Photoshop Elements

I recently wrote a tutorial on fixing animal white-eye in Photoshop, where I used a photo of a beautiful dog named Abbey... and that was good. Then one of my readers sent along a photo of their fluffly cat Chloe... and that was good. Chloe did indeed suffer from white-eye, though only in one eye--the other eye was an odd turqoise. That is not good.

Poor little Levels. It sits patiently in the adjustment layer pop-up menu, waiting to serve you. Quietly it watches you struggling to color correct photos. Flinching only inwardly, it is deeply saddened by your ignorance of its powers. Indeed, there are few who are wise to its color correction prowess.

I dare say it's time to give Levels a little lovin' :)

Let's continue on with our pretty kitty, Chloe, whose eyes we fixed in another tutorial. We're going to use Levels to color correct the photo, thus bringing out the regal beauty of this fine feline.

Recently, Dave Cross of NAPP turned me onto secret layer masks that live within adjustment layers. So this week I decided to recreate the Softening Freckles Photoshop tutorial in Photoshop Elements to show you how easily they work.

One of the frustrations that folks commonly face when scanning black & white documents is the appearance of "paper crud." This is when the bits that were supposed to be white end up a dirty-looking gray. This can simply be from imperfections in the paper, actual gunk on the paper, or a color cast from the scanner itself. Another problem is getting the document straight in the scanner to begin with. Luckily, both of these things are easily fixable in Photoshop Elements.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is an incredibly powerful piece of image manipulation software, but it's missing a very powerful feature found in Photoshop called Layer Masks. Luckily, there's a built-in way we can trick Elements into thinking it has this capability. But first, let's talk a little bit more about Layer Masks in general...