Advanced Techniques: Retouching, Selections, and Text

With the experience of working with Layers now safely saved to your repertoire of editing skills, it's time to tackle the often confusing world of retouching. This chapter introduces you to the power of the Spot Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tool - you will have seen examples of how this is used to 'perfect' images earlier in this book but here we shift the emphasis from beauty retouching to complex repair jobs that need multiple tools to create the perfect result.

You'll also find a section on what I regard as two of the best image modifiers: the Burn and Dodge Brush Tools - simple brushes that can transform a tired looking image into a dynamic picture - just with the stroke of a brush!

But this chapter is also about simplifying selections - highlighting excellent tools like the Subject Selection and Object Removal features.

And then we focus on the power of selections, describing all of Elements&apos...

Advanced Techniques: Retouching, Selections, and Text

With the experience of working with Layers now safely saved to your repertoire of editing skills, it's time to tackle the often confusing world of retouching. This chapter introduces you to the power of the Spot Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tool - you will have seen examples of how this is used to 'perfect' images earlier in this book but here we shift the emphasis from beauty retouching to complex repair jobs that need multiple tools to create the perfect result.

You'll also find a section on what I regard as two of the best image modifiers: the Burn and Dodge Brush Tools - simple brushes that can transform a tired looking image into a dynamic picture - just with the stroke of a brush!

But this chapter is also about simplifying selections - highlighting excellent tools like the Subject Selection and Object Removal features.

And then we focus on the power of selections, describing all of Elements&apos...

Retouching: Spot Healing Brush and Clone Stamp Tools

In this section, we'll look at how to correct the tones, imperfections, and the look of a simple beauty shot, step-by-step.

During this process, you'll learn how to use both the Spot Healing Brush tool and the powerful Clone Stamp tool, one of the original and, in my opinion, best retouching tools in Elements. The Clone Stamp tool was inherited from Adobe Photoshop in the years before Photoshop even contemplated being part of Creative Cloud.

In effect, the Clone Stamp tool is little more than a copy-and-paste tool. It works in a similar way to a word-processing application, where you might copy and paste a paragraph of text from one part of a document to another, except that it copies pixels rather than text.

The key point to remember when using either the Clone Stamp or Spot Healing Brush is that you first need to identify a clear Source area. This is an area where the "good" pixels are copied from...

Advanced Retouching techniques

If you search online for images using the word 'retouching' you'll find thousands of images—mostly of women. This illustrates a misogynistic view on how women should appear in public - you'll find a good few images of men too, also made and retouched to the point that they appear like plastic dolls with no blemishes and no character to boast of.

But retouching is not just about correcting the human form's shortcomings, however misguided that concept might be. It's also about performing simple tasks like removing bits of litter from a landscape that you'd not noticed when the shot was snapped, it's about correcting seriously warped perspective created when shooting with a wide-angle lens, it's about re-presenting an image to create a different look. To fully retouch any image, you can use one or, more often, a range of retouching and manipulation tools, principally: the Clone and Healing Brush Tool...

Retouching: the Object Removal tool

Elements has this great AI-driven selection feature, Object Removal, designed to make the retouching process as easy and as painless as possible.

Step one: Choose the feature (Guided Edit>Basics>Object Removal).

Step two: Choose one of the selection tools to match the type or accuracy of selection needed—in this example, I used Selection Brush, which lays a red mask over the painted area. You can modify the accuracy of this brush by choosing the Add or Subtract buttons. My "selection" was a bit over-generous, but once Remove Object is pressed, the magic happens. In this example, the surfer in the background disappeared seamlessly in a matter of seconds.

Tip:

Although Guided Edit's Object Removal feature is a great feature, Adobe has developed another sophisticated AI-driven selection tool simply named Select Subject (Select>Subject).

As its name suggests, its job is to select...

Local Retouching: the Burn, Dodge, and Sponge Tools

The Burn, Dodge, and Sponge Tools are probably the best unsung heroes of Elements. Why? Simple: they are easy to use and are very effective visually.

