This works effortlessly, although the patterns-hearts, balloons, fireworks, butterflies and the like-tend to be a little on the frilly side for our tastes. This guided edit walks users step-by-step through the entire process with a Protect Subject option (enabled by default) that restricts Pattern Brush to the background only, rather than apply it to subjects in the foreground. Pattern paintingĪutomatic selection also factors heavily into Pattern Brush, another new Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 tool which allows novice shutterbugs to spice up images by painting with one of 15 decorative brushes. Use the Pattern Brush option to decorate photos without affecting foreground subjects. Auto selection also makes possible two of the four new Auto Creation tools to add faux depth of field or convert backgrounds to black-and-white, which helps make subjects in the foreground stand out. The results aren’t always perfect and highly dependent upon lighting, background, and other factors, but PE2020 comes awfully close even on challenging photos, at least reducing the amount of time required to make necessary adjustments. What once required tediously drawing around the edge of a subject or repeatedly mashing Quick Selection or Magic Wand tools has now been (mostly) reduced to a single mouse click thanks to the Select > Subject menu option. This comes in handy for replacing backgrounds or extracting objects from one photo to composite into another. One such feature allows users to automatically select subjects in an image.

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