top of the Photo Editor, here’s how undoing with the History panel works:
1 Click Expert in the Photo Editor and choose Window ⇒ History.The History panel displays a record of each step you made in the current editing session, as shown in Figure 1-6.
2 To undo one or more edits, click any item on the History panel.Elements reverts your image to that last edit. All edits that follow the selected item are grayed out.
3 If you want to bring back the edits, click any grayed-out step on the panel.Elements reinstates your edits up to that level. If you make a new edit after going back a few steps, the grayed-out steps disappear.
FIGURE 1-6: The History panel.
Choose Edit ⇒ Clear ⇒ Clear History. Elements flushes all the recorded history and frees some precious memory, which often enables you to work faster. Just be sure you’re okay with losing all the history in the History panel thus far.
Eliminate Clipboard data from memory. To do so, choose Edit ⇒ Clear ⇒ Clipboard Contents or Edit ⇒ Clear ⇒ All.
Restore the number of history states stored to the default of 50. In Elements Performance Preferences, you can change the number of history states. You can ratchet this number up to 1,000 if you like, but realize that the more history states you record, the more memory Elements requires.
Reverting to the last save
While you edit photos in Elements, plan on saving your work regularly. Each time you save in an editing session, the History panel preserves the list of edits you make until you hit the maximum number or close the file.
If you save, perform more edits, and then want to return to the last saved version of your document, Elements provides you with a quick, efficient way to do so. If you choose Edit ⇒ Revert, Elements eliminates your new edits and takes you back to the last time you saved your file.
When you choose Revert, Revert appears in the History panel. You can eliminate the Revert command from the History panel by right-clicking (Windows) or Ctrl-clicking (on a Mac with a one-button mouse) the Revert item and choosing Delete from the contextual menu that appears.
Getting a Helping Hand
You probably bought this book because you’re not a fan of sifting through Help files and want an expert guide to image editing. We share everything a beginner needs to get started in Elements, but Elements is too sophisticated a program to cover completely in the pages we have here. You may also need some quick help if you don’t have this book nearby.
Whenever you need a hand, know that you can find valuable help information quickly and easily within Elements itself. If you’re stuck on understanding a feature, ample help documents are only a mouse click away and can help you overcome some frustrating moments.
Your first stop is the Help menu, where you can find several commands that offer information:
Photoshop Elements Help: Choose Help ⇒ Photoshop Elements Help or press the F1 key (Windows) or the Help key (on a Mac with an extended keyboard) to open the Elements Help file. You can type a search topic and press Enter to display a list of search results.
Getting Started: From the Help menu, choose this item for tips and information on getting started in Elements.
Key Concepts: While you read this book, if we use a term that you don’t completely understand, choose Help ⇒ Key Concepts. A web page opens in your default web browser and provides many web pages with definitions of terms and concepts.
Support: From the Help menu, this command launches your default web browser and takes you to the Adobe website (www.adobe.com), where you can find information about Elements, problems reported by users, and some work-around methods for getting a job done. You can find additional web-based help information by clicking Photoshop Elements Online and Online Learning Resources. The vast collection of web pages on Adobe’s website offers assistance, tips and techniques, and solutions to many problems that come with editing images. Be sure to spend some time browsing these web pages.
Video Tutorials: Choose Help ⇒ Video Tutorials to open a web page where videos for common tasks are hosted on Adobe’s website.
Forum: Choose Help ⇒ Forum to explore user comments and questions with answers to many common problems.
You can also find help by searching in the Home screen, as mentioned in the “Getting Familiar with the Home Screen” section, earlier in this chapter.
Saving Files with Purpose
When you save a file after editing it, you might save the file in the same file format, or change the format to suit your photo service center’s specifications or to ensure that your image downloads quickly on a website.
When you save, Elements also enables you to take advantage of special features, such as saving different versions of a file or including your edited file in the Organizer as well as saving it to your hard drive.
This section is your guided tour of the Save/Save As dialog box (or Save As dialog box, if you’re saving a file for the first time) and the Save for Web dialog box.
Using the Save/Save As dialog box
Choices offered in this dialog box include saving your files to the cloud. You can choose to save files on Adobe’s servers and access the file from any computer when you log on to Adobe Creative Cloud. Or you can choose to save files locally in your computer.
If you want to eliminate this dialog
