Additional Tools and Features

Elements continues to grow and expand with every version released. While many of its newer features are more often concerned with operating efficiency many are also developed from the company's foray into artificial intelligence (AI). Some features might be automatic like the amazing Moving Photos feature, while others appear to have assimilated multiple complex operations into one easy to follow interface - like the fantastic 'Perfect' series (Perfect Portrait, Perfect Landscape and Perfect Pet!), Move and Scale Object and Quote Graphic.

What you'll find in this chapter is a list of great features - features that you might have never used if all you do with Elements is a bit of simple editing. As mentioned, most of these tools encompass some really complex actions - like selections, sharpening, chromatic aberration removal, smoothing, blending, re-composing, warping and even facial reconstruction (in the case of the Open Closed...

Additional Tools and Features

Elements continues to grow and expand with every version released. While many of its newer features are more often concerned with operating efficiency many are also developed from the company's foray into artificial intelligence (AI). Some features might be automatic like the amazing Moving Photos feature, while others appear to have assimilated multiple complex operations into one easy to follow interface - like the fantastic 'Perfect' series (Perfect Portrait, Perfect Landscape and Perfect Pet!), Move and Scale Object and Quote Graphic.

What you'll find in this chapter is a list of great features - features that you might have never used if all you do with Elements is a bit of simple editing. As mentioned, most of these tools encompass some really complex actions - like selections, sharpening, chromatic aberration removal, smoothing, blending, re-composing, warping and even facial reconstruction (in the case of the Open Closed...

Adjust Color Curves

It might come as a shock to some of you but Photoshop Elements is actually based on Photoshop CC. Of course, most of the features are unique to Photoshop Elements, but they have their origins in Elements' higher-end cousin Photoshop: Levels, Hue/Saturation, Shadow/Highlights, Brightness and Contrast, Image Size, Canvas Size—these are all identical to those in Photoshop.

And indeed, if you use a software plugin, such as Photoshop Elements+, you can actually open up and exploit legacy Photoshop features that are still present in Elements. One tool that's sort of part Photoshop and part Elements is called Adjust Color Curves (Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Color Curves).

The Curves tool in Photoshop is a useful feature and while Adjust Color Curves could be called the poor cousin, it's still a good feature with which to adjust the contrast in an image.

Photoshop CC is designed for those who know exactly what they want...

Adjust Color Curves

It might come as a shock to some of you but Photoshop Elements is actually based on Photoshop CC. Of course, most of the features are unique to Photoshop Elements, but they have their origins in Elements' higher-end cousin Photoshop: Levels, Hue/Saturation, Shadow/Highlights, Brightness and Contrast, Image Size, Canvas Size—these are all identical to those in Photoshop.

And indeed, if you use a software plugin, such as Photoshop Elements+, you can actually open up and exploit legacy Photoshop features that are still present in Elements. One tool that's sort of part Photoshop and part Elements is called Adjust Color Curves (Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Color Curves).

The Curves tool in Photoshop is a useful feature and while Adjust Color Curves could be called the poor cousin, it's still a good feature with which to adjust the contrast in an image.

Photoshop CC is designed for those who know exactly what they want...

The Smart Brush

Here's an unusual tool—a special effects brush that works in tandem with a selection brush. Paint into an image and the brush finds contrast edges (around the subject), makes a selection, and fills it with whatever style of Smart Brush is currently set.

In practice, this works reasonably well—but, depending on the nature of the image chosen, the initial selection process can be quite flawed to the point where the effect it's filled with appears distinctly out of place.

That said, Smart Brush includes the Refine Edge utility—this allows users to soften, blur, widen, shrink, and smooth the brush selection edge to make the result look more realistic. Personally, I find this brush a bit too optimistic in what it tries to produce; everything is reliant on the efficacy of the selection process. But in this example, I was pleased with how well it did work.

The tool features more than 90 different effects, which...

