Photo Editing for Absolute Beginners

1. Photo Editing for Absolute Beginners Skillshare intro video: Today, I'm Melissa Shannon, founder of digital scrapbooking h.com, and I am so thrilled to be bringing you this video to tell you all about my brand new cars, photo editing for Absolute Beginners is a brand new, completely new class. This class now contains everything you'll need to get started in photoshop elements. You'll learn how to find your way around photoshop elements so that you can find the tools and commands you need, how to open a photo in photoshop elements, and save it so that you can't ruin your original. Edit a photo in quick mode and improve the look of your photos. Drop a photo for printing, so you get the whole subject in the frame. Add text to a photo to tell your story or make a postcard or invitation. Save a photo for printing online, so the prints look beautiful when you get them print at home on photo paper of any size and print multiple photos on a four by six or letter or A four paper. You'll also learn how to straighten your photo, so the horizon or buildings looking Smick. You'll gain the confidence to work on your own. And if you have questions, I'll be there in the comments to help you if you need a hand. Gooda. I'm Melissa Shannon, Ozzie Mum, digital scrapbooker, professional organizer and instructor. I love pairing photos with memories of meaningful moments in my everyday life. I would love to introduce you to the joy of using photos on your computer. I've been teaching and working with Adobe Photoshop elements for many years. Just think of me as your tech savvy friend on call for when you need a little bit of a hand with your photo editing. So, what are you waiting for? It's time for you to join me in class. 2. The Photoshop Elements Workspace: Ga. I'm Melissa Shannon, and I'm here in Adobe Photoshop elements 2024 to show you around the program. When you first open Photoshop elements 2024, you will be greeted by this welcome screen, and you'll have three options. You've got the organizer to organize all your photos. You've got the photo editor to edit your photos, and the video editor to edit video. At the top here are some tutorials and information. Showing you what photoshop elements can do. And then here will be your auto creations if you turn them on. You also have a little search box here. You also have a little search box here where you can search and browse articles, and the help files to help you find what you're looking for in Photoshop elements. And there's a link to the Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Support. So, let's get started with the photo editor. When you first open photoshop elements, it will take you to the quick mode. This is where you have access to some tools, as well as adjustments affects quick actions, textures, and frames. In this class, we won't be going through every single feature in every mode, but I'm starting with an overview to let you know what you have available. The next tab here is guided edit, where you can do some common corrections to photos. There's different categories. And if you're not sure what a special edit could be versus a fun edit, this is where the search comes in handy. So if I type in an old photo, we can take a photo back in time by giving it an old fashioned look, or we can transform an old scan photo to give it a fresh and flawless look. So, that search feature is quite helpful. And we've got some feedback on our searches as well. Then we have the next tab is the advanced. This one is more reminiscent of Photoshop CC, if you've ever used the subscription version of Photoshop. Has all of your tools on the left hand side. We have a layers panel. We can choose from a basic workspace, which has these icons here. Or we can go into a custom work space which is what I tend to use. Let's head back into the quick mode for now. The first thing we will want to do is open a photo that needs editing. 3. Open a Photo: This video, I'll show you how you can open a photo in photoshop elements. I'm working in Photoshop elements 2024, but if you have a similar version, either older or newer, the process is still the same. You can either go up to the file menu and click open, or you can click the large open button on the T bar. And I'm going to go to the folder where my photo is. And I'm going to open it. It's as easy as that. Now my photo is open in photoshop elements, and now we can start a editing in the next video. 4. Straighten a Photo: And I'm going to do a little bit of editing. The first thing I'm going to do is straighten my photo because, oh my goodness, if I had $1 for every beach photo where the horizon isn't straight, I'd be very rich. In order to straighten our horizon, we just click on one edge of the horizon, and then the other. And Photoshop does all that for us. If you'd like to learn more about the options in the Straighten tool, I'll have a detailed video next. 5. 