Photoshop Elements Color Correction

from the book "Photoshop Elements Missing Manual"

With Elements, 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 even need to understand much about what you're doing. 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.

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

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. Just click a thumbnail at the bottom of your screen, and that photo becomes the active image, the one you see in the Quick Fix preview area in the center of your screen.

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. 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. (See page 64 for more on how the Zoom tool works.) You can also zoom by using the Zoom pull-down menu below the image preview area.

The Hand tool helps move your photo around in the image window -- just like grabbing it and moving it with your own hand.

The Magic Selection Brush tool is new in Elements 4. It lets you apply Quick Fix commands to a part of your image only. The regular Elements Selection brush is also available in Quick Fix now. To get to the Selection brush, in the Toolbox, just click and hold on the Magic Selection brush icon, or click its icon in the Options bar when the Magic Selection brush is active. The difference between the two tools is that the Selection brush lets you paint a selection exactly where you want it (or mask out part of your photo to keep it from getting changed), while the Magic Selection brush makes Elements figure out the boundaries of your selection based on your much less precise marks on the image. The Magic Selection brush is much more automatic than the regular Selection brush.

The Crop tool lets you change the size and shape of your photo, by cutting 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.