Photo Quick Fix


If you have a photo that has some serious problems (bad color, bad lighting, bad everything, etc.), and you have no experience with color correction or repairing other color or lighting nightmares, you'll love Elements 4.0's Quick Fix. It's where you go when you're not experienced at color correcting or fixing tonal problems, but you can see something's wrong with your photo and you want it fixed fast with the least amount of sweat. You'll eventually outgrow Quick Fix and want to use Levels and Unsharp Mask and all that cool stuff, but if you're new to Elements, Quick Fix can do a pretty decent job for ya.

Step One

Open the photo that needs color correcting (in this example, our photo [shown below] needs the workscolor correction, more contrast, and some sharpening). Then, click on the Quick Fix button at the top-right side of the Options Bar to enter the Quick Fix mode.

Step Two

©SCOTT KELBY

The Quick Fix dialog shows you side-by-side before-and-after versions of the photo you're about to correct (before on the left, after on the right). If you don't see this view, go to the View pop-up menu in the bottom left of the Quick Fix window and select Before and After (Portrait or Landscape). To the right of your side-by-side preview is a group of nested palettes offering tonal and lighting fixes you can perform on your photo. Start with the General Fixes palette at the top. The star of this palette is Smart Fix. Click the Auto button and Smart Fix will automatically analyze the photo and try to balance the overall tone (adjusting the shadows and highlights), fixing any obvious color casts while it's at it. In most cases this feature does a surprisingly good job. There's an Amount slider under Smart Fix that you can use to increase (or decrease) the effect of the Smart Fix.

TIP

By the way, you can also access the Auto Smart Fix command without entering Quick Fix mode by going under the Enhance menu and choosing Auto Smart Fix (or just press the keyboard shortcut Control-Alt-M). However, there are two advantages to applying the Smart Fix here in Quick Fix mode: (1) You get the Amount slider, which you don't get by just applying it from the menu or the shortcut; and (2) you get a side-by-side, before-and-after preview so you can see the results before you click OK. So if it turns out that you need additional fixes (or Smart Fix didn't work as well as you'd hoped), you're already in the right place.


Step Three

If you apply Smart Fix and you're not happy with the results, don't try to stack more "fixes" on top of thatinstead, click the Reset button that appears over the top-right corner of the After preview to reset the photo to how it looked when you first entered Quick Fix mode. If the color in your photo looks a little flat and needs more contrast, try the Auto button in the Levels category, found in the Lighting palette (the second palette down). I generally stay away from Auto Contrast, as Auto Levels seems to do a better job.

Step Four

Besides Auto Contrast, there's another very powerful toolthe Lighten Shadows slider. Drag it to the right a bit, and watch how it opens up the dark shadow areas in your photo. Now, on to more Quick Fixing.

Step Five

The next palette down, Color, has an Auto button that (surprisingly enough) tries to remove color casts and improve contrast like Smart Fix and Levels do, but it goes a step further by including a midtones correction that can help reduce color casts in the midtone areas of your photo. Hit the Reset button to remove any corrections that you've made up to this point, and then try the Auto button in the Color palette. See if the grays in the photo don't look grayer and less reddish. The sliders in the palette are mostly for creating special color effects (move the Hue slider and you'll see what I mean). You can pretty much ignore these sliders unless you want to get "freaky" with your photos.

Step Six

After you've color corrected your photo (using the Auto buttons and the occasional slider), the final step is to sharpen your photo (by the way, to maintain the best quality, this should be the final stepthe last thing you do in your correction process). Just click the Auto button in the Sharpen palette and watch the results. If the photo isn't sharp enough for you, drag the Amount slider to the right to increase the amount of sharpening, but be carefuloversharpening can ruin the photo by becoming too obvious, and it can introduce color shifts and "halos" around objects.

Step Seven

There are a few other things you can do while you're here (think of this as a one-stop shop for quickly fixing images). Along the bottom of the dialog are icons you can click to rotate your photo (this photo doesn't need to be rotated, but hey, ya never know). In the General Fixes palette, there's an Auto Red Eye Fix if your photo needs it. If you don't like the results, try using the Red Eye Removal tool from the Toolbox on the left side of the dialog. Just click-and-drag over the problem area in your After preview for more red-eye control. Also, there are other tools: You know what the Zoom and Hand tools do (they zoom you in, and then move you around once you're zoomed in), but you can also crop your photo by using the Crop tool within the After preview, so go ahead and crop your photo down a bit.

Step Eight

Okay, you've color corrected, fixed the contrast, sharpened your image, and even cropped it down to size. So how do you leave Quick Fix mode and return to regular Elements 4.0? Go to the right-hand corner of the Options Bar and click on the Standard Edit button. That's basically the OK buttonit applies all the changes to your photo and returns you to the normal editing mode.

Before

After



The Photoshop Elements 4 Book for Digital Photographers
The Photoshop Elements 4 Book for Digital Photographers
ISBN: 0321384830
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 201
Authors: Scott Kelby

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