4 ABCs P Straighten Tool: Today, I'm here with you in Photoshop elements 2021 for the ABCs of PSC. Today, we're up to the letter P. And for some reason, the letter P is the shortcut for the straighten tool. So, let's check it out. You can find the straighten tool in the bottom section of your toolbox here under the modify Option. And it works pretty simply. You just find a photo that's not straight and trace along the horizon line or any object that's straight. And then it will straighten the photo for you. In this case, our photo is straightened, but it has these gaps Well, you can change that, let's undo that. And you can change that by using some of these other options. So we have the option to crop to remove that empty space or the crop to the original size option. And then we have the option to auto fill the edges. You can also choose whether or not to rotate all layers. So if you're retouching a photo and you've added a bunch of layers, and then you realized, oh, the horizon lines off, you can just check this box, and then everything will be rotated. Now, I'm going to do this again. I'm just going to use the grower shrink again, and I'm going to auto fill the edges. So zoom in a little so that we can see what we're doing. I'm going to carefully click and then release on the opposite side. And then photoshop elements is not only fixing my horizon line, they have also filled in the edges. Now, on this image where it's sand, sea and sky, it looks basically flawless. Let's try it on something that's a little bit more complex. Here's another photo where the horizon line's not straight. So I'm going to use this building here as my reference point. And let's see how this one looks. And now, the horizon is straightened, and the edges are filled in. Photoshop elements does a pretty awesome job of that. Now, if it doesn't work too well on your image, you can always choose to go for the crop to remove background option, and then you'll just lose a little bit of your photo. But straighten is a really great tool, and it really helps your photos look much more professional, especially with those kind of beach photos where it's super obvious if the horizon line isn't straight, but all photos look better with a straight horizon. You know, unless you're trying to be artsy. Hey, there's always a time to break the rules. Hope you've enjoyed today's tip about the Stratton tool. The shortcut is P in your toolbox. 6. Crop a Photo: So the next thing I'm going to show you is how to crop your photo. Cameras, these days come in lots of different resolutions. Your iPhone is different to your Android and your Samsung is different to your oppo, and your DSLR is different. And not all photo printing places do custom resolution sizes. So I'm going to show you how you can crop your photo, so you'll know exactly what is printed when you print a photo. So I am in the Quick edit mode here. I've opened my photo, and I'm going to click the crop button. Now, it will suggest some crops for me, but I actually want to choose four by six so that I can print this on a standard four by six and it'll come out looking beautiful. So I don't really want these two people, so I'm going to drag the corner of my crop box, and I'm going to crop those people out. And then, you can see I've got the rule of thirds here. I'm going to actually have that bottom third be the horizon line, and Lucy is beautifully almost on that third as well. So I think that'll be a great crop for this photo. So now I'm going to save my work. And now when I get it printed, it will be a stunning photo with the horizon line at the lower third, a beautiful blue Mulalu sky and children playing in the water. What a great photo. Now, if I wanted to, I could also print this at six b f four by six, and have it a vertical photo. To adjust the crop, just click and drag on the selected area or adjust any of the handles till you like how it looks. Then I would save this one as a JPEG ready for printing. When you save for print, be sure to adjust the slider to the large file size to get the best quality print. So on our drop down box, there's lots of different standard sizes you can use that will fit in a frame, a pocket page, a project life, or a photo album. But you can also create your own custom size crops. Since I'm Australian and we use A four paper here, I'm going to use my own size crop to make this picture fit on a sheet of paper. So that'll be 29.7 centimeters wide and 21 centimeters high. So if I'm going to print this at A four size with my A four photo paper, I'm going to use this. Now, you might be wondering, Hey, how are you resizing it if it's in centimetres already? Well, not to worry. Let me explain what this is. So once you finish the photo cropping the photo, you can go to image resize Canvas size, and you can see the size that it currently is. Now, photoshop does all the maths behind the scene to take your very high resolution photo and resample that down to the correct size. So this is a photo basics class, so we won't go into that. But don't worry. As long as you're not using a tiny screenshot and trying to print that out at a full sheet of paper size, you probably won't run into any problems because cameras these days are just such high resolution, and we only need about 300 DPI to print. Now, let's save this one as a JPEG so I can print it. So, I hope this video has helped you learn how you can crop your photos to make them fit the size that you need when they're printed. 