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Some advanced tools are easy to use and fun with Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4.0. Here's a quick guide to what some of these tools do.

The Magic Wand tool will select pixels in a similar color range to the ones you click on your picture. This tool is great for erasing large areas of an image that is very similar in color. I used it in my example photo to erase the clouds of the picture. I clicked on the wand tool and then clicked an area that was basically all clouds. I then got a dotted line outlining most of the clouds in the sky, then erased them using my delete button.

After the clouds are gone you can fill the dotted area using the eyedropper tool and the paint filler, or bucket. Click on the eye dropper tool and then click on a portion of the sky that is the color you want the rest to be. Looking at the color selection at the lower left of the window you can see what the color will be when you use it. Clicking on this box will bring up a window that allows you to alter or change the color. Now click on the Paint Bucket Tool and then move the bucket into the dotted area and click. It will fill the area with that color, you then use the brush tool with to smooth and fill in the color on the rest of the areas that did not get erased.

To remove the dotted lines of your selected area you have to be in the Magic Wand selection, click on the Magic Wand tool and then right click anywhere to get rid of the dotted lines. You then click on the brush and color in the areas of clouds that you did not get rid of with the Magic Tool.

The Magic Want Selection Tool is a handy and easy way to select one particular color in the picture, but beware that you only have that color of the thing you want to get rid of or alter in the area you want to be altering. This will choose any of the same colors in the entire picture. For instance if you have a picture with a person wearing a white shirt with clouds in the background and you choose the clouds to get rid of them, the shirt may also be chosen if the color is close to the one you picked.

If you want to pick and choose an area with a similar color and only in that part of the picture you would use the Magic Selection Brush Tool. This tool picks the area that is similar based not only on color but on texture to the areas near it. You can use this brush to paint the sky, not having to be careful of getting close to the trees and such of the border and it will automatically select the entire sky. You can then select a color and fill in the area to create your own sky color. You can use this tool to change the color of objects easily and quickly.

The brush shows the color that you use to see what you are selecting, let's say someones shirt. You can change the color of the brush to anything else if it is too similar to what you are working on by using the toolbar at the top of the window. Clicking on the color block will pop up a color chart and you can choose a different color for the brush that helps you see the area you are choosing.

When you paint in an area using the brush you will have a dotted line on the edges of the areas that are similar in color and texture. Using the brush you don't have to get real close to the edges, just paint any areas that are similar with a quick line of the brush. You can then delete that color and area and fill in with another, changing someones shirt color easily. You can alter the color using the color fill and the opacity settings by just filling over the original color and having the opacity set somewhere below 100%. With this method you can tone down a too bright shirt and not alter any of the rest of a picture.

The Lasso, Polygon Lasso and Magnetic Lasso Tool is other useful tools that selects areas using a drawn line that follows either the brush you are using or snaps to the objects that you select depending on which feature you select. These tools are very useful but hard to use and takes a lot of practice. This is one of those advanced features that takes a lot of patience and practice to become adept at. Using these tools in conjunction with the features of the tools you can select objects that have varying colors and textures to alter or edit them. This is handy for things like selecting something like a basket with a bottle of wine in it that would be different textures and colors.

The Spot Healing Brush is another very easy to use tool but is one that takes patience to use. This brush replaces the color and texture with one that is appropriate to the one that yo choose using either of the options of the tool. If you choose Proximity Match it will color over the area of the brush with the color and texture that is near it. This is useful to hide or color over blemishes or other unwanted features on people skin. If you select Create Texture the tool will automatically use the colors under the brush to make a color and texture to replace the ones there. Another very useful function of this tool is to cover over distracting portions of a picture. I have pictures of my son we are going to use for his Senior Portraits. One has him sitting on a tree and there are some large brighter and darker colored areas and knots on the tree that is somewhat distracting. Using this healing tool you can get rid of those areas and replace them with colors and like textures that are of the bark near the areas we want to replace. This quickly and easily replaces those areas you don't want on a photo with the colors and textures near by or with ones created like the ones they are replacing.

Two other handy tools are the Blur and Dodge tools. The blur tool does just that, blurs the area under the brush at the strength that is selected at the top of the window. The size and the strength can be changed along with some other features like whether you want to darken or lighten the blur or if you want to change the color or other features like this. Blur is nice to use to highlight a person or object in a photo and make the background less busy. If the subject of your photo is in a busy background or if the colors in the background are similar to the ones of your subject you might want to blur the background to make the subject stand out more.

