Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Emailing Your Photos

Elements makes it easy to email your photos. With just a few button clicks, Elements preps your image, fires up your email program, and attaches your image to an outgoing email. Of course, you can email your images yourself (without Elements' help), and you might prefer that method since you get more freedom to specify settings like file size. When you email images from within Elements, the program controls the size of the files you can send. The email options on the Mac version are pretty basic; in Windows, the Organizer gives you a lot of fancy templates for creating specially designed email.

Figure 15-6. There are only two frames in this animated GIF, which makes for a pretty crude animation. The more frames you have, the smoother the animation, but more frames makes a bigger file. On a tiny image like this one, size doesn't matter, but with a larger image your file can get huge pretty fast.

ON THE WEBCreating Web Buttons

Elements makes it really easy to create buttons to use on Web pages. Here's what you need to do:

1. Set the Foreground color square to the color you want to use and use the Shape tool to draw the shape you want. (It helps to choose "Actual Pixels" for your view size when doing Web work, because that gives you the same size you'll see in a Web browser.)

2. Apply one or more Layer styles (page 322) to make your button look more three-dimensional. Bevels, ...