Edit with speed
AUTO SMART FIX
This is a one-shot filter that aims to improve your image. Using the Before and After view can make it clearer what has happened. In the image above it has darkened the model’s skin while retaining the brightness of her eyes and vibrancy of her hair. You have no control over Auto Smart Fix, but it’s useful if you have a lot of images to process. Find it on the Enhance menu.
AUTO SMART TONE
Enhance > Auto Smart Tone is a good choice for portraits, where getting skin tone accurate is important. It projects a grid across your image, with a control point you can move. In the corners are extreme versions of the image. By moving the control point toward one of these images, you make your image more like it. Settle somewhere in the grid you’re happy with, and hit OK.
SMART FIX
For more control, open the Smart Fix section of the Adjustments panel on the right of the interface. This gives you a slider to alter the intensity of the effect, and a grid of thumbnails to choose from, although these effectively do the same thing as the slider. The Auto button does the same thing as Auto Smart Fix. There’s a reset button at the top right of the palette.
LIGHTING AND COLOR
You can find Auto versions of both these adjustments in the Enhance menu, but the slightly more manual implementations in the Adjustments palette are far better. They work much like Smart Fix, with a slider and some thumbnails, across Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. There’s a lot you can do under Lighting, and it gets more powerful once you open up the Color section as well.
SHARPENING
There’s an Auto Sharpen option on the Enhance menu, and a Sharpen section on the Adjustments palette, but sharpening is such a complex beast that, even though this is meant to be about quick fixes, it’s worth going straight to Unsharp Mask, which is also on the Enhance menu, but nearer the bottom. This gives you the chance to control the process and stop it going out of control.
UNSHARP MASK
The Unsharp Mask window has three sliders. The Amount slider controls the strength of the effect. The Radius slider controls how far from edges the effect is applied – keeping this down restricts the sharpening to edges, areas of detected contrast, leaving areas such as soft skin alone. Threshold has a similar effect, determining how strongly the app detects these ‘edges’.
ADJUST FACIAL FEATURES
Another tool from the Enhance menu. This stretches and pinches the component parts of a detected face to change their size. So you can turn a face into a large-eyed, huge-nosed freak, or use it more subtly to enhance the beauty of a portrait sitter without them really noticing. It works extremely well as long as it can detect the face properly.
RED EYES
The red eye effect is caused by a flash that’s too close to the lens axis bouncing back off the retina, but it’s so well known and easy to mitigate you almost never see it any more. Elements has an automated red eye tool that works well, and can even be used on your pets. There’s also a manual version, on the toolbar, which requires you to draw boxes around each eye.
EYE OPENING
The ability to open closed eyes became part of Elements a few years ago, and works well as long as you meet a few criteria. You need a photo of the same subject with his or her eyes open as well as one with them closed. Pictures of other people, or even animals, can be substituted for hilarious results. Elements also has to be able to detect a face in the image – it can’t always do it.
DON’T BLINK
Inadvertent blinks in photos can be fixed, however. Once the face is detected, click the Red Eye tool in the toolbar, and choose Closed Eye Correction in its Tool Options. You’ll be prompted to choose the face you wish to edit, and where the open-eye image is, whether on your PC, in the Organizer, or already open in the Photo Bin. Then, it’s a simple click.