The Dodge tool is also a handy tool to change certain areas of a photo and keep the original texture and color, only lighten or darken the area. If you want to darken or lighten an area you would simply use this tool and paint the area. Using the brush size for the control to color the areas and dodge to lighten or burn to darken you can color an area of a photo to lighten or darken it. This is handy when an area of a picture is in shadow but you don't want it to be or if you want to create a shadow area.

The Sponge tool is a very similar tool that changes the color saturation of an area. This will make colors appear brighter or darker without coloring over them with a white or black as in the Dodge Tool. This is handy for toning down a color or brightening one without changing the actual color. The Dodge Tool changes the color of the object by adding or taking away from the color using black and white. The Sponge tool uses the same color only it moves up and down the color scale depending on whether you are brightening or darkening.

These tools are handy ways to edit and fix photos and make the subject in your photo stand out. They also help you separate your subject so you can work on areas that need to be altered without changing other parts of your photo. Adobe's Photoshop Elements comes with many handy tools to help you make the most of your digital imaging.

January 28, 2010

Free eSeminars: Learn Acrobat Online

The always suave Mark Middleton and I will be hitting the "interwebz" for a series of educational eSeminars over next few months.

Not all of these eSeminars are legal-specific, but many of them offer content that may be of interest.

• All eSeminars are FREE
• 1-hour long
• Register Online for as many as you want

Remains of the Day: Malicious PDFs to Blame for 80% of Adobe Exploits Edition

Skype is on its way to Verizon, we take a look at what magazines may look like when they transition to tablets, and a study shows that 80% of successful malware exploits found their way to computers via Adobe Reader/Acrobat flaws.

• Report: Malicious PDF files comprised 80 percent of all exploits for 2009
  Yep: 80% of Adobe exploits in 2009 had Adobe Reader and Acrobat to blame. Yikes.
• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration
  Wired demos what a magazine may look like in an age of tablets.
• Redbox Cuts Deal With Warner; Agrees To 28-Day Window
  The movie industry is doing everything it can to make people buy DVDs before they're able to rent them, and we, the consumer, keep losing. [Tech Trader Daily]
• Verizon Smartphones Score Unlimited Skype-to-Skype Calling
  Great news for Verizon customers who make the occasional international call.
• Google Goggles Getting OCR Translations
  Previously mentioned Google Goggles will soon recognize text and translate it. Hello future!

Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.

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There's a couple of ways to go about this. First if this is the first time your using the program a pop up message will come up asking if you want to automatically load any pictures from your hard drives. At this prompt I would recommend you do all the hard drives attached to your system. You can also do just certain drives or files but it easier to just do all the ones on your computer and get it done and over with at one time.

This way you won't hunt and search for that one photo you were sure was somewhere on your computer and you can also see exactly what is on your computer. For people with kids using a common computer this is particularly handy to see just what is in those files and drives. Kids are handy at hiding things from parents and this will allow you to see exactly everything that is a picture or video on your system. I'm not saying kids would do this but you can see what is all over your computer, even if no one really tried to download things.

So either you are prompted to search for photos or you can do this manually. When you start up Photoshop Elements 4 there are three different screens you can start up in: the welcome screen, editor, or organizer. Go to the organizer and you'll see some toolbars and pulldown menus and the main photo area in the center. To get photos from your computer manually after the first start up you go to the pull down menus across the top and click on File, pause your cursor over Get Photos and move your cursor over to by searching, the little binoculars and click on it.

This will open a window with your search options. This has options to look for photos in all hard drives, Drive C, By folder or using the browse feature. The browse feature opens a tree where you can search through your computer yourself. When you find the files you want you'll click on OK to load them.

In order to understand more about Adobe's program there are a few things you should know. This organizer just organizes photos for you to see and edit or use. It does not change the actual location of those pictures in your computers file system. It copies the location but not the actual picture and lets you see the pictures however you specify for you to know what photos you have on your computer and organize them. This way if you are not in the Adobe organizer you can simply go to the location of these pictures using any other program and they will be where you had them originally, unless you move them using the organizer.

When you edit pictures it will save the picture or image back to the original location on your drive, if you click on the save function in the file menu. It will not prompt you to overwrite the original photo. When you go to edit a photo I recommend you leave the original alone and make a copy of it to edit. This way you have the original if you mess it up and want to start over. If you use the save as function you can change the location of that picture along with the format.

I would recommend you organize your photos into a collection when you are done editing them, and leave the originals in a file that you downloaded them onto your computer into. The organizer has a few different ways to organize photos, collections, categories with tags below them and all photos.

