Obermeier B. - Photoshop Elements 14 For Dummies

Photoshop Elements 14 For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948011

ISBN 978-1-119-13194-6 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-13195-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-13196-0 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

We live in a photo world. And Photoshop Elements has become a tool for both professional and amateur photographers who want to edit, improve, manage, manipulate, and organize photos and other media. Considering the power and impressive features of the program, Elements remains one of the best values for your money among computer software applications.

This book is an effort to provide as much of a comprehensive view of a wildly feature-rich program as we can. Additionally, this book is written for a cross-platform audience. If youre a Mac user, youll find all you need to work in Elements 14 for the Mac, including support for placing photos on maps and more consistency with Windows features.

As each software product is upgraded to a newer version, you sometimes find a whole bunch of new features that dazzle you and sometimes you find not so many new features but much more improved performance. Photoshop Elements 14 is focused on the latter. Do you remember Adobe Flash? Well, Flash is dying and much of the interface construction that was formerly based on Adobe Flash is now completely recoded. What this means for you is that youll find faster and better performance because Adobe has abandoned old code and given us all new code from the ground up. Youll find performance and stability much improved, which means faster responses as you whiz through tasks that took more time to perform in earlier versions of Elements.

In terms of features, this version of Elements brings you some nifty enhancements, such as improved face recognition and much better geotagging. Face recognition is now based on clusters or groups, even when you dont ask Elements to recognize a person in a photo. Elements sort of guesses at similar faces and groups them together. You tag one face in a cluster and all the faces are tagged with the same name. With geotagging, youll find it much easier to place people in geographic locations on maps.

Elements 14 continues with improvements such as bulk importing, which makes it easier for you to bring in a bunch of media from different locations in one click. After the media is imported, you find an improved view in the Media Browser where the Adaptive Grid (viewed when you show Details) displays information about your photo. Just mouse over an image and Elements shows you a tooltip displaying important information about your photos and videos. Additionally there have been some enhancements to the Refine Selection tool. Youll find using this tool very helpful when you want to select a photo with a person having hair blowing in the wind. The Refine Selection tool now in Elements 14 does a much better job of selecting those strands of hair floating around.

You also find a completely new user interface when working with Guided Edits. The Photo Editor offers a new look to Edited Edits where options are listed in categories and you find images with examples for each edit. Photomerge has been moved to the Guided Edits panel to help you step by step bring together panorama scenes. Elements continues to make your job easier when performing a vast array of editing tasks.

The Photoshop Elements Editor also provides you some very nice new features. One of our favorites is the new Shake Reduction command. Try applying shake reduction to a photo and youll be surprised to find that some photos were taken with an unsteady hand. There are also other new additions such as auto effects and the capability to straighten photos while in Quick Edit mode, and image dehazing.

Because Photoshop Elements has something for just about everyone, we know that our audience is large and also that not everyone will use every tool, command, or method we describe. We offer many cross-references throughout in case you want to jump around. You can go to just about any chapter and start reading. If a concept needs more explanation, we point you in the right direction for getting some background.

Throughout this book, especially in step lists, we point you to menus for keyboard commands. For accessing a menu command, you may see something like this: