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[Male] The Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor offers some very advanced features
that are extremely powerful but also very easy to use.
Now, one of the new tools available in Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 is the recompose tool.
It allows you to rearrange parts of an image without affecting
the important subjects of that photograph.
Now, let's take a look at this shot from a portrait session I did recently
with a mom and her kids walking away from my position.
This is her favorite shot of the bunch, but the daughter, seen here on the right,
is separated from the mom and the brother, and what we want to do is
move the daughter closer to mom and the brother.
And the Recompose tool will allow us to do just that quickly and efficiently.
What we're going to do now is scale the image, but you cannot scale
the background layer because those are locked, so what we have to do
is double-click, and we'll choose "Okay,"
and then the background layer is unlocked.
Now, in the past, what we would have done is grab the handle and rescale the image,
but of course, we can obviously see that that's not the result that anyone would want.
So, we're going to do this the right way with the Recompose tool,
which is located on the tool bar in the Crop tool drop-down menu.
We choose "Recompose Tool," hit "Okay," and then we grab the handle
and make the adjustment, and we can immediately see that the daughter
is moving closer to the mother and the brother,
but yet the daughter is not being distorted.
And we can make further adjustments in this image by grabbing the left-hand handle
and dragging accordingly.
And there's yet a third option that's very, very good and automatic.
Come up here to the presets, hit the drop-down list,
and we see a number of dimensions that we can choose from,
4 x 6, 5 x 7, and as large as 8 x 10.
In this case, we'll choose 5 x 7, click on it, and the photograph
is automatically scaled and sized to a 5 x 7 print size.
Now, if you like this result, what you would do is click on the green checkmark,
but in this particular instance, we're going to cancel what we just did
because I want to demonstrate a further option
available in the Recompose tool later on.
Now, it's important to remember that parts of the image are preserved automatically
and the people are not distorted.
But unimportant parts of the background were deleted.
There was no need to preselect parts of this image.
However, there's the possibility that more control of the image
might be necessary to achieve the correct result by selecting
the important and redundant parts of the image.
Now, let's take a look at this image from the Tibetan countryside
of a truck in the foreground of a really nice view of the plains and the mountains.
However, we want to resize this image because we want to print it,
and the frame that we have has a different aspect ratio than what is presented here.
So, what we want to do is recompose this image without losing or distorting
any important subject matter such as the truck, and at the same time,
taking out elements of the image that are distracting.
Now, be sure to unlock the background layer as we did before
by double-clicking, choosing "Okay," and now the background layer is unlocked.
Next, go to the Options bar, pick the green protection brush,
and highlight the truck, which is what we want to preserve.
And then we'll come down here, and we'll highlight the lower area,
just to be safe that we have it covered.
You don't have to completely cover what you want to preserve.
Photoshop Elements 8 will recognize the areas to be protected.
And then we highlight the cab to include it.
Next, we go up, pick the red removal brush, and highlight over the areas
that we want to remove in the image, such as this pole,
and this pole over here, and of course,
this little barrel sitting by the side of the road right here.
Now, if you highlighted too much, and you want to trim back your highlighted areas,
simply grab the eraser tool, located here, and then make the adjustment accordingly,
and we came down too far on this protection,
so we want to come back a little bit with that, and we can see how that works right there.
Next, we recompose the image by grabbing the handle, moving to the left,
and we can immediately see that the unwanted elements disappear,
yet the truck, which has been protected, is maintaining its undistorted appearance.
And we are preserving the mountains and the foreground elements of the plains
in the mountains, and we've now repositioned this image.
We can fine-tune the adjustment by going back and forth,
and if we go back to our original position, we see that the unwanted elements reappear.
But if we readjust, we can see that they disappear once again.
And as we described before, if you want to save this result,
you simply click on the green check mark, but in this particular instance,
we're going to cancel our adjustment and reuse this image in a further demonstration.
Now, the Recompose tool is also available in the Create section
when making a photo book.
We're going to choose "Photo Book," "Print with a local printer,"
choose a theme, hit "Create,"
and then the photographs will automatically be imported into the bookmaking process.
Now, what we notice is that the image definitely is not covered completely
in the frame of the photo book, so we want to, again,
recompose this image to allow those elements to all be included
in the image without changing the size.
So, we double-click, and we see that we can move the image around,
and we can either choose the truck, or we can choose some of the mountains
or some of the clouds, but we can't get the whole thing in the image.
But what you want to do is right-click, choose "Recompose Photo,"
hit "Okay," and now we can do just as we did before.
Grab the handle, move to the left, and recompose the image.
We can come down from the top,
and now we can include these elements in the frame of the book.
And as we saw, the Recompose tool allows you to rearrange areas of an image
without affecting the important subjects of that photograph.
