If you have been using Adobe software for a while you will probably agree with me when I say that each new version of Adobes software always contains something new and exciting. Unfortunately many people think that newer versions make the older versions obsolete. Fortunately they do not and you can continue to use any version of the software. Unfortunately if you don?t upgrade your version to a newer version you will undoubtedly be missing out on some of the newer features.

Adobe first created the Photoshop photo editing software and it soon became evident that it needed a ?lite? version for those who only wanted photo editing capabilities without the bells and whistles that accompany Photoshop. Because of this, Photoshop Elements was created so people can easily edit their photos without needing loads of training first.

Ever since the introduction of Adobe Elements there have been more and more versions coming every year and today the latest version of Elements is Adobe Elements 7. Adobe Elements 7 is probably the smartest version of Elements ever. The reason being that Elements software has increased the number of tools making it closely resemble the more professional version of Photoshop which are now being released as the Photoshop CS versions. So with Elements 7 you will be able to edit your photos just as if you had done it professionally with the Photoshop software.

Another change in version 7 is the user-interface which makes the program much more user friendly than in previous versions. If you haven?t already upgraded you may be wondering what the new features include.

One of the main new features included in Elements 7 is an organizer that allows you to label your images for easy sorting and finding. The organizer also allows you to work on a variety of images simultaneously. One of my favorite new features is the fix button. The fix button combiners all of the most commonly used tools when you are editing an image. Some of these common tools you will use repeatedly include the smudge, blur and sharpen tool.

If you enjoy making personalized items you will especially enjoy the create panel which helps you create items such as calendars, slideshows, etc. To use this feature you simply need to drag your image to the create panel and then decide on which project you would like to make. It is an incredible tool for making personalized gifts for friends and family.

For me the most impressive new feature in this new version of Adobe Elements is the share feature. As its name implies you can use this feature to share your photo album via the Internet and social networking programs such as MySpace and Facebook. You can also easily share your photos via email or copy them to a DVD/CD.

There are a variety of tutorials for Adobe Photoshop Elements, from beginners to advanced with both text and video tutorials that will help any Adobe Photoshop Elements user learn the workings of this complex photo editing software. This blog releases weekly Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorials that will help you get started with learning this creative software.

If you want to make your photos fabulous all you need to do is add a bit of hand tinting and you can turn something ordinary into something extraordinary. Whether you want to add a bit of color to a black and white photo, alter colors in your existing colored photo, or even put some black and white into your colored photos you can create masterpieces worthy of an art gallery.

Before you begin working on your photo I recommend you create a copy of it first so your first step is to open the photo in your software program then choose file and save as to give it a new name. Also, to save time, I recommend you save your work to your desktop so you can easily find it when you are finished working on it.

Open up the layers palette and drag the photo background layer to the copy icon, forming a new copy of your photo on a different layer and then hit "Target" select this new layer and press SHIFT+CTRL+U to remove the color from the digital photo. Finally hit CTRL+L to bring up the "Levels" dialog.

Something to remember is to hit "Auto" to see what your image looks like and then play with it from there. To darken shadows use the Black slider more to the right; to brighten the highlights you can move the White slider to the left; when this is finished you can click OK.

Now select the eraser tool, using a soft round brush set at round 5-10% opacity and about 30 pixels breadth. While bearing in mind that you are trying for a soft, transparent look you can begin to erase the areas on your photograph where you would like to see a bit more color. If you make a mistake, or erase too much, remember that you can use the Undo, or Ctrl+Z button at anytime to get back what you accidentally erased.

Now increase your brush size to enhance the areas where you would like more color and finally you can either merge all of the layers or simply flatten and then save your beautifully hand-tinted digital photo.

Sometimes we take pictures and when we print them out we simply say, "Wow, that could almost be a painting!" Many people are not aware that there are software programs that contain techniques that you can use to alter your photos into a watercolor or pen and ink painting or charcoal drawing. Once you have changed your photo you then can print it out onto canvas or fine art watercolor paper for that true art feel and permanence.

Today digital photography methods are closing the gap between "fine art photography" and simply "fine art." In the past it could take a painter days, weeks and months to create paintings or water colors; now this can be done digitally in a few hours. The great thing is that a variety of techniques can be applied to the same image. It all depends on how you want to "interpret" your art work.

Adobe Photoshop Elements has several tools that only require a little bit of time and experimentation in order to figure out how to use them to enhance your photographs. Simply by adding a bit of "noise" or "Gaussian Blur" filters to your photograph can do wonders to transform your ordinary photo into a work of art.

