I’ve mentioned that I’m really new to Elements 8. One of the things I needed to do was take an image, crop out a square section, and resize it to 100 by 100 pixels. I had a hard time doing this due to the default selections and my complete unfamiliarity with this editor.

If you have an image and need to resize it to a particular pixel dimension (I do it for LJ icons), you select a square portion of the large image by holding down the shift key and dragging the rectangle selector. Don’t look for a property of that tool to turn it into a square like I did; there isn’t one. Use the shift key.

Crop the image (Image –> Crop) to the square selection you chose.

To resize it, select Image –> Resize –> Image Size. When the dialog box comes up, you may not see a way to tell it the pixel size. This happened to me. It just wasn’t in the dropdowns for the units. Apparently, you need to select the two checkboxes “Constrain Properties” and “Resample Image”. THEN the pixels show in the unit dropdown. Go figure. Choose your desired size and you’re good to go.

It drove me batshit crazy looking for this, so I hope this helps someone. It’s both amusing and really frustrating that I find it so difficult to do simple things I’m used to doing easily in PSP…

I recently started using Photoshop Elements 8. It’s a big change for me; I’m used to Corel Paint Shop Pro. So I’ll be posting some seriously newbie sounding tips about Elements 8 here for anyone else who is looking for these seemingly simplistic things, but had a hard time finding them.

I like to create icons for Messenger and LiveJournal for my personal use. I also rather love cat macros. So a common thing for me to want to do is to put a border around text. I had a really tough time finding out how to do this simple thing, because I’m used to other editors so I was looking in the wrong place.

To put a border around text in Elements 8:

1. Create the text. It should end up on its own layer.
2. From the top menu, select Layer –> Simplify Layer
3. Select the text by holding down the control key and clicking on the text layer in the layers palette. Not the layer itself, but the little text in the “preview” next to the layer name.
4. From the top menu, select Edit –> Stroke(Outline Selection). Use the dialog box to control the color, width, etc.

Hope this helps someone. I was looking all over for that.