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One of the most significant improvements in Elements 3 is the way you can dramatically
improve the appearance of a photo with just a click or two—even if you
have no idea of what you’re doing. The Quick Fix window gathers together easy to use tools that can help you adjust the brightness and color of your photos and
make them look sharper. You don’t need to understand much about what you’re
doing, either. You just need to know how to click a button or slide a pointer with
your mouse, and then decide whether you like the look of what you just did.
If, on the other hand, you do know what you’re doing, you may still find yourself
adjusting things like shadows and highlights in the Quick Fix window because it’s
the only place in Elements that gives you a before-and-after view as you work.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use all the tools available to you in the Quick
Fix window. You’ll also learn about what order to apply the fixes so you get the
most out of all the tools.
The Quick Fix Window
Getting to the Quick Fix window is easy. If you’re in the Editor, go to the Shortcuts
bar and click the Quick Fix button. If you’re in the Organizer, on the Shortcuts bar,
click the Edit button’s drop-down triangle, and choose Go to Quick Fix. The
Quick Fix window looks like a stripped-down version of the Standard Editor (see below).
The Quick Fix window.
If you have several
photos open when you
come into the Quick
Fix
window, you can
use the Photo bin to
choose the one you
want to edit. You can
also call up
the Editor’s
File Browser by pressing
Ctrl+Shift+O (c-Shift-O) to search for new
photos
without leaving
the Quick Fix window.
Your tools are neatly arranged on both sides of your image: on the left side, there’s
a four-item Toolbox, and on the right side, there’s a collection of quick-edit palettes
stored inside the Control Panel. First, you’ll take a quick look at what tools
Quick Fix provides you with. Then, later in the chapter, you’ll learn how to actually
use them.
The Quick Fix Toolbox
The Toolbox holds an easy-to-navigate subset of the larger tool collection you’ll
find in the Standard Edit window. All the tools work the same way in both modes,
and you can also use the same keystrokes to switch tools here, too. From top to
bottom, the Quick Fix Toolbox holds:
- The Zoom tool lets you telescope in and out on your image so that you can get
a good close look at details or pull back to see the whole photo.
- The Hand tool helps move your photo around in the image window—just like
grabbing it and moving it with your own hand.
- The Crop tool lets you change the size and shape of your photo. You crop off
the areas you don’t want.
- The Red Eye tool makes it a snap to fix those horrible red eyes you see in flash
photos.
The Quick Fix Control Panel
The Control Panel, on the right side of the Quick Fix window, is where you’ll make
most of your adjustments. Elements helpfully arranges everything into four palettes—
General Fixes, Lighting, Color, and Sharpen—listed in the order you’ll typically
use them. In most cases, it makes sense to start at the top and work your way
down until you get the results you want.
The Control Panel always fills the right side of the Quick Fix screen. There’s no
way to hide it, and you can’t drag the palettes out of the Control Panel as you can
in Standard Edit mode. But you can expand and collapse them, as explained in the next illustration.
Note: If you go into Quick Fix mode before you open a photo, you won’t see the pointers in the sliders, just empty tracks. Don’t worry—they’ll automatically appear as soon as you open a photo and give them something to work on.
Clicking any of these triangles collapses or expands
that section of the Control Panel. If you have a small
monitor and you’re bothered by the way the Sharpen
slider scrapes the bottom of the window, close one of the
upper sections to bring it up onto your screen when you
need to reach it.
Different Views: After vs. Before and After
When you open an image in Quick Fix your picture first appears by itself in the
main window with the word After above it. Elements keeps the Before version—
your original photo—tucked away, out of sight. But you can pick from three other
different layouts, which you can choose at any time: Before Only, Before and After
(Portrait), and Before and After (Landscape). The Before and After views are especially
helpful when you’re trying to figure out if you’re improving your picture—
or not, as shown below. Switch between views by picking from the pop-up
menu just below your image.
The Before and After
view in the Quick Fix
window makes it easy
to keep an eye on just
how you’re changing
your photo. You can
use the Zoom tool to
change the size of your
photos,
but the
windows themselves
are a little buggy—
sometimes they resize
along with the view
percentage and
sometimes they don’t.
If your window gets
stuck, try switching to
the After
view and
then back to the
Before and After view.
Macs Only - Quick Fix Navigation:
Windows veterans will probably find the Quick Fix window
pretty normal since it takes over your whole screen.
