subject: Adobe Elements Tutorial - Best Tools Revealed [print this page] If you are like me there has been some point in your life where you have looked at one of your photos and said to yourself, "Wow, that could almost be a painting!" Were you aware that there are digital techniques that you can use to transform your photos into a watercolor or pen and ink painting or charcoal drawing? Once you have transformed them they then can be printed on 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.
As you will soon find out in this Adobe Elements tutorial, this photo editing software offers many wonderful filter tools and it simply requires a little bit of time and experimentation to learn how to use some of these to enhance your photographs. Adding a little "noise" or Gaussian Blur" to an image can do wonders to transform a photo.
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 Elements has some wonderful "Effects" tools and experiment with some of these to see what they can do with your image. Ahhh, and when you have created some masterpieces, try converting them into black and white or select portions of your image as black and white while other portions remain in color. You will get a "painted effect" on the color portion.
Another interesting fact of transforming these photographs in this way is that you are literally altering the pixels of the image. This allows you to enlarge the image far greater without the image resolution loss 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.
I really hope that you have enjoyed this brief Adobe Elements tutorial, and if you still want more, and are eager to master Adobe Elements like a graphic designer, the have a look at this sample Adobe Elements tutorial in video format below...
