What You Can Do with Elements 6

Elements not only lets you make your photos look great, but it also helps you organize your photos and gives you some pretty neat projects to use them in. The program also comes loaded with lots of new ways to share your photos. The list of what Elements can do is pretty impressive. You can:

  • Enhance your photos by editing, cropping, and color correcting them, including fixing exposure and color problems.

  • Add all kinds of special effects to your photos, like turning a garden-variety photo into a drawing, painting, or even a tile mosaic.

  • Combine photos into a panorama or a montage.

  • Move someone from one photo to another, and even remove people (your ex?) from last year's holiday photos.

  • Repair and restore old and damaged photos.

  • Organize your photos and assign keywords to them so you can search by subject or name.

  • Add type to your images and turn them into things like greeting cards and flyers.

  • Create slideshows to share with your friends, regardless of whether they use Windows, a Mac, or even just a cellphone.

  • Automatically resize photos so that they're ready for email. Elements even lets you send your photos inside specially designed emails.

  • Create digital artwork from scratch, even without a photo to work from.

  • Create and share incredible Web photo galleries, and email-ready slideshows that will make your friends actually ask to see the pictures from your latest trip.

  • Create and edit graphics for Web sites, including making animated GIFs (pictures that move animation-style).

  • Create wonderful collages that you can print or share with your friends digitally. Scrapbookers—get ready to be wowed.

It's worth noting, though, that there are still a few things Elements can't do. While Elements handles text quite competently, at least as photo-editing programs go, it's still no substitute for PageMaker, InDesign, or any other desktop publishing program. And Elements can do an amazing job of fixing problems in your photos, but only if you give it something to work with. If your photo is totally overexposed, blurry, and the top of everyone's head is cut off, there may be a limit to what even Elements can do to help you out. (C'mon, be fair.) The fact is, though, you're more likely to be surprised by what Elements can fix than by what it can't.

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