PHOTOSHOP.COM TUTORIALS

Creating a Greeting Card
Eye-catching greeting cards are a sure way to impress family and friends, and a really attractive card can spend many months on someones mantelpiece, or even get framed and displayed with pride. The Greeting Card Editor in Adobe Photoshop Elements offers you a variety of templates to create attractive cards with ease and efficiency. You can include one or more photos on each page of a greeting card that can be printed on your home printer, ordered online, or sent via e-mail. This lesson will enable you to experience how easy it is to choose a format and theme and present a photo in a creative and professional looking manner. When youre finished, youll have transformed your photo into a delightful greeting card. 1) In the Organizer, use the Keyword Tags palette to find the portrait of a little girl, tagged with Lesson 4, named 4_Pauline.jpg.
2) Click to select the purple Create tab in the Task pane.

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3) In the Create panel of the Task pane, choose Greeting Card from the More Options menu.
4) In the New Greeting Card dialog box, under Choose a Theme, scroll down and select Wedding Classic, the third theme from last, showing grey torn paper with white flowers along the bottom. Under Choose a Layout, select the middle layout in the second row, a portrait format rectangle on an angle. Select the Auto-Fill with Project Bin Photos option and deselect Include Captions. Then, click Done.

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5) Youll see a preview of your greeting card in the Editor panel, with a bounding box around the photo you have chosen. You can move, rotate and resize the photo if you wish. To resize the picture, position the pointer over a handle in the corner of the bounding boxthe pointer turns into a double arrowand drag to change the size. When dragging the bounding box, the image is scaled proportionally by default. Click and drag the photo if you want to reposition it on the greeting card.
6) When done resizing and repositioning the photo, click the green Commit button ( ) at the bottom of the bounding box to commit the changes.

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That was quick! Composing your photo with an appropriate theme and layout can make a really distinctive card. When the Move tool is selected, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the elements of a selected layer in small increments instead of dragging them using your pointer. Similarly, you can use the arrow keys to move a selection when a selection tool is active. 7) Choose File > Save. In the Save As dialog box, navigate to the My CIB Work folder and name the file 4_Greeting_Card.psd. Make sure that the Include in the Organizer option is selected. Click Save.
8) Choose File > Close. Be certain not to save any changes to the original photo. Congratulations, youve finished your first creation. Now youve experienced how quickly you can get attractive results using pre-designed styles. Look for yourself, there is an abundance of styles and templates to choose from to best suit your creative projects. In Lesson 5 you will learn more about printing, sharing and exporting from the Organizer.
Excerpted from Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Adobe Premiere Elements 4 Classroom in a Book, by Adobe Creative Team. Copyright 2007. All rights reserved. Pearson Education, Inc. and Adobe Press. www.adobepress.com

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PHOTOSHOP.COM TUTORIALS
Retouching with the Healing Brush
The Healing Brush tool is similar to the Clone Stamp tool in that you clone pixels from one area onto another area. But the Healing Brush is superior in that it takes into account the tonality (highlights, midtones, and shadows) of the flawed area. The Healing Brush clones by using the texture from the sampled area (the source) and then using the colors around the brush stroke as you paint over the flawed area (the destination). The highlights, midtones, and shadow areas remain intact, making the repair more realistic and natural and not as blotchy or miscolored as with the Clone Stamp tool. Here are the steps to heal a photo: 1) Open an image in need of a makeover and select the Healing Brush tool from the Tools panel in Full Edit mode. You can also heal between two images, but be sure that they have the same color mode; for example, both RGB (red, green, blue). We chose a guy who looks like he might like to lose a few years, as shown in Figure 9-13.
Figure 9-13: Wipe out ten years in two minutes with the Healing Brush tool.

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2) Specify a diameter and hardness for your brush tip from the Brush Picker dropdown panel on the Options bar. You can also adjust the spacing, angle, and roundness. For details on these options, see Chapter 12. Dont be shy. Be sure to adjust the size of your brush as needed. Using the appropriate brush size for the flaw youre retouching is critical to creating a realistic effect. 3) Choose your desired blend mode. For most retouching jobs, you probably should leave the mode as Normal. Replace mode preserves textures, such as noise or film grain, around the edges of your strokes. 4) Choose one of these Source options: Sampled: Uses the pixels from the image. This is your choice for the majority of your repairs. Pattern: Uses pixels from a pattern chosen from the Pattern Picker drop-down panel.
5) Select or deselect the Aligned option on the Options bar. For most retouching tasks, you probably should leave it on Aligned. Select Aligned: When you click or drag with the Healing Brush, Elements displays a crosshair along with the Healing Brush cursor. The crosshair represents the sampling point, also known as the source. When you move the Healing Brush tool, the crosshair also moves, providing a constant reference to the area youre sampling. Deselect Aligned: Elements applies the source pixels from your initial sampling point, no matter how many times you stop and start dragging.
6) Select the All Layers option to heal an image using all visible layers. If this option is deselected, you heal from only the active layer. To ensure maximum editing flexibility later, select the Sample All Layers option and add a new, blank layer above the image you want to heal. When you heal the image, the pixels appear on the new layer and not on the image itself. This enables you to adjust opacity and blend modes and to make other adjustment to the healed layer.

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7) Establish the sampling point by Alt-clicking. Make sure to click the area of your image that you want to clone from. In our example, we clicked a smooth area of the forehead. 8) Release the Alt key and click or drag over a flawed area of your image. Keep an eye on the crosshair because thats the area youre healing from. We brushed over the wrinkles under and around the eyes and on the forehead (refer to Figure 9-13). This guy never looked so good, and he experienced absolutely no recovery time.
Excerpted from Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Dummies by Barbara Obermeier and Ted Padova. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved. Wiley Publishing, Inc. www.wiley.com

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