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)

Gradient tool

Another greatly underrated tool in Elements is the Gradient tool. Those photographers among you that have used a graduated resin filter over the front of the lens from manufacturers such as Cokin, Lee Filters, and B&W will know what I am talking about.

Place the filter over the lens and position the darker part over the sky, with the clearer section at the base over the landscape. This effectively reduces the sky exposure, thereby balancing the often large exposure disparity that leaves us with an overexposed upper half and an underexposed lower half of the frame. Graduated filters come in different colors (such as orange to enhance sunsets or sunrises).

This tool comes with 16 default gradients and eight gradient subcategories, giving you a choice of 83 in total. I have only ever used two or three.

Step one: Here's a nice shot, complete with two figures silhouetted by a bright sunset. Click the Gradient tool icon (Tool Bar...