7. Fix a photo in Quick Mode: Here to show you how you can edit your photo in Quick Mode in photo shopliments. So let's click Open to open our file. And there's a couple of things wrong with this photo. Obviously, it's come in upside down. So we're going to go to image, rotate, 180 degrees, looking much better already. Now, we want to adjust how this photo looks, because obviously, you can't really see the children, the background's gray, everything's at looking. So let's go to our Smart fix. And we'll try Auto. See what that does for us. Adds a little bit more color. And now let's look at the exposure. We probably do not want to go too hard on the exposure. Because we'll lose a lot of the detail. You can mouse over each of the nine thumbnails to get a quick preview of how your image will look. Of course, you can do some advanced editing, but that's not what this class is for. Here we have some edits that can be done to the shadows. That's how it is now. And I'm just going to look at what looks good. I'm just putting my mouse over each of these thumbnails till I've got something that I think looks not too unrealistic. I think I might go with that one. Or we can click auto levels and auto contrast if we prefer. I didn't really like that, so I'm just going to click revert to revert it back to what it was before. That's what this little icon means, and then I'm going to go with this one. We can adjust the color. We can make it psychedelic, probably not. We can auto color it. We can adjust the balance of the temperature. This is where it can be helpful to deal with old scans of 70s photos that have gone all yellow, and then we can add some sharpening. Now, for this one, we might want to o in a bit to see. You can o in the Zoom tool, click and drag over an area, or you can zoom in using this slider here. And we can see what the sharpening will do to the image. Probably don't need any more sharpening. I'm happy with how that looks. At the end of all that, you can save your work. You can actually do before and after to see the difference. Or if you're not happy with it at all, you can always click this revert button up here or you can click do to go through all the steps. But I'm pretty happy with that, so I'm going to save it as A, photoshop document. 8. Add text to a photo: This video, I'm going to show you how you can add a box of text to a photo. I've opened my photo in quick mode, and now I'm going to grab the type tool. The type tool allows me to add type or text to a photograph. I'm going to click and drag to create a text box. And then I'll just type. Now I can select the type and then adjust the colors and text styles, as I would in any word processor. You can also click and drag the labels to resize. Then when we're happy with how it looks, you can click the tick or check to commit the current operation. I can always go back in by double clicking on the type, and if I mess up, I can always place the X to cancel. Now, from here, you can resize your type, but you need to make sure that you resize it carefully. You don't want to click and drag from anywhere because it'll warp the text. Cancel out of that one. So if you resize from a corner, everything stands in proportion, but it also resizes the text. So if I want to just resize the text box without changing the size of the text, I'll need to double click and then move these handles. And this way, I can resize with any of the handles, just the corners. If I resize from one of the sides. The text just reflows inside the text box. So, there's how you can add a box of text to an image. 9. Add single line of text to a photo: Let's see how we can add a single line of text. I'm going to use the type tool by pressing t on my keyboard or clicking the Type icon and then click once. Now, I might just to resize this one nice and big. So the single line of type works in much the same way as the box of text. You can select it and change the alignment. And if you want to learn more about all of the options in the type tool, I will embed my video all about the type tool below. Now that I've finished my work, I'm going to save it as a JPEG ready for printing. And make that full resolution. So now I can save this as a photoshop document, and I will be able to go in and edit this text in the future. If I save it as a JPEG, I won't be able to edit this text in the future. Shall we do just one last thing? Let's just change the color here to make it match There we go. Oh, that's super bright. Maybe I don't like that. I'll change it to a different color. Try the blue. Yes, that's more. That's much better, and save our work. Then we'll save it as a Peg, which is how we can print it using an online printing service. If we just want to print it at home, we can just go to file print and print this way. Now, we've done all of this in the quick mode, but if you want to pop over to the advance mode, you can see that we have our background layer our paragraph of text in the textbox and our pool party. A in separate layers. So I hope this has helped you learn how to add text to your photo. Thanks so much for joining me, and I'll see you in the next video. 