The Burn and Dodge tools are electronic representations of what I did for years in a black and white printing lab. "Burning-in" a photo was a technique for making part of a print darker than the rest of the image—using something like a cardboard mask with a hole in it to make it happen. After the base exposure was done, I'd continue to expose the print—but only the bits of it that I needed to go darker—by holding the cardboard mask between the enlarger lamp and the photo paper. By gently moving the card mask so that the additional exposure only fell onto the the targeted area, I could manipulate the global exposure to that of a custom exposure. The dodging tool worked in reverse—a bit of card taped to some wire and held between the enlarger...

Local Retouching: the Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge brushes

So many times, we use global editing tools in our work only to see that it's just a small part of the image that needs attention—not all of it. To this end, Elements sports a few excellent brush-based tools that work on local adjustments. You literally "paint" softness or sharpness into small areas of the image with complete control over how quickly the pixels under the brush tip are affected, and how soft the results might be.

Three such tools are the Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge brushes. All three operate just like all other brush-based tools in that you can adjust the size of the brush (via a slider on the tool Options panel or by pressing the left/right square brackets), its efficiency (here, called Strength), and, of course, the softness/hardness and shape of the chosen brush tip.

Blurring: I use this brush occasionally as it's good for small details—...

Simple selections: Subject Selection

Here's another newish feature (first appeared in Elements 2020). It's called Subject Selection and is the simplest and easiest process you could imagine for doing exactly what it claims: selecting a subject. Here's how it works.

Step one: Choose your image, then open it in Expert mode. Go to Select>Subject (Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd + S) and sit back for five seconds to see the subject selected. Wham! It just happens—driven by Adobe Sensei (Sensei means teacher in Japanese), you'll get a pre-selected subject. I tried this with several picture examples where the subject stood out against the background. This AI-driven feature did the job pretty well—with about a 90-95% accuracy (around the "subject").

Not bad considering I did nothing to the images other than open the files then try the selection process. Yes, it is a selection tool "dumbed down"—there's...

Advanced Selections: Selection features

Before you even start manually selecting objects, it's vital to understand how to control the selection tools. Unlike the Subject Selection feature, which pretty much does all the heavy lifting for you, Elements has a wide range of manually operated selection tools that are designed for those tricky jobs that the AI-driven features can't handle.

Saving selections

One important feature that you'll find among the selection modifiers is the ability to save a selection once it has been finished, as shown in the following screenshot. For me, this is important because if you've spent time perfecting a selection, you don't want to lose it should you have a problem with the software or the computer, which might require a restart.

Elements has a dedicated selection menu at the top of the screen, and almost at the bottom of that pop-down menu, you'll find the Save Selection... command (A in the screenshot). Give the selection a memorable name in the Save Selection panel that opens (B in the screenshot) before clicking OK and moving on. If you plan on adding multiple selections to the same image file, it's probably worth naming your selections very specifically so that they can be easily identified later should you need to work on them again.

Save Selection is not the end of the story. To save...

Advanced Selections: Feathering

When you make a selection, the selection line around the subject is sharp. It's a little like a scrapbooking exercise where the subject is cut out of the page using a craft knife. We often don't want such a sharp line because your editing will become obvious. The answer is to use a feature called Feathering. This blurs the selection edge by a certain amount, dictated by the pixel radius. How much "feathering" you need is a hard thing to judge because the fuzziness of the selection line is also influenced by other factors, including file resolution.

Once you're happy with the modifications that you have added using Mask view, click back into Selection mode to view the traditional selection line of marching ants (as it's often described) before saving the selection and moving on.

Experience often helps you judge the feathering amount, although it's simple enough to experiment by starting...

Advanced Selections: The Refine Selection Brush tool

The Refine Selection Brush is not technically a selection tool; rather, it's a feature designed to refine an existing selection. In this context, it sort of replaces the process of adding/removing from an existing selection by holding the Shift or the Alt/Option key while moving the cursor over the image.

The Refine Selection Brush throws up the red mask overlay in the same manner as the Selection Brush, but under its View menu, you can also set this tool to show the selection on a black or a white background. If you don't like the overlay color, click on the color swatches button underneath the Opacity slider to change it to a different color.