But if you’re on a Mac, the first thing you may notice in
Quick Fix is that you can’t see your desktop anymore.
This is just the way Adobe designed Elements.
Mac owners may feel trapped here since you can’t easily
click on the desktop and get back to the rest of your computing
life. And tabbing doesn’t hide the Control Panel
the way it hides the Palette bin in Standard Edit.
To escape from Quick Fix and get back to where you can
see your desktop, click the Standard Edit button in the
Options bar to return to a more Mac-like view. Or, if you
want to hide Elements completely, press c-Ctrl-H. To
bring the program back onscreen again, click its icon in
the dock. Also, clicking the X in the upper-right corner of
the Quick Fix screen closes your photo but not Elements.
Editing Your Photos
The tools in the Quick Fix window are pretty simple to use. You can try one or all
of them—it’s up to you. And whenever you’re happy with how your photo looks,
you can leave Quick Fix and go back to the Standard Editor.
If you want to rotate your photo, you can do it here by clicking the appropriate
Rotate button at the top of the Control Panel.
Note: If you click the Quick Fix Reset button, just above your image, you’ll return your photo to
the way it looked before you started working in Quick Fix. This button undoes all Quick Fix edits,
so don’t use it if you only want to undo a single action. For that, just use the regular undo command:
Edit . Undo or Ctrl+Z (c-Z).
Fixing Red Eye
Everyone who’s ever taken a flash photo has run into the dreaded problem of red
eye—those glowing, demonic pupils that make your little cherub look like something
out of an Anne Rice novel. Red eye is even more of a problem with digital
cameras than with film, but luckily, Elements has a simple and terrific Red Eye tool
for fixing it. All you need to do is click the red spots with the Red Eye tool, and
your problems are solved.
To use the Red Eye tool:
- Open a photo.
The Red Eye tool works the same whether you get to it from the Quick Fix
Toolbox or the main Toolbox in Edit mode.
- Zoom in so you can see where you’re clicking.
Use the Zoom tool to magnify the eyes. You can also switch to the Hand tool if
you need to drag the photo so that the eyes are front and center.
- Activate the Red Eye tool.
Click the Red Eye icon in the Toolbox or press Y.
- Click in the red part of the pupil with the Red Eye tool (see the illustration below).
That’s it. Just one click should fix it. If a single click doesn’t fix the problem, you
can also try dragging over the pupil with the Red Eye tool. Sometimes one
method works better than the other. You can also adjust two settings on the
Red Eye tool: Darken Amount and Pupil Size.
- Click in the other eye.
Repeat the process on the other eye, and then you’re done.
If you need to adjust how the Red Eye tool works, the Options bar gives you two
controls, although 99% of the time you can ignore them:
- Darken Amount. If the result is too light, increase the percentage in this box.
- Pupil Size. Increase or decrease the number here to tell Elements how much
area to consider part of a pupil.
Zoom in when using the
Red Eye tool so you get a
good look at the pupils.
The eye on the left side of
the picture has already
been fixed. Don’t
worry if
your photo looks so
magnified that it loses
definition—just make
the
red area large enough for
a bulls-eye (so to speak).
Notice what
a good job the
Red Eye tool does of
keeping the highlights
(called
catchlights) in the
eye that’s been treated.
Other Red Eye Fixes
The Red Eye tool does a great job most of the time but it
doesn’t always work and it doesn’t work on animals’
eyes. There are a couple of other ways you can fix red eye
that work in almost any situation. Here’s one:
- Zoom way, way in on the eye. You want to be able
to see the individual pixels.
- Use the Eyedropper tool to sample the
color from a good area of the eye, or from
another photo. Confirm that you’ve got the color
you want by checking the Foreground color picker.
- Get out the Pencil tool and set its size
to 1 pixel.
- Now click in the bad or empty pixels of the eye to
replace the color with the correct shade. Remember
to leave a couple of white pixels for a catchlight.
This solution works even if the eye is blown out (i.e., all
white with no color information left.)
If you understand layers, you can also fix Red Eye by
selecting the bad area, creating a Hue/Saturation adjustment
layer and desaturating the red area, but this
method doesn’t work so well if the eye is blown out.
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This article is adapted from Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly) by Barbara Brundage and is reproduced here with permission. Copyright 2005, O'Reilly.
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