Photoshop Elements 9: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Elements for Digital Photographers

If you’re a fairly serious digital photographer, you’ll be delighted to know that Adobe hasn’t just loaded Elements with easy-to-use features. The program also has a collection of pretty advanced tools pulled straight from the full-featured Photoshop.

Number one on the list is the Adobe Camera Raw Converter, which takes Raw files—a format some cameras use to give you maximum editing control—and lets you convert and edit them in Elements. In this chapter, you’ll learn lots more about the Raw format, and why you may (or may not) want to use it for your photos. Don’t skip to the next chapter if your camera shoots only JPEGs, though: You can use the Raw Converter to edit JPEG and TIFF images as well as Raw files, which can come in really handy, as you’ll see shortly.

Note

Whereas JPEG and TIFF are acronyms for technical photographic terms, the word Raw—which you may occasionally see in all caps (RAW)—actually refers to the pristine, unprocessed quality of these files.

And you’ll learn about Exposure Merge, which lets you combine different versions of a photo to create a single image with a higher dynamic range (a wider range of correctly exposed areas) than you can get from a single shot.

You’ll also get to know the Photo Filter command, which helps adjust colors by replicating the old-school effect of placing filters over camera lenses. Elements has some truly useful batch-processing tools that let you do things like ...