The collections are separate from the categories and are like photo albums or slide shows to show off and group the pictures. The categories with the tags below them are more for groups of photos you have not worked much with but have organized into groups for ease of searching. When my program searched all the drives for photos I grouped them according to who's pictures they were, and what occasion or topic they were for. I have four people using my computer, my wife, two kids and myself. I let them make their own categories and made my own. I have several categories for each thing I do on my computer. One is for my game reviews, I need screenshots of the games and have a category for these with the tags for individual games.

The tags are a sub category below the category for you to divide the photos into. Just to clarify, it goes like this for the organizer, you have two separate groups to organize photos into, categories and collections. The toolbar for the two types has Tags and Collections on them but don't get the major groupings confused, it's collections of tags. Under collections you have tags for a subdivision, under collections you have collection groups.

The all photos grouping shows every photo you have loaded into the program, you can also exclude the collections or categories when viewing in this mode. It makes it easier, especially when first organizing all those photos to do this. You can go through and put photos into different categories and then exclude that category to lower the amount of photos in the all photo view.

The category icon and tags will show up on the pictures properties area and you can even make new icons for a wider variety than the dozen or so that come with the program. Using the editor or downloading some from the Internet you load or save them to a file for the program to use. In Photoshop you make a PNG picture 20 x 20 pixels in size, thats .278 inches square and save it to the caticons folder It's like this on my computer with the adobe program loaded to default location during setup.

C:/Programfiles/Adobe/Photoshopelements4.0/shared_assets/caticons

To make your own you need to use very simple pictures, not anything real. The size is actually 20 pixels or small square dots wide and tall. That means it's small and will not be able to use real or actual pictures for your icons. Simple icons you download from the Internet are usable if they are the correct size or if you resize them. You can play around with getting them to work using the editor, a good practice using your new program.

The icons are only used for the category icons, not the tags. But you can make your own or save some that you download from the Internet for the categories.

Organizing photos into the different categories and tags or collections is as simple as drag and drop the picture from the center all photo area onto the bar for the collection or category. Or you can right click the photo and click on add tag and it will pull down a menu with the tree for your photos. Find the collection or category you want and click on it. Whether you drag and drop or right click the tag will appear under the photo and you can work very quickly to add tags to all your photos.

In about three hours I tagged almost 2500 photos and started my computer's photos toward a more organized collection. I made several categories with some tags under them. And one thing I will mention, when you search photos the program will find any photos. Regardless of what they are or where they are. Any files with jpeg or gif will be loaded on the automatic setting, so if a game or other program has any photos it uses as tutorials or parts of there help sections it may load these into the organizer. Mine loaded some parts of my video card program help section and some game pictures. It loaded several maps and parts of game programs that the game uses as maps for you during game play and the splash screens while waiting for parts of the game to load.

All of these photos and such I put into separate categories so I would not mess with them. It is important that you are sure of what you are doing when dealing with these types of pictures. They are a part of another program and you should be sure you do not edit them and then save them back to the game or original program. If you do the program or game might not work or be different, or at least the picture for it will be different. If the settings for the picture is altered the program may be looking for a picture or image and not find what it was looking for and get an error.

So for these images and photos, don't mess with them, just put them into their own category and leave them alone until you are confident you know what you are doing with them. I have them in categories and do plan to mess with them, but I will not save them back to the games folder. Some of the images are of levels of games I am playing and it would be handy to see what the level looks like, a map of the level and what leads to where.

After you get all your photos organized you can quickly search by the categories you set up. You can exclude or include categories using the check box next to the categories of the photos in the box on the right of the screen with the category levels in it. A little binocular will show up in the box when you are viewing that group, a red circle with a bar will show up when you have excluded that group. You go back to all photos from the small box at the top of the photos windows.

Above the photo windows is a bar graph that shows the dates of the photos to allow you to search for photos by date. You can exclude this bar from the view by clicking on view at the top of the menus and timeline. You can also include or exclude the details of the photos by using the details just above this.

Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4 photo organizer is an easy to use and handy way to search and find photos that are on your computer. Once you go through all your photos it is an easy way to use the editor and save, find and create collections for you to print or show off all your favorite pictures. It also displays videos on the organizer by a little filmstrip in the corner so you know which are photos and which are videos. You can create slide shows using the organizer and show off your great collections. The organizer is a great way to automate your photos and organize them simply and easily.

How Big and Complex can you make your form?

