Using Photoshop Elements to improve your photos

Removing colour casts and converting to black and white

This short tutorial is based on some of Keith's digital photography courses that he used to teach in local Adult Education centres. There are sample files in a zipped folder that you can download to try out for yourself.

Although the examples here use older versions of software, we've kept them to illustrate basic principles of image editing - very importan to know, even if your own software has all kinds of 'auto-fix' tricks built into it...

The aim is that when you look at an image you can visualise what end result you want and choose the possible techniques to get there. This approach may not suit everyone, there is no magic checklist, no list of instructions to follow.

Photoshop Elements is a very powerful program, with many useful features. The tutorials on this site illustrate basic actions that you can take to improve many of your digital photos. Use the practice files and experiment with them.

Keith uses Photoshop for the images on this site, it is more complex than Elements, but many of the manipulations he carries out could be done just as well in Photoshop Elements. The courses use Elements 2, but you should be able to work through with the original and later versions as well.

The techniques

• Removing a colour cast
• Getting black and white from your colour images

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