Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
The Surface Blur filter isn't hard to understand, but you usually have to do a fair amount of
fiddling with its sliders to get the best balance between softening and preserving detail for a
natural-looking effect. Here's what the sliders do:
▪
Radius
. As with other filters, this setting controls the size of the area Elements samples
for the blur. Move this slider left for a smaller blur or right for a wider blur.
▪
Threshold
. This slider controls how different in tone the pixels have to be for Elements
to blur them. A low setting means less blurring (fewer tones will be blurred); a higher
setting means more blurring.
If you want to do a lot of experimenting, instead of dragging the sliders, try highlighting the
number in each setting's box and then using the up and down arrow keys to adjust the effect.
NOTE
Elements includes a whole tutorial especially for fixing portrait photos (although it uses
the Smart Blur filter rather than Surface Blur). To try it out, go to
Guided→Touchups→Perfect Portrait.
Applying Actions and Effects
If you hang around people who use Photoshop, you'll hear them talk about
actions
and how
useful they are. An action is a little script—similar to a macro in a program like Word—that
automates the steps for doing something, which can save you tons of time. For example, ima-
gine an action that applies your favorite filter and crops a photo to a certain size, or one that
creates a complicated artistic effect, like a colorful watercolor look that would take many
steps to do manually. Wouldn't it be great if you could use actions in Elements?
Fortunately, you can. The program has always included what Adobe calls
effects
and, under
the hood, effects are really actions. And you've always been able to add some Photoshop ac-
tions to Elements, although the process was awfully complicated for many versions of Ele-
ments. But these days, Elements includes the Actions panel, which makes it just as simple to
run actions in Elements as it is in Photoshop. The following pages explain everything you
need to know.