I get asked this question often. Customers or partners develop very complex or large dynamic forms with many pages and large amounts of script. At what point do we cross the line and reach a level of complexity where Reader/PDF is no longer the right tool for the job?

There is no easy answer. The answer will be different for different users. But it is helpful to look at some of the stress points you’ll encounter with large forms.

Note that these notes apply to forms opened in Acrobat/Reader. The stress points for forms rendered on the server are much different.

1. Number of pages to render
2. File Size
3. Script size, complexity and development methodology
4. Script performance

Number of pages to render

One of the great properties of regular PDF files is that the file open time is constant no matter how large the PDF. The time to open a two thousand page PDF is pretty much the same as for a one page PDF. This is because Reader doesn’t load the whole PDF into memory and doesn’t read the bytes for page <n> until the user navigates to page <n>.

Dynamic XFA/PDF forms offer a different value proposition. The pages are shaped at form open time by the form data. Of course, there are great advantages to dynamic forms. But there are also associated processing costs. At form open time the entire form definition is loaded into memory. The entire set of data is loaded and merged with the form template. Reader performs enough of the layout to determine how many pages will be rendered. Then when you navigate to page <n>, Reader renders that page from the in-memory structures.

How many pages can Reader handle for a dynamic document? This depends on the complexity of the template. I’ve seen five page forms that take forever to open. I’ve seen a hundred page form open in a second. The limit is more related to the density/complexity of template and data rather than the actual number of pages.

Some form authors attempt to reduce file open time by hiding inactive pages. This strategy was effective in reducing form open time in Acrobat/Reader 7. But in Reader 8.1 when the form open algorithm was improved, the ‘page hiding’ strategy no longer makes a significant difference.

File Size

Dynamic XFA/PDF forms tend to be smaller than static documents. This is because of the template property of forms. For example: a hundred page static PDF will have a hundred pages of PDF mark-up. Whereas in the dynamic case, this could be one page of XFA mark-up that gets replicated a hundred times when merged with data. The latter will be a much smaller file. Nonetheless, dynamic documents can grow to the point where they begin to stress your system. The time to read and parse the documents happens very quickly – even for very large templates. However, the size of the template becomes more of a factor when there are security components in play. Operations such as Certification, Reader extensions and Signatures will perform comparison operations on ‘before-and-after’ versions of the form. The costs of these comparisons are proportionate to the size of the template.

So while there is no absolute threshold on file size, you will find the threshold is lower for certified/extended/signed forms.

Script size and complexity and development methodology

I have seen XFA/PDF files with tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript. Given that there is no debugger, you have to be pretty persistent to create this amount of script. If your big script library is well written, it may perform well enough, but the stress comes with the maintenance of the script:

• When you change the script, do you have the ability to rigorously test your changes? When you modify fields or subforms, will your script still work? Do you have test collateral that gives you code coverage for all the edge cases in your script? Do you have some form of automated testing? QTP anyone?
• Is your script maintainable? Or is the code ‘write-only’? Unless you have been disciplined in the creation of your library, you will have longer term maintenance issues when a new developer comes along to update an existing form.
• When you encounter problems with your script, are you able to isolate the problem when you ask for help? Your friends in our support organization are much better at solving problems with small, simple forms than with large, complex ones. If your script is modular and isolated into components then you’ll be able to ask for help much more easily than if your script is an inter-tangled mess.
• When you change script, do you preserve previous versions of your form? You need the ability to roll-back changes.

Again, there are no absolutes here, but if you want/need to write lots of script, you need to have the associated discipline in your development environment to make it maintainable.

Script performance

Large amounts of script do not necessarily imply poor performance. But poorly written script of any amount can kill form performance. A script that traverses the entire form hierarchy will have performance that is proportionate to the number of objects in the form. As the form grows, the script slows down. There are many 'best practises' for writing efficient script. It is very important to pay close attention to the contents of frequently executed loops.

Conclusion

But before you make a big investment in a form, make sure you consider the alternatives. You might be better off with a Flash form or an AIR application.  If you choose Reader/PDF, the maximum size and complexity of your form depends primarily on your own tolerances.  You need to decide whether the runtime experience is responsive enough.  You need to decide if you are getting the return on investment for your cost to develop and maintain the form. 

January 28, 2010

Free eSeminars: Learn Acrobat Online

The always suave Mark Middleton and I will be hitting the "interwebz" for a series of educational eSeminars over next few months.

Not all of these eSeminars are legal-specific, but many of them offer content that may be of interest.

• All eSeminars are FREE
• 1-hour long
• Register Online for as many as you want

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