Photoshop Elements Demo

I am currently using Photoshop Elements 7 and find it handles most of my needs.  Plus, I'm just not up to learning anything new right now so I'm sticking with it. Over the next few days I will be posting a series of photos to show how simple manipulations can be made using different backgrounds and filters.  It's a lot of fun and the results can be stunning.  This is a photo of one of the parrots from our Florida trip.

My first step is to isolate the bird from the background.  My favorite tool for this is the magic extractor.  You simply color in red what you want to keep and color in blue what you want removed and press "ok".  Then it does it's magic and you have just the bird.

On the left side I added a gradient blue background to bring out his coloring.  On the right side I chose to add some tropical looking leaves for an appropriate background.

Then I decided to play with some others just to see how they look and to give you an idea of what impact they have on the image.

The leopard print was a bit distracting, so I tried a green gradient that I like better than the blue as it seems to bring out the blue in his feathers.  But the choice is yours to make.

We'll add a couple more backgrounds tomorrow and then show some special effects that can be done.

Long Live the Queen of Manipulation