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)

Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge brushes

So many times, we use global editing tools in our work only to see that it's just a small part of the image that needs attention – not all of it. To this end, Elements sports a few excellent brush-based tools that work on local adjustments. You literally "paint" softness or sharpness into small areas of the image with complete control over how quickly the pixels under the brush tip are affected, and how soft the results might be.

Three such tools are the Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge brushes. All three operate just like all other brush-based tools in that you can adjust the size of the brush (via a slider on the tool Options panel or by pressing the left/right square brackets), its efficiency (here, called Strength) and of course, the softness/hardness and shape of the chosen brush tip.

Blurring: I use this brush occasionally as it's good for small details—like the stray shoots around this...