Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software delivers useful tools that will help you get really creative with your photographs. Unleash your artistic side with filters, color changes, transformations, and more. With a little experimenting, you can turn your photographs into real works of art.

Open your photo
Start with a favorite photograph, or go out and take an artistic photograph to use as the basis for your experimentation. Open the photograph by selecting Open from the File menu. Since you're going to modify your photograph, it's a good idea to save a copy right away so that you can always go back to your original photograph. To do that select Save As... from the File menu and save your file with a new name. Now you can play around with your photo without worrying about ruining a good shot.

Change the picture
Photoshop Elements delivers a whole group of tools designed to transform, resize, rotate, and tweak your photographs — all found within the Image menu. You can turn your picture on its side with the Rotate command and you can scale, distort or skew with the Transform commands. (Before you can transform you might see a dialog box that says, "Transformations should be applied to layers. Do you want to make this background a layer?" Go ahead and click OK.)

You can also change the way your picture looks using the Adjustments tools found under the Image menu. One of the most interesting tools is Invert, which will swap or reverse all the colors in your photograph.

Enhance your photos
Some of the coolest things that Photoshop Elements can do are found under the Enhance menu. The first four choices there are designed to fix pictures that aren't quite right. However, if you're looking to get artistic with your photographs, head right for the next two choices.

The most fun group is Adjust Color, which lets you play around with the way your photograph looks. Color Cast is designed to fix photographs with too much of one particular color. Simply select the Color Cast tool and click with the eyedropper on parts of your picture to create some really interesting effects.

The other tools can be fun, too. For example, Hue/Saturation allows you to change the amount of each color in your photograph. Remove Color turns a photograph into a black and white image, for a nice vintage look. And use Replace Color for some cool results. By clicking on a thumbnail of your photograph, you can pick individual colors to replace, leaving everything else. This is great for changing the color of someone's eyes, or making a red flower green. Color Variations allow you to modify the color in your picture by clicking on different versions of your image. It's a straightforward way to see how your finished picture will look without any guesswork.

Both of the tools under Adjust Brightness/Contrast allow you to change the lightness and darkness of your image. When correcting a photograph use these tools very carefully to bring out subtle details in your photograph. For artistic images you can use these tools to make really unique looking photos.

Filter fun
Almost everybody's favorite set of tools can be found in the Filter menu. There are dozens of filters available that allow you to get incredibly creative. For example, you can use the Colored Pencil filter under the Filter menu, and then the Artistic choice to make your photograph look like it was drawn by hand using a pencil. Or you can use the Glass choice under Distort to make it appear as if your photograph is being viewed through a pane of wavy glass.

And best of all, you don't have to apply a filter to your entire image. Using the Marquee Tool or the Lasso Tool (the first and second tools down on the left of the toolbar) you can select areas of your image for your filters to affect. Furthermore, you don't have to apply just one filter, you can experiment with different combinations. And you can go back and change the color of your images, or even resize them when you're done with filters.

It's so much fun to get creative with your photographs, and there's really no end to what you can do. Soon you’ll see that playing with Adobe Photoshop Elements can result in some fantastic works of art that are even more interesting than the original photos.