tutorial 1 Use the Shake Reduction tool to reduce camera shake blur

Rod Lawton shows you how to reduce blur from camera shake with Elements 14’s Shake Reduction tool

Camera shake is one of the biggest bugbears for photographers. It happens when the camera moves during the exposure, so it’s closely tied to shutter speed. The slower the shutter speed, the greater the danger of shake. We’ve all experienced this frustrating problem after not keeping a close enough eye on our shutter speed in low light conditions, and there’s nothing worse than bagging what looks like a great shot and then, on closer inspection, realizing it’s not quite pin-sharp.

We can also relate this issue to the focal length of the lens – telephoto lenses magnify any shake to make it appear a whole lot worse. You need to watch out for camera shake when you’re shooting indoors or in low light, because this is when the camera will have to use a slower shutter speed. Normally, you’d counteract this by increasing the camera’s ISO setting to force the shutter speed back up again, and that’s what we should have done here. Instead, we used a low ISO, which resulted in a slow shutter speed of just 0.4 sec – no wonder the details are blurred!

In this tutorial we’re going to show you how a handy tool, that was introduced with version 14 of Photoshop Elements, can help. It’s called the Shake Reduction tool and, as the name suggests, it does exactly that, reducing camera shake caused by any movement from the photographer. With a click of a button you can remove the effects of camera shake from your images, however, for the best results, take full control by delving into the additional options in the tool to tweak your image for more accuracy.