Where the Refine Selection Brush out-features the older-style Shift or Alt/Opt keyboard shortcuts (to add to or take from an existing selection) is that its options not only include the ability to add to or subtract from the selection, but also the ability...

Advanced Selections: The Refine Edge tool

Another useful selection feature is called the Refine Edge tool.

Having made your initial selection, if you click the Refine Edge button in the Options panel, you'll see the selection view mode change to a white background. You can change this to a red mask background, a black background, or several other working looks, depending on how complex the picture is and how you like to view your selection work (as we'll soon see).

Refine Edge panel (below): Use this panel to perfect any selection. As all images are individual this panel provides you with the tools to customize selection accuracy.

From the top of the panel - View Mode offers seven ways to see the selection while working on it (i.e. as a traditional line of marching ants, Black only, White only, Black and White, As a Layer, Overlay, etc).

Moving down to Edge Detection: This section controls the (pixel) width (and therefore...

Advanced selections: the Marquee and Lasso tools

The Marquee Tool has two modes: Rectangular and Elliptical—with these you can draw a square, rectangular, elliptical, or circular selection shape. In this exercise, I want to shift the door in the following image to the right, copy and paste the left-hand window over the space left by the (moved) door frame, and finally, copy and paste an object from another image into the left-hand corner of this scene.

When making selections, it's important to appreciate that all selection tools work together—you can start with one, then if needed work with a second or third selection tool to complete the job.

Possibly the hardest task with selections is to determine which one is best for the job—here, I started with the Rectangular Marquee Tool to make a selection of this house's front door:

Step one: The door is roughly rectangular, so the Rectangular Marquee tool is the...

Advanced selections: the Magic Wand tool

The Magic Wand tool is one of the best selection tools because it selects objects based on their tones; plus, it's so easy to use. If I use the example of an image featuring a blue sky and a dark landscape, clicking on the blue sky with the Magic Wand tool will inevitably select everything that is blue, but if the sky fades from dark blue to light blue, as most skies do, you might find that Magic Wand only selects a band of color, not the entire sky. This is because the pixels that you click on represent a certain shade of blue. The tool will not automatically select every pixel that's blue. Its sensitivity (to the range of blues, in this example) is controlled by the Tolerance slider. The default value for this is 32, so if I were to increase the tolerance value to, say, 100, it would grab a lot more of the sky. If you set it to the maximum value, 255, the tool will select everything in the image, regardless of its color.

...

Simple Selections: The Quick Selection tool

The Quick Selection tool certainly has a more instant appeal about it. Click and drag the cursor through the area that you want selected; it operates just like the Magic Wand tool, based on pixel color, while continually expanding its semi-automated selection process as you drag the cursor over different colored pixels. Because of its design, you'll note that this selection tool is very good at snapping to the edges of same-colored objects.

Note that the Magic Wand tool might also be fairly effective with this kind of selection subject, but it would probably need lots of additional mouse-clicking to scoop up all the tone variants, including shade, shadow, and other tonal inconsistencies, that every picture throws at us. In this example, it's the shading in the clouds that's hard to assess—those tones are hard to see with the naked eye, but nevertheless will appear a challenge to select evenly using a...

The Selection Brush tool

Photoshop Elements ships with a range of selection tools, all of which offer slightly different selection capabilities. Here's a neat one called, simply, Selection Brush!

This tool features the excellent Selection and Mask Viewing modes. It operates just like a paint brush. Click and drag across your subject and it will appear to draw two selection lines, one on each side of the brush. Swish the brush tip around, and you'll see that it fills in those lines, making the selection increasingly large. This is a reasonably capable tool while its Mask mode is a feature I use frequently to preview and edit work done.

The Auto Selection tool

As with Refine Edge Brush, the Auto Selection tool is relatively new to Photoshop Elements. It combines the action of the regular Lasso tools with the Auto Selection functionality of Quick Selection Brush. What this means in practical terms is that if you want to make a freehand selection of a particular area using Lasso, once you let go of the mouse, having completed the selection as close to the edges as you can, the line snaps to the nearest edge of contrast.

