Sunday, December 28, 2008

Photoshop Elements for Photography Enthusiasts

By David Peters

Photoshop software is great for retouching and applying special effects to your photos and also helps you prepare your photographs for the web. If you need to resize your images, add filters and styles, Adobe Photoshop is the software for you.

There are a variety of versions of Photoshop, but the for the amateur photographer or the professional who is new to digital photography, Photoshop Elements is easy to learn and comes with a low price tag and a host of creative tools that help with image manipulation.

If you wish to retouch your image Elements has a huge variety of brush sizes available in Photoshop. Images can be altered by painting with the brushes over the area you want to change. Red eye can be removed in less than two minutes. If you have photos that have poor quality there is a sharp tool to sharpen certain areas of an image. You can even remove unwanted background items from an image.

You have the ability to save your images in any one of 15 types of file formats, giving you the possibility of creating images for a variety of different projects. This includes images for the web, for slideshows, and for many different forms of printing.

Photoshop elements also help you create images for the web easily. Most photographers at some time during their career will want to create a website, and with Photoshop, preparing images is simple. It also helps you to resize images that are being attached to an e-mail.

Using HTML creating a web gallery can be a lot of work but with Photoshop Elements you can open a group of images, resize them, create a thumbnail gallery and create all the navigation HTML buttons for your site. It also creates a folder for your web files and saves it on your computer.

Photoshop Elements also contains a slide show, which is a very easy way of showcasing your images. Slideshow presentations are saved in PDF format making them easy to e-mail or download. To view a slideshow you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer.

Also included is a video frame capture tool. This feature allows you to capture any frame from a video and save it as a stand-alone image. Images created using frame capture can be edited the same as any standard image.

Where the need to edit colour is great, Photoshop has a wide range of tools that will help. Colour images can be turned into black and white shots in less than five minutes. You can also add filters to images to warm them up or create different tones.

The most important feature of Photoshop is the Toolbox. The Toolbox contains all the editing tools that you need in order to burn, dodge, clone, blur, sharpen or smudge an image. This box also contains handy tools to crop and zoom in on an image.

There are many artists worldwide who make a living by retouching images with advanced image software. Learning how to use Photoshop correctly will be a massive help to your digital photography, and if you are a keen photographer it should become part of your digital darkroom. - 16747

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