As you become familiar with many of these filter tools, you will soon discover that you will want to apply certain tools to different parts of your image. An easy way to do this is to select an area of your photo that you want to apply an effect and "cut it" from the main photo and copy it into a new folder. When you have done this , you can work on each part of the image independently. When you completed your effects to the part you had cut away, simply copy it back into the original image and move it to the proper location. It literally "snaps" into place when you line it up with where it needs to be.

Adobe Photoshop Elements has some great "Effects" tools and I recommend playing with them of these to see what they can do with your image. Also, when you have created some masterpieces, try changing them into black and white or select portions of your image as black and white while other portions remain in color. You should see a "painted effect" on the color portion.

When you are using these filters you are literally altering the pixels of the image. This allows you to make the image far larger without the loss of resolution that you would experience with a normal photo. For example, we have applied some techniques to an image taken on an 8 megapixel digital camera and have then printed that image at 30 x 40 inches on canvas and it is stunning…and it can easily go larger.

There are a whole bunch of Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorials which will help you to get a full understanding of the program, showing you the short cuts to using all of the tools included on the Adobe Photoshop Elements software. If you wish to take your digital photographs to the next level then LearnElementsNow is the perfect program for you.

It is so amazing just how Adobe Photoshop Elements software has produced the right combination of both power and simplicity allowing you to easily express your photos in a really personal way. It doesn't matter what kind of editing experience you have as this user friendly, step-by-step editing program will guide you from A to Z.

The easy image-selection tools will allow you to perform more advanced retouching and enhancing with great ease, thanks to it's incredible composing levels. You will find imaginative image books, digital scrapbook pages, slide shows, and exclusive interactive web galleries. You will always be able to immediate access to your photos and video clips and finding them and editing them will no longer be a problem.

The available tools give easy flexibility to editing your photos; this has made Adobe the leading online software distributor on the Internet. The terms "cloning", "web optimization", "batch processing" and "image layering" may sound foreign right now but you will soon see just how easy these tools are to use with your digital images

Adobe Photoshop, the parent program, is a more advanced photo editing program and has produced some great technological advances; thankfully Elements has also managed to make similar advances, but in a more easy to understand manner. Even though The Photoshop CS versions are a more advanced user piece of software, Adobe Photoshop Elements is the best way to learn photo editing.

There are a variety of Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorials which help you to get an understanding of the program, showing you the short cuts to using all of the tools included on the Adobe Photoshop Elements software. If you wish to take your digital photographs to the next level then Adobe Photoshop Elements is the perfect program for you.

Adobe Photoshop Elements software is ideal if you want to retouch digital images, apply special effects to your images and will also help you prepare photographs for the web. If you need to resize images, add filters and styles, Adobe Photoshop Elements is the software for you.

There are a variety of versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements, but for the amateur photographer or the professional who is new to digital photography, Adobe Photoshop Elements is easy to learn and comes with a low price tag and a host of creative tools that help with image manipulation.

The brushes available in Adobe Photoshop Elements give a massive choice for retouching images. Images are adjusted by painting with the brushes over the area you want to change. Red eye in a image can be removed in less that two minutes. Items can be removed from an image. For poor quality images there is a sharp tool to sharpen certain areas of an image.

There are 15 types of file format that you can save your images to, giving you the possibility of creating images for a large amount of different projects. This includes images for the web, for slideshows, and for many different forms of printing.

Adobe Photoshop Elements can also create images specifically for the web. Preparing your images for your web site is simple and easy with Adobe Photoshop Elements. It also helps you to resize and compress images that are being attached to an e-mail.

Creating a web gallery can be a lot of work but using Adobe Photoshop Elements you can open a group of images, resize them, create a thumbnail gallery and create all the navigation HTML buttons for your site. It also creates a folder for your web files and saves it on your computer.

Adobe Photoshop Elements also contains a slide show, which is a very easy way of showcasing your images. Slideshow presentations are saved in PDF format making them easy to e-mail or download. To view a slideshow you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer.

Also included is a video frame capture tool. This feature allows you to capture any frame from a video and save it as a stand-alone image. Images created using frame capture can be edited the same as any standard image.

Where the need to edit color is great, Adobe Photoshop Elements has a wide range of tools that will help. Color images can be turned into black and white shots in less than five minutes. You can also add filters to images to warm them up or create different tones.

The most important feature of Adobe Photoshop Elements is the Toolbox. The Toolbox contains all the editing tools that you need in order to burn, dodge, clone, blur, sharpen or smudge an image. This box also contains handy tools to crop and zoom in on an image.

There are many artists worldwide who make a living by retouching images with advanced image software. Learning how to use Adobe Photoshop Elements correctly will be a massive help to your digital photography, and if you are a keen photographer it should become part of your digital darkroom.

