Important:  When you look at a tutorial like this you need to understand that the person who made it up took out all the parts that didn't work. Otherwise the tutorial would be way too long and boring. Believe me when I first did this it didn't work nearly as nicely as it seems to here. Also you might notice that not all of the images shown in the tutorial come from the exact same pass through the sequence. I have had to do this several times to get pictures of everything.

This is the image I am going to clean up. It is a picture my darling daughters took while playing around. They like to have me retouch photos for them, and I  frequently do. I opened the file using File/Open. That works the same way as most other Window's programs so should be pretty familiar.

The first thing I will do is crop the picture. Nearly all of the photos that we take in my house look better after cropping.  First select the crop tool. To do that click on it  using your left mouse button. There is an arrow pointing to it in the picture to the right.

After you have selected the crop tool then move your mouse to about where you want one corner. Then push the left button down and without letting go,  drag the mouse across to where the far corner should be. Don't worry too much about getting it exactly right;  we are going to change it next.

Look at the image to the left, see the little rectangles on the corner and sides of the selected area, you can wiggle those -- they are called handles.  The corner handles will change what is selected in two directions, and the handles on the sides only change the side they are on. To wiggle a handle move your mouse to it, push your left mouse button down and  hold it while you move your mouse around.

There are two other ways to change what is chosen around.

You can click inside the picture with your left mouse button, and while you hold it down, move the whole selection around by moving your mouse. When you get it right, let the mouse button up.

The other one, which I really like is that you can rotate the selection. Move your mouse outside the select to just outside the corner. Move it around kind of slowly till your curser  changes into a curved arrow. Now push your left mouse button down and hold it and the whole selection will rotate when you move your mouse around.  Here I am trying to get it to line up with stuff in the picture -- but don't feel obligated to do it that way if you have a better idea. 

When you have the selection just the way you like it click on the button with a check on it and it will crop the picture. The button with an X on it will cancel the crop. If you change your mind after you have  cropped the picture, click on Edit/Undo to undo the crop.

Note:  Instead of cropping to a random size, you can actually pick which size you want your cropped pictures to be, using entered numbers. This is especially handy when you are sending your pictures out to be printed.

If you enter in numbers followed by "in" in the width and height boxes at the top of the screen, then you will always crop your picture to that particular size in inches. You can also enter a resolution in, if you want to. This will resize the picture to a particular number of pixels as well as a particular number of inches but I usually don't do that.

After the cropping is done, I will work on the Red Eye.

Start by zooming in really close on the eyes.  To do this you first select the zoom tool by clicking on it with your left mouse button. 

You have two options to make things zoom. You can click in the middle of the picture and that will zoom towards that point and you can also click and drag to pick a rectangle like you did for the cropping. To do that click down with your left mouse button  and while you are holding it down move to the other corner of the section you would like to look at.

Once you are zoomed close to the right amount you can make adjustments to what is selected. As usual there are multiple ways to do it. You can slide the picture around using the sliders on the edges of the screen -- that works likeWord or Excel.

You can also push the space key down. That will make a little hand show up. As long as you hold the space key down you can drag the picture around with your mouse.

However you want to do it get one or both eyes displaying really close up on the screen.

Photoshop Elements has a red eye correction tool. What it does is change one color to another when you run the mouse over it. So what you are going to do is select two different colors and then color over the eye.

Start by selecting the Red Eye Correction tool. I have labeled it in the image to the right. That will make the controls on the top of the picture appear.

The next thing to do is to click with your left mouse button in the middle of the box labeled  "Current."   (In this picture it is already pink because I have already set it to the color I want to get rid of.)

That will make another menu -- the color picker menu appear. It will pop up in the middle of your screen. You could pick a particular color off the rainbow on that screen, but it will be easier to get the correct one directly from the eyeball in the picture.

So move to the red part of the eye and click with your left mouse button on the red part. That will set the color that needs to be changed. Then click with your mouse on the OK button on the color picker menu.  That will close this menu and move you back to the main window.

Next, click on the box labeled replacement on the top of the screen. (That is shown labeled in the same picture as the one with the one labeled current and it is a nice brown.)

The Color Picker screen will come up again, I chose a color just on the edge of the eyes to be the new color. Then I colored over the eye   To color over the eye push the left mouse button down and wiggle it around on top of the eye.  After I did it I had changed almost all of the red part to a better color. But there were a few light pink pixels left in the very middle of the eye that still needed changing. 

So I clicked on the current button again. Then I picked the really light pink color in the center to be my new current color and left the replacement color alone. And then I colored over the light pink parts of the eye by pushing the left mouse button down and wiggling the mouse around over the middle of the eye.

After I finished this eye, I moved over and did the other just the same way.

After I got the red eye fixed I wanted to smooth the skin out a little. There are a couple of ways to do this. I will show two of the ways. The first way  is to use the clone tool. What it does is copy part of the picture over another part of the picture.

So you first select your clone tool by clicking on it with your left mouse button. 

Then, look for your "alt" key. On my keyboard, it is on the left side near the "shift" and "ctrl" key.

Then take your mouse over the picture to a good looking spot. I picked one just under the redder spot. Now push down on the alt key and while it is down click with your left mouse button on the good spot. Now let up the alt key.

Next, move your mouse to the redder spot and push the left mouse button down and color over the redder spot with the mouse.

Note: If your new color doesn't match very well you can change how it works by changing the opacity of your clone tool . The opacity control  is up at the top of the screen. To start with the opacity is 100 %. That means it copies the whole picture from where you started. You can lower it and then it will average the two pictures together. Sometimes that will look a lot nicer.

After working near the chin area for a while, I went up to the forehead. Here I am going to use a different tool. This is to show that there is more than one way to do this.   Because different pictures may need different approaches, I'd like to show you more than one. That way if one doesn't work very well you can try another.

So here I will use the blur tool. Select the blur tool by clicking on it with the left mouse button. Then just move it over that slight darker spot.

When you are over the darker spot, push your left mouse button down and just wiggle the mouse around. When I did it the spot disappeared quite nicely.

Note: I did not change any of the controls for this. But you can change the size of the tool and change the pressure. The pressure reminds me of the opacity for the previous tool. The bigger number, the more things change, the smaller number the less things change.

It is really hard to see what changes you are making when you are doing these teeny-tiny retouches. So I am going to show you a trick  that lets you see how much difference something makes.  Photoshop Elements has a "History" window that can be really useful.

It lives up at the top of the screen in what looks like a bunch of file folders. Click on the one that says "History." Then click with your left mouse button on the blue line at the top of the file folder and while hold the button down, move the whole menu out of the file cabinet thing.

Then, click with the left mouse button on the bottom of the section -- in the blank area next to the trash can. And while holding the mouse down pull the menu down.

Now you can see a whole lot of changes at once. If you click on any particular line the picture will change back to what it was right after you did that particular thing.

If you decide you have made a mistake, this can be a lot handier than clicking on undo a bunch of times. You can do the redo's by clicking on lines lower.

Here is my darling daughter with her complexion as taken and then smoothed. As you can see, I did  a lot of little touch ups.

And here is the final picture: