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We live in a photo world. And Photoshop Elements has become a tool for both professional and amateur photographers who want to edit, improve, manage, manipulate, and organize photos and other media. Considering the power and impressive features of the program, Elements remains one of the best values for your money among computer software applications.

About This Book

This book is an effort to provide as much of a comprehensive view of a wildly feature-rich program as we can. Additionally, this book is written for a cross-platform audience. If you’re a Mac user, you’ll find all you need to work in Elements 15 for the Mac, exactly the same as when we refer to using Elements on Windows.

Here we are now in version 15 of Photoshop Elements. Imagine, 15 versions of the program! You won’t find huge changes to an already refined user interface, nor will you find some extraordinary, out-of-this-world, new features. What’s new in this version of Elements are refinements of the feature-rich program and some helpful new features that permit you to express yourself artistically in just about any manner you choose.

In terms of the new features, this version of Elements brings you some nifty enhancements to facilitate ease in working with the program and some very nice tools and methods for editing your photos:

❯❯ Touch Support: Most of the new Windows laptop computers shipped today have touchscreens that permit you to use your fingers instead of a mouse for menu commands and actions. The Mac has been slow to adopt this technology. Elements 15 supports some features for using touchscreen technology when working on a Windows laptop. The Organizer and Quick Edit modes have migrated to more friendly touchscreen behavior.

❯❯ Layers: You can now group layers in Elements. You can also color-code layers.

❯❯ Perspective Crop: You can crop images using perspective control.

❯❯ Content Aware Move Transform: Content Aware lets you move pixels around an image while blending the edges with background content so the result appears much less artificial. Now you can use Content Aware when transforming selections such as scaling and rotating.

❯❯ Enhanced Search: Searching for people, places, and events has been revamped to help you quickly and efficiently add tags to images. Finding special moments becomes much easier and it’s all included in a single panel.

❯❯ Auto Tagging: If you’ve found tagging images with keywords or identifying people and events individually to be burdensome and take up too much of your time, this new Auto Tagging feature helps you breeze through managing your Organizer library.

❯❯ Enhanced Auto Fix: If you want to quickly make some fixes on images but you don’t want to launch the Photo Editor, you can now select multiple photos and apply fixes directly in the Organizer.

❯❯ Import from Cloud Services: Storing your pictures in the cloud has become commonplace for most users. If you use Dropbox, One Drive, iCloud, or one of many other cloud services, you can now directly import photos into the Organizer from your cloud service.

❯❯ Face Aware Liquefy: This new features enables you to detect an area on a face such as lips, nose, eyes, or chin; use sliders in a panel to make adjustments (something like changing frowns to smiles); and apply the edit to all images with the same face tags.

❯❯ Filter Gallery: Filters have always been a fun experience for users of both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. The Filters panel has now become much easier to use.

❯❯ Guided Edits: If you’re a long-time user of Photoshop Elements, you’re aware that with each new version, we find new Guided Edits. A Guided Edit walks you through a series of steps to produce an effect – like having a Photoshop Elements guru over your shoulder telling you step-by-step how to make an edit.

In Elements 15, we have some new Guided Edits:

● Photo Text: Helps you use text as a mask and embellish the text with embossing, drop shadows, strokes, and so on.

● Speed Pan: Enables you to add motion to images.

● Painterly: Enables you to turn a photo into an image appearing as an art painting.

● Frame Creator: Enables you to make custom photo frames that you can use in other creations. You can add the custom frame to a library and reuse it many times with other creations.

❯❯ Optional Smart Layers: Smart Layers have been around in Photoshop and Elements for some time. The idea behind a Smart Layer is that whatever you do to the layer can later be rejected and you can return to the original content unedited. This is known as nondestructive editing. When you drag a photo from the Photo Bin in Elements to an open image, the new photo appears as a Smart Layer. Some users don’t want the new layers in a document added as Smart Layers. Now in Elements 15 you have a Preference option to turn off Smart Layers when you drag a photo from the Photo Bin to an open image.

Throughout this book, especially in step lists, we point you to menus for keyboard commands. For accessing a menu command, you may see something like this:

Choose File ⇒ Get Photos ⇒ From Files and Folders.

You click the File menu to open its drop-down menu, click the menu command labeled Get Photos, and then choose the command From Files and Folders from the submenu that appears. It’s that simple.

We also refer to context menus, which jump up at your cursor position and show you a menu of options related to whatever you’re doing at the time. To open a context menu, just right-click the mouse, or Control-click on a Mac if you don’t have a two-button mouse.

When we mention that keys need to be pressed on your keyboard, the text looks like this:

Press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S (Option+Shift+⌘ +S on the Mac).

In this case, you hold down the Alt key on Windows/the Option key on the Mac, then the Shift key, then the Control key on Windows/the ⌘ key on the Mac, and then press the S key. Then, release all the keys at the same time.

Icons Used in This Book

In the margins throughout this book, you see icons indicating that something is important.

This icon informs you that this item is a new feature in Photoshop Elements 15.

Pay particular attention when you see the Warning icon. This icon indicates possible side-effects or damage to your image that you might encounter when performing certain operations in Elements.

This icon is a heads-up for something you may want to commit to memory. Usually, it tells you about a shortcut for a repetitive task, where remembering a procedure can save you time.

A Tip tells you about an alternative method for a procedure, giving you a shortcut, a workaround, or some other type of helpful information.

Elements is a computer program, after all. No matter how hard we try to simplify our explanation of features, we can’t entirely avoid some technical information. If a topic is a little on the technical side, we use this icon to alert you that we’re moving into a complex subject. You won’t see many of these icons in the book because we try our best to give you the details in nontechnical terms.

Beyond the Book

In addition to what you’re reading right now, this product also comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that includes a detailed look at the Elements photo editing workspace, Tool Panel shortcuts, tricks for selecting objects, and more. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and type Photoshop Elements 15 For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.

Where to Go from Here

Try to spend a little time reading through the three chapters in Part 1. After you know how to edit and save photos, feel free to jump around and pay special attention to the cross-referenced chapters, in case you get stuck on a concept. After exploring the Elements Photo Editor, look over Part 2, where we talk about organizing and searching photos. If you’re ready to jump into more advanced tasks, check out Parts 3 and 4, where you learn how to make selections; layer images and effects together; add filters and type; and much, much more.

We hope you have much success and enjoyment in using Adobe Photoshop Elements 15, and it’s our sincere wish that the pages ahead provide you with an informative and helpful view of the program.