Overview of the Tutorial This tutorial includes dozens of digital photo files for you to work with; however, you can use your own images also (though you may need to tweak the instructions). In any case, you can use a combination of both approaches as you proceed. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use a digital camera to capture photos for your computer; you can use a flatbed scanner, have photos put on disk via Picture CD or other processing, or even have them posted to the Internet.

Use of Photoshop Elements can be divided into four main processes: bringing images into the program, fine tuning the images, adding special effects, and outputting the images to a printer, the Internet, or other device. You’ll work with all of these in this tutorial. As you work with this tutorial, don’t worry if your images don’t look exactly like the screen shots. It’s OK to experiment also. The process is more important than the product. Each activity should take under five minutes and you can do them in any order. That said, I still recommend doing the tutorial in sequential order, because some of the techniques build on earlier explanations.