The Paint Bucket tool

The Paint Bucket tool, as its name suggests, works like a real bucket of paint. Choose a color from the Toolbar Color Picker, click the image, and it will throw a bucket of color across the image. OK, so your beautiful landscape is now all black (or whatever color was picked up in the Picker). By default, Paint Bucket has several adjustments:

• Opacity (which works as if you are watering the "paint" down).
• Blend Mode (which affects how the paint color reacts with the pixels it's poured over).
• Contiguous mode (which means it only affects similar-colored pixels if they are adjoining to other).
• Tolerance (which dictates how sensitive it is when identifying similar-colored pixels over which it spreads). The default number of 255 means the paint covers the entire image regardless of what you clicked. Set to a smaller value, such as 15, and it only affects pixels that are very similar in tone to the ones initially clicked.

...

The Gradient tool

Another greatly underrated tool in Elements is the Gradient tool. The photographers among you that have used a graduated resin filter over the front of the lens from manufacturers such as Cokin, Lee Filters, and B&W will know what I am talking about.

You place the filter over the lens and position the darker part over the sky with the clearer section at the base over the landscape. This effectively reduces the sky's exposure, thereby balancing the often large exposure disparity that leaves us with an overexposed upper half and an underexposed lower half of the frame. Graduated filters come in different colors (such as orange to enhance sunsets or sunrises).

This tool in Elements comes with 16 default gradients and eight gradient subcategories, giving you a choice of 83 in total. I have only ever used two or three.

Step one: Here's a nice shot, complete with two figures silhouetted by a bright sunset. Click the Gradient...

The Haze Removal tool

Another great feature of Elements is its Haze Removal tool. This is a tool that's designed to boost the mid-tone contrast in your photos, and it works incredibly well on hazy, misty, steamy pictures where the clarity is suffering. You'll note, in the examples shown here, that once processed, the finished images also appear sharper. This is because the sharpening process is all about the contrast differences along subject edges, which is what the Haze Removal tool does, so it might not only fix the climatic conditions, but also make the scene appear sharper.

It's also beneficial on some black and white images and low-contrast images, and sometimes it's just good to add to a picture to add a bit of punch. Elements features two versions: one is the Auto Haze Removal tool, which does a credible job, but if it's control you need, it's best to go for the regular Haze Removal tool in the Enhance menu and use its sliders to perfect the...

The Content-Aware Move tool

A tool that might help fine-tune your compositional skills is the Content-Aware Move tool. Essentially, this is a large-scale Healing Brush, but instead of clicking repeatedly over an image hoping that it can copy, paste, and blend pixels over a problem area, this tool works on a much larger area. Draw around the object you want to move, drag the entire object to a new position, and release it—Elements will do the rest.

Here, the rest means assessing the pixels around the target site and then blending them into the background canvas. Some examples work much better than others.

Elements provides some control over the Healing action (via a slider), plus Add or Subtract modes, for the initial selection process.

After it has performed, however, I find I have to fine-tune the results with Clone Stamp or Healing Brush to tidy up some of Elements' visual mistakes. That being said, the Content-Aware Move tool is not a bad feature with which...

The Recompose tool

Another re-composition helper is the Recompose tool. Personally, I think its results can be very hit and miss, almost as if Adobe has bitten off more than it can chew.

We all have snaps in our libraries where we might wish the composition to be slightly different—people a bit closer to each other, landscapes a bit wider, or formats recomposed to a square shape, for example. The Recompose tool sets out to provide the solutions to these problems.

Main image, above:

I like the openness in this scene, but want to stretch it further to give the image more of a panoramic look. To achieve this, I need to add more to the right-hand side of the canvas using the Canvas Size feature (inset panel). I wasn't 100% sure how much extra real estate I was going to need, so I added a lot—if it adds too much, it's easy enough to crop any surplus off later. The new real estate appears as a checkerboard pattern, indicating that...