If you search for examples of how this selection tool is used, you'll probably find it's only applied to a certain type of image. The reason for this is simply that every image that requires a selection is very different from every other image—so no one selection tool is ideal for all selection tasks.

Selection tip:

How much feathering should you use? This is a hard question to answer, as there are so many variables: the resolution of the...

Basic Text: Text Styles

Step one: For absolute beginners, the easiest way to add text to an image is to use the Graphics panel in the Expert edit mode. Click once on this panel and from the drop-down menu at the top of the panel, choose Text.

Step two: Choose a style from the expansive range of examples in the type panel. Click into the main image area and you'll see the ubiquitous Your Text Here text appear. Now, the trick with this—and all versions of the Type tool—is to ensure that you click inside that text first, to make it active, then type your copy into the field. If, in your excitement, you click away from the text, Elements "thinks" you have finished and the line of text becomes set. It's no longer editable. Because text always occupies its own layer, it's simple to click back into the text field to make it active again, then start your typing.

Type tool tips: Even though these Graphics Styles are semi...

Basic Text: The Type tool

Photoshop Elements includes a word-processing functionality, enabling text to be added directly to images and graphics. In fact, some of the more automated functions on offer are supplied complete with blank text boxes, ready for you to click and add your words of wisdom, so it's easy to do.

Step one: Choosing the Myriad Pro Regular font, I chose the Horizontal Type tool (as it is officially called), clicked once into the image, then typed in Stand up (hit Enter), comedian: (hit Enter), and then typed Vince Connolly to get this triple-deck text layout. The text is left-aligned, and the type layer is automatically placed at the top of the layer stack (inset panel).

Font size tip:

When you start using the type tool, you might notice that the text you've chosen appears very small or far too large. This might be because last time Elements was used, you chose a small or very large point size in the Options panel. But more than likely...

Basic Text: Styles and effects

The Type tool allows users to apply the usual font styles and color to their text. But there's a lot more to using text than simply typing into an image.

With your text layer active (highlighted in blue), you can apply any of Elements' Layer Styles from the Styles panel that's located on the right-hand side of the main window. The most common style that's used with text is the Drop Shadow. Drop shadows are particularly effective for making text stand out from the page, especially if the background under the text is distracting.

Step one: Elements makes it easy to apply special effects. Choose Drop Shadow from the drop-down menu at the top of the Styles panel, pick one of the shadow "looks," and click its icon to apply the style to that particular layer. If you don't like this effect, try clicking another icon, and that new look will replace the old one. Using Styles in this way allows even novices...

Advanced Text: Custom Text

If you are looking for a special font to match a particular theme or character in one of your Elements projects, one thing you could consider is downloading a custom font from a site such as www.dafont.com. There are a lot of places advertising "free" stuff—I have never had any issues with this one, but I'd be mindful of what and where you click on some of the more disreputable sites online. I have been using fonts from Dafont for many years, and it seems pretty reliable. Here's how it's done:

Step one: Visit the site. Scroll through the pages or use the Search bar.

Step two: When you find a font to your liking, click the Download button. It's small and so downloads quickly.

Step three, left: Once downloaded—to your Downloads folder (Mac/PC)—locate the file and open it by double-clicking the downloaded file icon. It will open a window displaying what the font physically looks like.

...

Keyboard shortcuts

As with most editing, you can lose sight of the image-making process and become too immersed in the more complex editing functions. Keyboard shortcuts are there to help spread the load, reduce repetitive strain injury (RSI), and generally speed up your workflow. I use the first three in the following list all the time. It's also beneficial for you to memorize some of the tool access keys (letters) to make it easier to jump from process to process. Some of these are shown here:

• Ctrl/Cmd + J: Duplicate the (active) layer.
• Ctrl/Cmd + D: Use this to deselect or remove any active selection.
• Ctrl/Cmd + T: Use this to transform objects on the active layer.
• Ctrl/Cmd + E: Merge down.
• Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + E: Merge (all) visible (layers).
• O: Burn, Dodge, and Sponge tools.
• A: Selection brushes (Quick Selection, Selection Brush, Magic Wand, Refine Selection, and Auto Selection).
• L: Lasso tools (Freehand Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, and Magnetic...