Advanced Photoshop Elements Tools

Using Advanced Tools in Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4.0

Some advanced tools are easy to use and fun with Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4.0. Here's a quick guide to what some of these tools do.

The Magic Wand tool will select pixels in a similar color range to the ones you click on your picture. This tool is great for erasing large areas of an image that is very similar in color. I used it in my example photo to erase the clouds of the picture. I clicked on the wand tool and then clicked an area that was basically all clouds. I then got a dotted line outlining most of the clouds in the sky, then erased them using my delete button.

After the clouds are gone you can fill the dotted area using the eyedropper tool and the paint filler, or bucket. Click on the eye dropper tool and then click on a portion of the sky that is the color you want the rest to be. Looking at the color selection at the lower left of the window you can see what the color will be when you use it. Clicking on this box will bring up a window that allows you to alter or change the color. Now click on the Paint Bucket Tool and then move the bucket into the dotted area and click. It will fill the area with that color, you then use the brush tool with to smooth and fill in the color on the rest of the areas that did not get erased.

To remove the dotted lines of your selected area you have to be in the Magic Wand selection, click on the Magic Wand tool and then right click anywhere to get rid of the dotted lines. You then click on the brush and color in the areas of clouds that you did not get rid of with the Magic Tool.

The Magic Want Selection Tool is a handy and easy way to select one particular color in the picture, but beware that you only have that color of the thing you want to get rid of or alter in the area you want to be altering. This will choose any of the same colors in the entire picture. For instance if you have a picture with a person wearing a white shirt with clouds in the background and you choose the clouds to get rid of them, the shirt may also be chosen if the color is close to the one you picked.