a photographer friend of yours uses Photoshop extensively and has created an action that resizes an image and adds a border and photo credit, you could run that action in Elements instead of performing each step. (Elements can currently only run actions, not create them.)
Adding a new action isn't straightforward, however. Here's how to do it:
Take a Photoshop action file—it ends in the extension .atn—and place it in the following directory on your hard disk (each slash represents a folder name; note that the files are stored in the Library folder at the root level of your hard disk, not the Library folder that's found in your user account's Home folder):
[Hard Disk Name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Photoshop Elements/8.0/Locale/
en_US/Workflow Panels/actions
Relaunch Elements, go to the Guided Edit pane of the Editor, and you'll see the action set appear in the first drop-down menu.