Learning Photoshop Elements 6.0 - The Enhance Menu - Including Auto Smart Fix, Auto Levels, and Auto Red Eye Fix

Learning Photoshop Elements 6.0 - The Enhance Menu - Including Auto Smart Fix, Auto Levels, and Auto Red Eye Fix
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Auto Fixing Your Photographs

Auto Smart Fix: Auto smart fix will automatically fix any photo problems dealing with poor exposure in contrast, color saturation, and color balance. Keep in mind that Elements will enhance the photo on its own computerized terms, so it may not always be the best choice for fixing your photographs.

Auto Levels: Auto levels will fix your photograph in the case that it was underexposed or overexposed. This comes in handy if you’re toying with the manual settings on your camera and got a great photograph, but it lacks detail due to the wrong exposure level.

Auto Contrast: Contrast is the difference between the lightest and darkest areas of a photograph. Auto contrast will help to fix a photo in the chance there is no pure white in the photograph (underexposed) or no pure black in the photograph (overexposed).

Auto Sharpen: This method of editing your photograph will help fix photographs that are blurred. It will help differentiate lines between different elements in the picture, rather than the image blurring together. Blur can occur when the camera was moved too much while taking the picture, or if you were taking a photo of a moving target and the camera’s shutter speed was too slow.

Auto Red Eye Fix: Elements will examine the photograph and try to correct the red eye that occurs when the flash goes off while taking a person’s picture. It will not always fix the problem and you will have to make the correction yourself.

Adjusting Smart Fix and Adjusting Lighting

Adjust Smart Fix: Along the same lines as Auto Smart Fix, this allows you to choose a percentage using a slider to enhance your photo. You can have Elements automatically choose a percentage, or choose your own.

Adjust Lighting: Sometimes when taking a photograph you’re faced with poor lighting. You have a gorgeous subject but the sun or indoor lighting doesn’t want to cooperate with you. This is where the Adjust Lighting choice comes in. You have three options to change the lighting of your photograph. First, you can click on Shadows/Highlights. This allows you to differentiate the exposure of how the photograph came out by adding more highlights or more shadow into the image. You can also adjust the midtone contrast of the image as well. This is all done by percentages, so you may have to test it a little. If you keep the preview box checked, you can see what your photograph will look like before you make the permanent changes.

Next, is Brightness/Contrast; This will allow for you to change the tones of the image if it happens to be overexposed or underexposed to look more natural, rather than washed out or too shadowed.

Lastly, is adjusting levels. The levels option comes in handy if you want the most possible control out of adjusting your photographs exposure. Levels will allow for you to use three sliders to control the shadow values, middle tones, and highlight value. It also lets you choose only certain portions of an image to adjust. You can add different layers in order to do different things with separate parts of your photograph. You can adjust the brightness in one section, fix the color cast in another section, and darken shadows in another portion.

This post is part of the series: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Menus - Photoshop Elements Made Easy

This tutorial series will explain all the menu options within Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0. From the File Menu to the Help Menu.

  1. Adobe Photoshop Elements File Menu - Including New, Open, and Duplicate
  2. Adobe Photoshop Elements File Menu - Including Save, File Info, and Organize
  3. Adobe Photoshop Elements File Menu - Including Import, Export, and Print
  4. Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Edit Menu - Including Undo, Redo, Cut, and Copy
  5. Adobe Photoshop Elements Edit Menu - Including Selections, Brushes, and Patterns
  6. Adobe Photoshop Elements Edit Menu - Including Color Settings, Presets, and Preferences
  7. How to Rotate Your Images Using Adobe Photoshop Elements
  8. Adobe Photoshop Elements Image Menu - Including Crop, Transform, and Resize
  9. Adobe Photoshop Elements Image Menu - Details on Mode, Converting Color Profile, and Magic Extractor
  10. Adobe Photoshop Elements Enhance Menu - Including Auto Smart Fix, Auto Levels, and Auto Red Eye Fix
  11. Adobe Photoshop Elements Enhance Menu - Including Adjust Color, Unsharp Mask, and Convert to Black and White
  12. Adobe Photoshop Elements Layer Menu - Details On New, Duplicate, and Rename Layer
  13. Adobe Photoshop Elements Layer Menu - Details On Adjustment Layers, Fill Layers, and Layer Content
  14. Adobe Photoshop Elements Layer Menu - Including Type, Merge, Flatten, Arrange, and Group
  15. Adobe Photoshop Elements Select Menu - Information On Deselect, Reselect, Inverse, and Feather
  16. Adobe Photoshop Elements Select Menu - Including Modify, Grow, Similar, and Loading, Saving, and Deleting a Selection