LearnElementsNow.com are currently offering a FREE 65 Page Adobe Photoshop Elements Book as a bonus for any customer who signs up for the 60 day risk free  Adobe Photoshop Elements video tutorials package.

The Adobe Photoshop Elements video tutorials are also now backed up with a FREE CD which will be sent to you for no additional cost, so that you can enjoy your video tutorials without having to be online.

If you have photos on your computer that need to be fixed and wish to learn Adobe Photoshop Elements you will love the video tutorials that show you how you can learn the program, regardless of which version you are using, as well as the FREE Adobe Photoshop Elements Book currently available. Whether it is cropping out unwanted items or fixing lighting problems in your photos Adobe Elements is the program to use to fix these problems and this video tutorial is what you need to be able to master the program in as little as 2 hours.

You'll soon be able to edit your digital photos with fun and ease and with these video tutorials (which you can watch online or download to your own computer) you will be made to feel like you are actually looking over your teachers shoulder as the means to create and modify all types of photos is unfolded before your eyes..

Listed below are only a few of the tasks you will learn using these video tutorials: -

1) Easily find and review your photos and video clips for quick editing.

2) Change your photo background and edit lighting.

3) Fix red-eye, blurring and other common problems.

4) Crop and resize photos without compromising quality

5) Use other available editing tools to enhance your photos

6) Perform more advanced retouching and enhancing thanks to the easy image-selection tools, and amazing editing capabilities

Quickly learn the Elements user-interface including: quick fix guide mode, full edit mode, elements quick fix guide mode, histogram palette, color swatches palette, the magic wand tool, brushes, the filter gallery resizing, retouching, correcting, leveling, cropping, grayscale, elements brightness and contrast adjustment, automatic lighting and color commands file formats.

You will also learn how to make money from your digital photos just so that your investment in time for learning adobe elements can be rewarded with payment as a reward for taking the time to learn how to master Adobe Elements.

If you want to learn the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop Elements quickly and easily this video series is for you, which also includes all a FREE Adobe Photoshop Elements Book, that will help you to learn even quicker as you follow the video tutorials.

Adobe Elements is a user friendly program that allows persons with basic computer knowledge to edit their digital photos as is done with the more professional programs such as Photoshop. Adobe Elements gives you a wide range of modes in which you can run the program depending what you want to do with the digital images. So you can do a full edit or a quick fix on your photographs and the good part is you can do this all with so much ease when using Adobe elements as explained in this Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorial for beginners.

Many people who use software editing programs are unaware of the fact that when they are manipulating their photos they are, basically, playing around with the pixels that make up your image. Pixels are the smallest components in your photo and when put together create the image that you see. The tools that are included inside Photoshop Elements enable you to change the different shades and colors of the individual pixels and even remove any unwanted pixels. For instance, if you want to remove a background, including shadows, you can simply change the color of the pixels within the shadow image. You can decide to remove the pixels completely or you can choose to change the color so that the item you want to remove blends in with other parts of the photo.

You can also use tools including the smudge, blur and sharpening tools to manipulate the pixels. Here you are able to fix problems of over-exposure or under-exposure and adjust the pixels so they blend in with surrounding pixels. The sharpen tool will allow you fix blurred images, in essence increasing the number of pixels which will enable the photo to become clearer.

Then there is the burn tool which manipulates the color of the pixels in such a way that you can change the appearance of images by giving them better tones. Thus you can use this tool for images that may have been over exposed such that the image has parts that are too light. If however the image or photo appears to be too dark you can correct this by using the dodge tool which will reduce the tone of the pixels in the targeted area to a lighter one.

So, while it appears that you are changing the image itself, in essence you are in fact manipulating the individual pixels that makes up the photo. Since pixels are actual individual dots that create your image you can edit the color of individual pixels without affecting the color of the pixels in a nearer proximity. This gives you the freedom of creating a unique photo out of an ordinary one. The nice thing is that using Adobe Elements you can edit your photos like the pro's do without needing all the complicated training that other programs require. So go ahead, play with pixels the Elements way.

The Smart Brush tool in Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 is a mixture of the Quick Selection tool (Elements 6) and adjustment layers; it offers a quick way to adjust, enhance, and add effects to your photos and is located in the Full Edit area of the Editor.

When you click on the Smart Brush a menu pops open showing nine categories of nearly 70 effects that can be applied to your photo. It's great because all you have to do is make your choice from the list and simply paint over the area you want the effect to be applied. After you begin drawing your initial selection the tool automatically switches to the Add to Selection mode. To remove any part of your selected area you can hold down Alt on your keyboard and paint away the parts you want to get rid of.

