Expert: LizaL - 10/12/2004

Question
Hello!
I have 2 questions:
1. Is the Adobe Photoshop Elements a good application to editing and manipulate digital photos?
2. What is the most practical way to extract one object (can be any within the photo) and create a new photo file (jpeg?) with just the object extracted? Let's say you have a photo of 2 beer cans and you just want to have one of them isolated from the rest of the picture.  Is Photoshop Elements good for that? How to do that?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Bye
J.Dom (also an expert on travel Portugal)


Answer
Hey J. Dom!

Hope I can help you here --

1. Photoshop Elements is actually a scaled-down version of Photoshop, and it's perfectly good for most things. It's also a good introductory program if you want to get into Photoshop, in the future. So yes, it'll manipulate and edit photos just fine!

2. For what you want to do, you can use the Quick Mask tool. In Photoshop 7, this tool is at the bottom of the tool palette, below the color swatches. I'm not sure about Elements, although it's probably in the same place there too.

There are two tools below the color swatches; they both look like rectangles with circles in them. Double click on the right tool and set the choice to Selected Areas. Say OK to exit. Then click once on the tool to select it. Use a brush (fairly large one) to paint around the can you want to take out. Do the whole can, not just the edges. Now exit Quick Mask mode by click on the tool to the left of it.

In the Layer pulldown menu, select New Layer Via Cut. This will "cut" your can out and put it on a new layer.

You're going to have to do some repair to your background, but this is one way to achieve your results.

Hope this helps! If this isn't clear, go here and watch my little movie; it's in QuickTime .mov format, and you might have to be a little patient while it loads!

http://little-works.com/all_experts/quickmask.mov

Lisa