Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 - Third Edition

By : Robin Nichols
Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 - Third Edition

By: Robin Nichols

Overview of this book

Managing thousands of images while producing perfectly edited results is now a must-have skill for online bloggers, influencers, vloggers, social media users, and photography enthusiasts. Photoshop Elements helps you to manage this easily and boost your creative output. This third edition is updated with Elements 2021’s latest features and focuses on Adobe's AI-powered features along with the entire creative workflow. Each chapter is designed to help you get the most out of your image files in an easy way. You’ll learn how to add significant visual improvements to your work using no more than a few one-click edits with AI-driven features and manual adjustments. The book is filled with useful instructions to guide you seamlessly through the often complex processes, tools, and features in Photoshop Elements. Finally, you’ll cover everything from developing your organizational skills through to creating remarkable special effects, complex text, image combinations, and eye-popping visual techniques using both AI-driven features as well as manually operated tools. By the end of this Photoshop Elements book, you'll have learned how to leverage the impressive tools available in Photoshop Elements 2021, and use them to greatly improve your photo editing and image retouching skills.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Mastering contrast with Levels

Contrast, or more specifically, a lack of contrast, is often the most noticeable fault in many pictures. This is partly because cameras are designed to capture images with a slightly lower contrast than was actually present in reality – and in doing so, they capture a slightly wider range of tones than if they were recording higher contrast from the get-go.

JPEGs are processed in-camera—which is why, when compared with a RAW file, they will always appear slightly more colorful—but you can always extract more tonal range from a RAW file. It just needs a little more work.

The best tool to begin editing any non-RAW image (such as a JPG, TIFF, PNG, or PSD file) is Levels (Ctrl/Cmd + L or Enhance>Adjust Contrast>Levels).

Levels is used to adjust the tonal distribution in any image. You'll recognize this when you see the histogram – this is the same display that you'd see on your camera's LCD screen...