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[male speaker] Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 has a new feature called Photomerge Exposure that allows you to create properly exposed images that you couldn't capture in 1 shot. There are 2 ways to use the Photomerge Exposure feature, either auto or manual. Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 will analyze the selected images and discover which mode is best, but you can always take control and select which mode works best for any particular image. We're going to start in manual mode because this works very well in images with flash and no flash, as we see here of this picture of Cornelia standing in front of the clock tower in Graz, Austria. The camera properly adjusted the exposure for the flash illumination of the subject, but yet the background image, which was the clock, was underexposed as a result. In the next image we can see that the flash did not go off, and the automatic exposure feature of the camera saw the clock face and made a proper exposure for the clock face. What we want to do is combine the 2 images so that we have 1 complete final image with both elements properly exposed. We begin by holding down the Shift key. Left click to choose both images, go to File, New, Photomerge Exposure, and then Photoshop Elements 8 will analyze the 2 images and discover that indeed the manual process will work better in this particular instance. So what we're going to do is come down and get our background layer, left click, hold it down, drag it in to the background box, let go, and it will be placed in there. Then what we do is get our Selection tool, and all we have to do is make an indication within the portion of the image that we want to combine. So we highlight this area here. We don't have to completely cover it. Let go and then Photoshop Elements 8 will automatically move Cornelia to the new background layer for a new image that looks very, very good and both elements are illuminated properly. The automatic mode works best when used with images that are the result of exposure bracketing such as the examples we see here. We have a rather overexposed image, properly exposed, and then underexposed. And what we're going to do is combine these 3 images and see how the automatic mode works and what we can do. Again, hold down the Shift key, left click to choose all 3 images, then we come up to File, New, Photomerge Exposure, and then we'll see that the automatic function is selected by Photoshop Elements 8, and we see the result here, which is not too terribly bad. But we might want to make adjustments from this point, and what we can do is come over here to these sliders and we can adjust either for the highlight details to be lighter, the shadows to be darker, and of course we can adjust the saturation accordingly. We can also come over here and eliminate 1 of the 3 images to see how the combination would look differently if we eliminated 1 of the images. My particular choice would be this one, so we might want to leave it that way. But you may agree that the first image being removed would look better. And again, it's all according to your taste. There's many different ways to use the Photomerge Exposure function. Photomerge Exposure is only 1 feature of the Photomerge family of features. With the Photomerge features you can easily and quickly combine multiple images in order to create 1 new, perfect composition. We can do group shots where you can create the perfect group shot that you could never capture in 1 image with everybody smiling and looking into the camera. With Faces you can combine different faces to create a humorous result such as putting Mom's face in Dad's head. This is a great, fun tool for the kids to play with. The Photomerge Scene Cleaner. You can move unwanted moving objects from a series of images such as cars and walking people and tourists. The Photomerge Panorama is a very popular feature which allows you to combine a series of overlapping images to create stunning panoramic photos. And of course Photomerge Exposure, the feature we just saw in this lesson. We have combined 2 shots to create 1 image that you couldn't capture in just 1 shot, and we automatically combined 3 images that were exposure bracketed and made a tremendous single image.
