Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 Part G

This is the 7th installment in my blog post series on using Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 based on what I learn on the VTC video training course. A lot of people especially when learning how to use this software tend to overuse sharp and unsharp. They are mainly for using on parts of a photo that are a little out of focus and overuse degrades the picture quality. The color cast command can be found at enhance/ adjust colour/ remove color cast. It's particularly good for old photos where the color has degraded. It's good to use it in conjunction with adjusting the light levels. A bit of advice is if you photograph a lady and want to Photoshop the picture ask her for permission as she might be offended. Men in general don't seem to mind. If a subject only has minor blemishes it often isn't necessary to fix them. The color curves command found at enhance/ adjust color/ color curves lets you manually adjust the colors in the picture. Really you have to experiment and gain experience to know whether color curves is better than light levels or histogram on a particular image. If you have washed out color and an indistinct background in an image consider converting it to black and white. It's found at enhance/ adjust color/ convert to black and white. It has quite a few preset black and white options or you can sort the image out manually. If you do landscape photography the most important factor is do you like the picture. You can often one good photo into several photos each with different settings with in the program. Always look for something different or unusual to photograph. Most subjects look best off centre on a photo. Ideally the subject will take up 1/3 or 2/3 of the photo. Having a fair amount of background makes the picture more dramatic. Finally there is a color variations command at enhance / adjust color / color variations which displays predefined images with settings applied that you can just click on or alternatively you can adjust the settings and then select an image that looks right.