How does the Smart Brush work? If you look at the Layers palette, you'll see that an adjustment layer was created along with the layer mask that accompanies adjustment layers. The area you highlighted is shown in white on the mask, consequently showing the effect. The black areas on the mask are hiding the effect.

To revise the effect you created, you can either double-click the adjustment layer in the Layers palette or you can double-click the red adjustment pin located in your selection on the image. As long as the adjustment layer is one supported by Adobe Photoshop Elements, the dialog box for that adjustment layer will open and you can make any changes you wish.

Some of the presets were created using an adjustment layer found in the full version of Adobe Photoshop and not in Adobe Elements, so you won't be able to edit these effects.

Photographs are a good way of capturing those moments which will linger in one's memories for a long time. Unfortunately, however, photographs are not able to maintain the same quality as they age. Since photographs are mere paper they are often affected by things such as moisture, dust and scratches and even light. The end result is you will end up having photos that are too light, have scratches and are no longer looking that good.

Too many people are faced with the question of what to do with photos that haven't withstood the test of time. Do you wait until they are no longer visible or do you simply toss them' If you are facing questions such as these you don't have to do either. Using Adobe Elements you can actually restore your old photos to their original condition. It may sound amazing but this Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorial will show you the basic steps to achieve these changes.

The first step to restoring your cherished photos is to create a digital image of them so you can then edit them using your computer. Converting them to a digital image is as easy as scanning them into your computer. Once you have scanned your photo you can then begin the photo editing process.

With Adobe Elements you will be able to open the scanned images of your photos. When you open the photos you can now edit them as you wish using the tools that are provided by the software. One thing you must remember is to backup the scanned images so you can always revert to the original ones in case of mistakes.

Now restoring your photos when using Adobe Elements is quite simple and it does not need any skilled training, all the tools in the elements software are very simple and easy to use. The most common tools you will use when restoring photos will be the smudge, blur and sharpen tool, these are the tools you definitely will need to get to grips with.

I am going to give you a breakdown of each of the tools and how you can use them to restore your photographs. The smudge tool is helpful when you want to eliminate any scratches that are on the original photo. You can also use the smudge tool to remove any object in the background you wish to eliminate as well as correct photos that were not properly focused.

The next tool is the blur tool. This tool will allow you to add some tone to photos so they can appear darker than they originally did. This tool is very effective when you are working with photos that have deteriorated due to long periods of exposure to sunlight. So you will be able to restore the color in your photos so it looks bright and attractive again.

The sharpen tool is the last, most commonly used tool in photo restoration. If any parts of the photo are blurred, whether it is in the original photo or from scanning it in, this tool will fix those bits.

Remember there is no photo too old to be fixed by Adobe Elements, so if you would like to view a Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorial in video format, David Peters has a lot more to offer you to help master Adobe Elements software.

Beginners are normally soon put off when trying to get started with Adobe Elements, so this Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorial will just hightlight on those functions that are most used and easy to use…

The Adobe Elements Interface
As you know Elements doesn't have a single interface as you can launch the program in several modes. This all depends on what your doing; Organizing your images, Full edit mode, Quick Fix, or a really cool feature is to create options to produce photo books.

If you have Elements 6 you'll also notice some more really cool features like; Email, Burning to CD or DVD, and also a real plus is that the interface is less cluttered, which makes your life easier when you're moving around the screen.

The quick fix guide mode allows you to make very elementary changes to your photos as it allow you to change lighting, color, sharpen, as well as options to do a novel smart fix. On the right hand side of Photoshop Elements entrance menu you will find the auto fix button which is another revolutionary tool that Adobe have introduced.

Auto fixing was probably invented for the absolute elements newbie to achieve a quick photo editing fix. Start to use these six great editing functions found on Adobe Elements software;-

1 - Sometimes you'll find your editing isn't going the way it should be, so you can just hit the "Reset Button" on the after picture.
2 - If you need to show your before and after images, there's a drop down button in the bottom left hand corner, which says "View".
3 - Your tool box can be found on the left hand side of the screen.
4 - You can zoom in from your image on this page and the zoom button can be found in the bottom left hand corner.
5 - Your auto tab buttons can be found on the right hand side of the screen.
6 - Each quick mode gives you the option of using sliders.

The full edit mode is a great tool to edit any of your digital photo images. Most of the important tools and commands are located in the palettes.

With the introduction of Palettes you are able to manage your layers and apply wicked effects to your photos. The layers and effects palette are always displayed automatically when you open up Elements. The windows menu will give you more editing features and is found at the top of the screen. The palettes have a floating effect, so you can position them wherever you like on the screen.