Move & Scale Object feature

It's not often that you get to experience a complex, automated photo-editing feature that's really exciting, but this is one of those times. In Guided Edit mode, under Basics, you'll find Move & Scale Object.

As the somewhat ambitious name might suggest, this is a copy-and-paste operation on steroids. But in my experience, it only really works effectively on simple images—the process of identifying the main subject and selecting it cleanly using one of two selection tools, then copy-and-pasting it elsewhere in the image, is both a complex operation and one that's fraught with potential editing problems. That said, I chose this simple shot of a woman photographing the pyramids in Egypt as an example. This feature is easy to use—just follow the onscreen instructions!

Photo manipulation woes

In 1982, the National Geographic Magazine got into hot water—the editors liked...

Move & Scale Object feature

It's not often that you get to experience a complex, automated photo-editing feature that's really exciting, but this is one of those times. In Guided Edit mode, under Basics, you'll find Move & Scale Object.

As the somewhat ambitious name might suggest, this is a copy-and-paste operation on steroids. But in my experience, it only really works effectively on simple images—the process of identifying the main subject and selecting it cleanly using one of two selection tools, then copy-and-pasting it elsewhere in the image, is both a complex operation and one that's fraught with potential editing problems. That said, I chose this simple shot of a woman photographing the pyramids in Egypt as an example. This feature is easy to use—just follow the onscreen instructions!

Photo manipulation woes

In 1982, the National Geographic Magazine got into hot water—the editors liked...

Moving Photos feature

In Photoshop Elements, you'll find a few neat developments—many are connected with Adobe's continued development of AI. This is there to make the often-complex retouching processes appear easier to control, and in the case of the Object Removal, Adjust Facial Features, Open Closed Eyes, and the Move & Scale Object features, it works pretty well. Here's another one that I shall try to illustrate here, even though the end product is a video. Moving Photos (and the new 2023 Moving Elements feature) has bridged the gap between stills and moving pictures by supplying this cool GIF or MP4 maker.

Find a picture with a strong subject, open it in the Moving Photos feature (Enhance>Moving Photos), double-click the type of animation from the menu (inset, on the left), and sit back and let Adobe do its magic. And magic it is.

We have all seen the effect used in advertising campaigns and in some horror film genres...

Quote Graphic feature

One feature I never expected to appear in Elements is this: Quote Graphic. But then, Quote Graphic is appropriate because it makes working with text both easy and very creative - especially when compared to the rather tricky-to-use Type Tool.

The idea behind this new feature is to make the job of working with text a little easier. You can work this a couple of ways: choose an image and add the text, graphics, and animations to it, or start from scratch and work with vector graphics and type on their own.

If you already have an image open, you can choose

Start with a Photo and it opens in the special Quote Graphic window, as seen above.

There are plenty of possible artwork combinations here, from standard print sizes (vertical, square, horizontal) to the usual social media format options. Use your own images or use a stock one from Adobe and your own witty quotes, or one of those supplied.

Right...

Convert to Black and White feature

The medium of black and white is favored by a lot of photographers—it evokes feelings of antiquity, style, and artiness in many different scenarios. The trouble is, if you ask a bunch of photographers how to convert a file into black and white, they'll come up with multiple different ways of doing it—some good, some great, some complex.

Elements makes the conversion process a little easier with it's own Convert to Black and White tool. Here's how it works:

Step one: Choose the Convert to Black and White tool (Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd + B or Enhance>Convert to Black and White).

Step two: The Convert window opens and the image in the main edit space automatically converts into one of the black and white recipes on offer. With the introduction of higher-resolution monitors, the fixed-shape preview before-and-after windows are less relevant than the main image behind it.

Step three: Choose one of the...

