3
MOVING PICTURES
This isn’t easy to demonstrate in print, so you’ll have to
use your imagination. Designed for exporting animated
GIFs and MP4 files for use on social media, drop down the
Enhance menu and choose Moving overlays to access them.
Look at [Image C]: there were a few dandelion seeds flying in the
air around the model when we found this picture, but choosing
the dandelion moving overlay has added more, plus they move.
Once again, you can prevent moving parts from going over the
subject of your photo by ticking the relevant box. If Sensei gets
it wrong—and it’s good at getting it right—you can tweak it
manually by clicking Refine Overlay and using the tools to add
and subtract from the selection by painting. Performance in this
tool is pretty slow, even on our 16-core PC, and especially on a
4K screen which required zooming in to 250 percent on a 1080p
image. There’s an Export button built into the interface, so you
can export either as a GIF or MP4 movie file. However, there isn’t
a lot of control over the end result, especially if you choose MP4.4
PET PORTRAIT PERFECTION
You’ll find Perfect Pet in the Special Edits section of Guided
Mode, and it’s a bit like the clone tool being given a section
of its own. The idea is that you can remove things like leads and
collars, then fix up the image to fine-tune the lighting and remove
dirt and spots. Open the photo in Guided mode, select the edit,
and you’ll find all the tools you need on the right of the interface.
Remove collar and leash is where the cloning comes in, while fur
is relatively easy to build something realistic-looking and avoid
the repeated patterns that give away the presence of the rubber
stamp. Elsewhere, there are sliders to adjust the lighting, plus
crop and straighten the image. If you want a one-click fix, you can
hit the FX Effects button at the bottom of the right-hand panel,
and choose between Auto-Correct or other simple solutions to
common problems. There’s also a handy split-view feature, at
the top left, which can show a before and after view so you can
easily see how far you’ve altered the original image [Image D].DC5
EXTEND BACKGROUND
Another Special Edit in Guided mode, this is
essentially an implementation of Content-Aware
Fill from Photoshop CC. It’s particularly useful for
turning crops of portrait images into landscape ones,
or creating wide image files, such as Facebook profile
cover photos. There are presets for common social
media formats, as well as sizes such as A4 landscape.
You can choose between stretching the image (Extend)
and cloning (Autofill) it, and both have their pros and
cons. If you’re stretching, you can protect part of the
image by masking it with a brush to make sure only the
background gets stretched and not the subject. Cloning
can fall victim to repeated patterns but it generally does
a good job, and you can always touch it up later in Expert
mode. There’s a spot healing brush for minor fixes, and
the ability to view before and after comparisons.6
WHAT ISN’T NEW
The old Photoshop Elements interface we’ve had
since version 11 still hasn’t had an overhaul. It’s
too big and takes up too much space on 4K monitors. The
app is still split into three sections, Quick, Guided, and
Expert, and doesn’t support CMYK color separations to
maintain a gap between the pro CC product. Otherwise,
everything in Photoshop Elements until now is still there,
making it a comprehensive photo-editing application.It seems astonishing in 2022 that automatic updates should
be a new feature, but it is. Photoshop Elements (and its
video-editing brother, Premiere Elements) can now update
automatically. Just go to Edit > Preferences > Application
Updates, and make sure Automatically download and install
updates is ticked [Image B]. While you’re in Preferences,
go to Performance and make sure ‘Use graphics processor
for improved performance’ is ticked too. It only makes a
difference in the Liquify and Adjust Facial Features tools,
but every little helps.
If you’re fond of working with big documents, setting up
a scratch disk can help improve performance, as it holds
document data and History panel states that won’t fit in
RAM. Under Preferences > Scratch Disks your startup
drive is ticked by default, and it’s not always clear how
you add a new drive. To do this, double click one that’s not
the drive you’ve stored the app on, preferably a fast SSD
with plenty of space available (drives must be formatted
as NTFS, EXFAT, or FAT32 and you can’t use a USB thumb
drive), and untick the original.
In the unlikely event of a Scratch Disk Full warning, head
back to this page in the preferences to assign another one.AUTOMATIC UPDATES
MAR 2022 MAXIMU MPC 63