10. Print at Home: Here to show you how you can print at home from photoshop elements. Here I have my photograph that I have cropped four by six, and then I'm going to click File Print. And the print dialogue will appear. Here's all of my printers. Going to choose this one that's a color printer. And I am going to change the setting for my photo paper. I'm going to put that in the rear feed paper slot. And all of that is good. I'm going to click Advance. And I am going to make sure that the quality is high quality. Click. Okay. Then I'm going to verify that paper size is correct. I can always change the orientation, and I can choose what type of prints I want to do. Individual prints, a picture package, using organizer or a contact sheet. Using organizer. We're not going to cover using Photoshop elements organizer in this class. But if you'd like to learn more, you can always check out my organizing for absolute beginner's class that will help you through the process of setting up and using organizer. Then we choose a print size. I'm going to do four by six because that's the size we just cropped it to, and we're going to print one copy. And then you can also relocate the photo. So if you want to save paper, you could print it just on the top half and then you can save that bottom half for another and you can move the photo around inside that area too. Now if you like me and you're like, Oh, no, I accidentally moved it. Don't worry. Click Center image, and it will go back into the spot. And then just move it with this cross move icon and don't move the photo, and you will be right. This column here is for when you have additional photos, page setup is the properties of the printer. More options allow you to add some metadata, add a border, crop marks, and even flip the image if you're using it as an iron on. File name and the crop marks to make it super easy to crop it on our paper trimmer. All right. So that's it. Let's print it and see how it turns out. Here's how the photo looks when it's printed on with the crop marks and the and makes it very easy to line up for perfect trimming. 11. Print Multiple Photos on One Piece of Paper: I am here to show you how you can print multiple photos on one piece of paper. If you're like me, you probably don't want to waste any paper. So, I often like to print multiple photos on one page. So what we're going to do is click File then and blank file. Then we're going to choose from either US paper sizes or international paper sizes, which is me. And then we're going to click Okay. So this is going to be at the paper that we print on. Now, I'm actually going to rotate mine so that it's horizontal just to make it a bit easier. Image rotate 90 degrees left. Then I'm just going to drag and drop my photos on to my page. All right. So you can then just move each layer around and work out how big you want to print them The beauty of bringing them all in like this is that they're all smart objects. So that means that I can recyze them smaller and then larger, however, I like. Now, this is great if you don't need the photos to be a specific size. But let's say you're working on a photo album that has four by six photo spots. You might want to do something a little bit more precise. So I'm going to use guides to set up my photos. I'm going to go to view Rulers, and then make sure that guides is turned on. And I'm going to click Add new guides. I'm going to make a vertical guide at 6 ". And even if your documents in centimeters, you can still do it by inches, which is handy for us. Our photos are still printed in that traditional size. And then we're going to do another new guide. And we're going to make that a horizontal guide at 4 ". And then we're going to make another guide at 8 ". And now I can easily resize this image to fit four by six. Now, if you've watched my cropping video from earlier, you will know that you can also just crop those images to four by six. But I'm not going to worry with that. I'm going to do this one here. Now, this one won't be exactly four by six. It's just not wide enough here. But that's okay. And for a vertical photo, I can just rotate it. And I can make it 90 degrees here at the bottom. Same with this one, transform 90 degrees to resize it. To see this image here. It is covering up part of this one down here. I don't want that to be the case. So I'm going to move it this Christmas e photo up to the top of the pile, so now it's on top of my little chicken boy. And you can do that as needed on your page. Now, of course, if you are printing on a letter paper will be slightly different, but we can just do the same thing. We can make a new guide at 6 ". A vertical guide at 4 ". And then because the page is 8.5 " wide, will create another vertical guide at 8 ", a new horizontal guide at 10 ". Now, you might be thinking, Melissa, what are these lines? It's too confusing. Don't worry. I will actually save this one for you so that you can have it. And here's