Duotone Effect filter

A duotone is a black and white image with an extra color added for effect. It's a feature that has been in Adobe Photoshop CC for many, many years. In fact, duotones have been popular with photographers when publishing high-end books of mostly black and white images. The Italian printing industry has one of the best reputations for producing such books, although now you can make your own with Elements. But this feature doesn't just stop at converting to black and white then adding color (which I guess is why it's called Duotone Effect and not just "duotone"). You can apply a gradient to the Duotone Effect, customize the color content of the duotone—in fact, you can have a lot of fun creating color images like never before.

Step one: Find an image, open it, move into the Guided Edit mode, and locate Duotone Effect under the appropriately named Fun Effects section.

Step two: Interestingly, this tool...

B&W Color Pop filter

Guided Edit Mode is, in this version of Adobe Photoshop Elements, a powerhouse of useful features. This one, B&W Color Pop, has been around for several versions—come to think of it, even some cameras have this feature as an inbuilt camera "look."

This is definitely one of the simpler Guided Edits on offer—it's only got four features or tools that you need to negotiate, and that makes it easy, simple, and fast.

Step one: Open the image and decide on the color you want to highlight (top screenshot, in red). I chose the yellow top of the child, as she's the main subject, but you can choose Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, or pick your own using the eye dropper if needed using the Select Custom Color button.

Step two: I liked the selection it made here (it was clean because there was no other yellow in the frame) so I didn't need to use the Fuzziness slider or the Refine Effect tool. I did whack...

Old Fashioned Photo filter

Black and white conversions, despite Elements having an easy-to-use Convert to Black and White feature (under Enhance), can be tricky—it's easy enough to do it, but to do it well, with a richness of tonality, takes a bit of skill. I have included this Guided Edit feature because it does a great job of tinting images—not just "sepia toning" but really offering a cool range of color tones that most would have never thought to create in the past. Now you can!

Step one: This first feature (outlined in red) borrows a few of the recipes from the Convert to Black and White tool under Enhance (such as Newspaper, Urban, and Vivid), allowing you to first off add a bit of contrast "kick" to the converted mono tones.

Step two: Adjust Tones affects the contrast—get it looking good, then move on to Add Texture. Most really old photographs actually have less grain and artefacts than we have now...

Perfect Portrait feature

Elements now has three "Perfect" Guided edits—Perfect Landscape, Perfect Pet and Perfect Portrait. It's actually an amalgamation of not one, but 10 different editing tools, nicely lined up top to bottom in the panel on the right-hand side of the screen.

The advantage of a feature like Perfect Portrait is not so much that it works really well—it does—but rather that it brings all the features that you'd need to make a portrait appear perfect together in one panel. You probably won't use them all, but the relevant ones are all there in the toolbox. It's a bit similar to the toolbox a carpenter might take on a job—they're not necessarily going to use everything, but at least all situations are covered.

To use Perfect Portrait, open your image and run the feature (Guided Edit>Special Edits>Perfect Portrait). The first function to try is the Smooth Skin feature...

Perfect Portrait feature

Elements now has three "Perfect" Guided edits—Perfect Landscape, Perfect Pet and Perfect Portrait. It's actually an amalgamation of not one, but 10 different editing tools, nicely lined up top to bottom in the panel on the right-hand side of the screen.

The advantage of a feature like Perfect Portrait is not so much that it works really well—it does—but rather that it brings all the features that you'd need to make a portrait appear perfect together in one panel. You probably won't use them all, but the relevant ones are all there in the toolbox. It's a bit similar to the toolbox a carpenter might take on a job—they're not necessarily going to use everything, but at least all situations are covered.

To use Perfect Portrait, open your image and run the feature (Guided Edit>Special Edits>Perfect Portrait). The first function to try is the Smooth Skin feature...

Perfect Pet feature

Following on from its Perfect Portrait and Perfect Landscape Guided Edit feature, Elements now sports a Perfect Pet mode. Don't laugh, it's actually quite good, encompassing tone changes with sophisticated retouching. Like most of Elements' Guided modes, it is a little limited, but it's also great fun—and fun is what editing images should be...

