How can the $99 second cousin to the most powerful and best image editing software beat it hands down? By doing something far easier and better -

Here’s what I mean. I love this picture of my daughter Kate:

It captures her in that pensive moment that epitomizes her growing into a teenager. But its not that great a photo - the color’s dull, the water’s an icky green. I wanted to change the mood and make it a black and white. The usual way to do this is by going in Photoshop and using Image-Adjustments-Hue and Saturation and lower the saturation to 0. This gives me:

Notice it’s kind of dull and looses some of that nice light showing on her face. Now I could play around with the curves in Photoshop and get it better. But in Elements you have a whole tool devoted to B&W conversions that gives you a variety of choices. Go to Enhance-Convert to Black and White. You get this box:

Look at all the choices! The styles gives you the basic look and then you can fine tune it using the intensity and color adjustments. Try it and see! Here’s a few variations on our picture:

This great tool is available in Elements 5.0 and 6.0, and a more sophisticated version is available in Photoshop CS3.

Keep scrapping!

Stan - the DaddyKitty