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01 November 2003
Posted in
How To...
NZ Macguide Issue 6
Apart from the speedy correction options in the Enhance menu of Photoshop Elements, there's some very powerful features. We'll run through the more sophisticated features for you.
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Emailing pictures
How many people have received 300dpi images 50 centimetres wide via email, tying up their software for hours coz you can't get anything else emailed after the miscreant (where are you, Mr Fitchett!?) was sent? Getting images correct for their uses eludes many, but now Elements steps up to the plate and sorts it all out to you.
Here's how
1. Open an image in Elements - in this case, Chris, Bruno and Cody doing a perfect set piece in nine-year-old soccer. The original digital camera shot is 72 dpi already, so that's a start, but it's physically 42 by 31 centimetres so it would take about 18 minutes to download at 56K, the speed of most modems. This would not please the talent scout from Manchester United, she's a very busy woman.
2. Choose Attach to E-mail from the file menu. Immediately, Elements calculates the anger of the Man United talent scout - er, I mean that the file size is way too big for emailing. Click Auto Convert.
3. As if this wasn't enough, Elements boots your Mail program and opens a new message window for you with the slimmed down image attached. Type in the recipient's email address and you're in business.
Now, how hard was that? No formulae to memorise, no calculations, no figuring out the right formats ... and you can be friends with all your email friends again.
Grab frames from movies
Another nice feature of elements lets you grab frames from movies; this would be great for all those iMovie buffs out there who want an easy way of grabbing a frame to turn into a usable image. It couldn't be easier...
1. Choose File>Import>Frame from Video.
2. Browse to your movie. Double click on it and Elements opens the movie in a window that lets you play it, making choosing your frame as easy as possible. Hit Grab Frame when you find the one you want - make more selections if you wish before hitting Done.
3. You image opens in Elements so you can colour correct, filter, Quick Enhance or use any other tool Elements supplies to make the image how you want it. Of course, quality will depend on the size and resolution of your movie, and the quality of your equipment - in this case I used a tiny soundless movie shot by a two-year-old Samsung Digimax, so the end result was too tiny to print even in Macguide.
'Create Photomerge' - Stitch images together
1. In the interests of science and Macguide readers, I went up on the roof and shot one mega-panorama. As you can see, the exposures are all over the place and it would take me hours to put it together, well, in Photoshop. It would be an onerous task, considering the exposure variance under that ... uh ... summery Auckland sky, and that fact that there are six pictures adds to the difficulty.
To make my life easy, I began by putting the six pictures into the same new folder.
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| "In the interests of science and Macguide readers, I went up on the roof and shot one mega-panorama" |
2. Open Elements. Choose Create Photomerge from the File menu. Navigate to where your images are, hold down the Shift key and select all six pictures (if your pictures aren't in one folder so you need to select them discontinuously, hold down the Command/Apple key for your multiple selection - see how I made my life easier by putting the pictures into their own folder first?)
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3. The Photomerge dialogue appears, the pictures load into the bar at the top, magic appears on the earth and Elements puts them altogether, virtually seamlessly. On my stopwatch (450Mhz G4 Mac Cube, so pedestal iMacs and eMacs would be quicker) this took only 49 seconds, but if that's too long for you, you can let it chug away in the background under OS X.
4. Well, it's damn good, but it's not perfect. Can we fine tune the result? Why, yes. Before you check OK, you can select Advanced Blending. In my example, this did a much better job of the diagonal blend between frames two and three. Then I okayed the image, ran Auto Levels and Auto Color Correction from the Enhance menu, and here's the finished example.
5. But wait ... you can individually select frames and change the perspective using the Vanishing Point tool (holding down the Option key helps you select images that may be obscured by others), and you can also choose where the frames align by moving the images yourself with the mouse, the arrow keys or the Rotate tool - so I could have done an even better job if I'd put the time in.
© Parkside Media 2003
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