how we would lay out the photos on here. We could have two verticals and one horizontal on this piece of paper. So I'm going to use the icon to turn them off. I'm going to resize this one here. Here we go. Turn this one on. I'm going to resize this photo. There we go. And now I'm going to put this horizontal one down at the bottom. So the 6 " line is here, and the 4 " line is here. But again, this isn't the proper proportions, and I can't really crop this photo, so. It's just going to go as is. So, luckily, for you guys, I actually happen to have some letter paper here at my house. So I can actually print this as a sample. Now, If you are printing at home. Be aware. You printer may not have the capacity to actually print to the edge. You may need to fill around, especially at the top and bottom. For me, what I'm going to do is now that I've got these all size, the right size, I'm just going to move them into the middle. And then I will print them. I will print this one on my printer with my letter paper. I'm going to print actual size. And then I'm going to check the printer settings and make sure it's printing the right paper from the right paper tray, and click print. Now let's head back to our A four printing, and let's print that one. I'm going to switch this back to A four paper, and I'm going to print this one as well for you. Now, this is a very high quality printer. Here's the end result printed on beautiful Matt Epsen Professional paper. Love it on letter. So we've got our 24 way sixes here, and our last little Not quite four by six. As you can see, the results are great. You can fit 34 by six onto your 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. And here's the results on our A four paper. No, 24 by six. And then these are just under 6 ". And this one's even smaller. So there are regular sizes. This one is on glossy Kodak paper. From you know, 20 years ago, that's still good. I hope this has given you some idea of what real life printing at home looks like. And in the next video, I'll be showing you how you can print multiple photos on 14 by six, which you can then print at home or upload to your photo printer online. 12. How to print two photos on a 6x4: I'm going to show you how you can print multiple photos on a four by six. So the first thing we're going to do is create a new blank file. We're going to use photo paper star sizes. We're going to choose a landscape four by six and click Okay. Now we're going to drag in the photos we want to use on this page. If I drag them up from the photo bin, they will come in as a smart object. You can see this icon here. That means I can resize them as many times as I want. So if you want to just eyeball it and print it, you're absolutely free to do that. But if you want to use it in a project lifestyle page protector, you will need to set up some guides so that you get them accurately lined up. So to do that, we're going to go to the view menu and click New Guide. We're going to do a vertical guide at 3 ". Now, as it turns out, these photos are already placed precisely because they just happened to be two photographs shot at the correct ratio, so they fit perfectly into a four by three inch spot. Now, of course, you can get fancy with it and add any kind of guards that you like, but for the purposes of this class, we're keeping it simple. So I'm going to include this four by six photo printing layout for you. So that you can just pop your own photos in and enjoy printing them on a four by six photo print, or you can save these as a JPEG file and upload them to Snickety prints forever or whoever you're printing your photos with. So I hope that's helped you. 13. Save for online printing: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can save your photo for excellent high quality printing when you order online. Now, many of you probably don't have your own photo printer at home, but that's okay. You can always order prints from several online sources. I use and recommend forever, Pinity prints, Snapfish, and Shutterfly. Now, the first thing we need to do is make sure our photos are formatted for printing. This is a standard f by six size that most photo printers will support. In order to check that your photos are going to be the correct size, you want to go to the image menu, re size, and click image size. There you can see the pixel size, but also the centimeters or inches that your current document is saved at. This one says it's four by 6 " at 300 pixels per inch. The resolution needs to be about 300 to print at high quality. I'm just going to click, since that's all correct. And then we're going to click Save As, and we're going to choose J peg, which is what we use for printing. And then when this JPEG options pops up, we're going to drag this slider all the way to the right and click okay. That will give us a really high quality print when we order them. You'll notice that you're still working in your photoshop document. It saves a copy as a JPEG, but keeps you in your PSD file. If you make any changes, you'll need to resave it as a JPEG to make sure you're printing the most up to date version.