All Guided Edit features follow a step-by-step recipe—you start at the top of the list and work your way to the bottom before saving the work and moving to the next project (top, right).

After cropping and leveling the file (only if needed), move to the Remove Dirt and Spots function (actually Spot Healing Brush in disguise)—this is good for quickly removing small blemishes. I was amused to see the Remove Collar and Leash function—actually, this is the Clone Stamp tool, a very sophisticated retouching tool that enables you to copy...

Adjust Facial Features

This feature appeared in Elements a few versions ago. At the time, I didn't give it a second thought, but when I eventually tried it, I realized how amazing it was. Warning: your family photos might never look the same after trying this tool.

The clever Adjust Facial Features tool uses its AI to identify and isolate the facial area in a portrait. It isolates key facial elements, such as the eyes, nose, lips, and mouth, so they can be masked and edited separately. These sections can then be changed using a number of distortion techniques—Elements treats the pixels almost as if they were elastic, allowing you to stretch, expand, push, bend, and contract features accordingly.

Multiple faces: If there's more than one face in the snap, this is what Elements will present—a blue circle indicates the current or active face. To work on the other faces, simply click the circle to make it active, add your changes...

Adjust Facial Features – Face Tilt

Since its first appearance a couple of releases ago, Adjust Facial Features has made its mark on the editing community. It works brilliantly to make slight adjustments to the human face—rounder eyes, thinner cheeks, and flatter-shaped eyebrows. Elements has taken the AI technology one step further with a new feature called Face Tilt, which you'll see at the bottom of the Adjust panel. Of course, like its parent Adjust feature, it only really works if the AI can identify a face, or faces, in the shot.

Then, using AI, and a fair bit of background selectivity and pixel manipulation, you can rotate the face area left/right, up/down, and at a rotational angle. Sounds crazy, no? I thought so, but soon discovered that it actually works.

Re-compose by warping pixels: I found this cute picture where both babies are not really looking at the camera—and, using this tool, managed to manipulate their angelic...

Open Closed Eyes feature

Another seemingly impossible editing feature that you'll see in Elements is its impressive Open Closed Eyes tool.

Sure, now I've heard it all—a software application that opens the closed eyes of your portrait subject? Well, don't laugh, it really works, and in most examples that I have tested, it works very well indeed, provided that you can find a pair of eyes that match the portrait sitter's eyes reasonably well. Why is this feature needed? If you have a bunch of portraits, but the one composition you really like has the subject blinking in it, you can use this feature to copy and paste the open eyes from another shot over the blinking eyes. You can also use it to replace one set of eyes with a second, different set of eyes. How good is that!?

Step one: Open the shot in Quick or Expert mode.

Step two: Choose the Enhance>Open Closed Eyes tool and wait for the utility to open in the main window (see the screensh...

Keyboard shortcuts

• Image Modes: Quick/Expert Edit>Image>Mode
• Adjust Color Curves: Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Color Curves
• Blur, Sharpen, Smudge: Tool Bar>Enhance (R)
• Eraser: Tool Bar>Draw (E)
• Smart Brush: Tool Bar>Enhance (F)
• Paint Bucket: Tool Bar>Draw (K)
• Gradient Tool: Tool Bar>Draw (G)
• Haze Removal tool—Enhance>Haze Removal (Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd + Z)
• Content-aware Move tool: Tool Bar>Modify (Q)
• Recompose tool: Tool Bar>Modify (W)
• Move & Scale Object: Guided Edit>Basics
• Quote Graphic: Create menu
• Convert to Black and White: Enhance>Convert to Black and White (Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd + B)
• Duotone Effect: Guided Edit>Fun Edits
• B&W Color Pop: Guided Edit>Black and White
• Old-fashioned photo: Guided Edit>Fun Edits
• Perfect Landscape: Guided Edit>Fun Edits
• Perfect Portrait: Guided Edit>Fun Edits
• Adjust Facial Features: Enhance>Adjust Facial Features...