Photoshop Elements 4: 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 may 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 Organizer gives you a lot of fancy templates for creating specially designed email.

ON THE WEB: Creating 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 for your button, 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 (Section 12.2.1) to make your button look more three-dimensional. Bevels, some of the Complex Layer styles, or the Wow Layer styles are all popular choices.

3. Add any necessary text using the Type tool (Section 13.1). You may want to apply a Layer style to the text, too.

4. Save as a GIF.

Emailing Images

The Organizer gives you an almost bewildering array of formatting choices for emailing your photos. You can send pre-arranged groups of photos, frame your photos, change the background color, and so on. There's one big annoyance ...