Using Photoshop Elements to improve your photos

The fundamentals

This tutorial is based on some of Keith's digital photography courses that he has taught in the past, at local Adult Education centres. Keith's photgraphy training for individuals is outlined on our Photography tuition page.

These articles were written for Photoshop Elements 2 - but are still relevant for the underlying image editing techniques in the latest versions. There may be new improved 'automatic' tools for fixing images, but an understanding of what's actually going on, is always useful.

There are sample files that you can download to try out for yourself.

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. In our links section there are many other sources of info - try them out and see which you like the best.

Photoshop Elements is a very powerful program, with many useful features. Rather than just go through its functions and menus, Keith has picked 5 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 version as well.

It is suggested that you go through the tutorials in order, since they do reference previous ones. There is a (2.9 Megabyte) zipped folder of the actual sample images you can download to experiment with.

The photos were all taken on a 1.4MP Olympus CX1400. The examples in the zipped file have been reduced in size.

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Northlight Images also provides commercial photography training courses for businesses, including specialist Photography training for Estate Agents and for Product Photography.

FYI: I've set up a LinkedIn group (~4700 members) for people interested in all aspects of Digital Black and White photography: Digital Black and White

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The techniques

• Midpoint
• Cropping
• Gamma
• Levels
• Saturation
• Straighten
• Clone
• Masked Adjustments

You can search all the hundreds of articles on the site for more information

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