Color correction overview

Photoshop Elements provides several tools and commands that let you fix the tonal range, color, and sharpness in your photos, and remove dust spots or other defects. You can work in one of four workspaces, depending on your experience and needs.

Guided Edit

If you are totally new to digital imaging and Photoshop Elements, use Guided Edit to guide you through color correction tasks.

The Guided Edit tab is located in the Edit tab of the Palette Bin in the Editor. For color correction, focus on the following:

• The Enhance Colors Guided Edit

• The Remove a Color Cast Guided Edit

• The Correct Skin Tone Guided Edit

After Guided Edit increases your understanding of the workflow, you’re ready to move on to more detailed color correction techniques in the Quick Fix and Full Edit workspaces.

Quick Fix

If you have limited knowledge of digital imaging, Quick Fix is a good place to start fixing photos. It offers more versatility than Guided Edit, providing many of the basic tools for correcting color and lighting. (See Correct color in Quick Fix.)

Full Edit

If you’ve worked with digital images before, you’ll find that the Full Edit workspace provides the most flexible and powerful image-correction environment. Full Edit includes lighting and color-correction commands, along with tools that let you fix image defects, make selections, add text, and paint on your images. (See Correct color in Full Edit.)

When working with some of the adjustment commands in the Editor, you can make adjustments directly to the image pixels. Or you can use adjustment layers to make nondestructive adjustments that you can easily tweak until your image is right. In Full Edit, the Smart Brush tool  and Detail Smart Brush tool  automatically create an adjustment layer for the correction you’re applying. (See Apply the Smart Brush tools.)

Camera Raw

If you shoot images in your camera’s raw format and are highly experienced with digital photography, you can open and correct raw files in the Camera Raw dialog box. Because your camera has not processed the raw files, you can significantly adjust color and exposure to improve the images. Often you won’t have to make other adjustments in Photoshop Elements. To open camera raw files in Photoshop Elements, you must save them in a supported file format from the Camera Raw dialog box. (See About camera raw image files.)