“You need to identify this man before someone kills me”
David Calvert

No, they need to restore order and reason before someone kills you.
I hope the tabloids are pleased with themselves when someone does get hurt.

I’m a porky fellow.
I wanted to tell you that straight off the bat.
I like my food cooked with butter and cream. I like my milk full-fat, not skimmed. I leave the rind on my bacon and my needle-eye arteries weep in wretched self-pity every time they hear the clank of the frying pan.
Because of my lifelong adherence to a strict regime of saturates and starchy carbs, when someone puts the word light or, god forbid, lite, immediately before or after a noun, my brain automatically replaces it with tasteless, pointless or impotent, depending on the noun in question.
Following on from that, as a ten year user of the full-fat, virile, roaring pixel-tiger that is Adobe Photoshop, I assumed that the use of the word Elements in its ‘cheaper’, ‘less functional’ sibling was due to the presence of a similar-minded porker in the Adobe marketing team. ‘We’ll call it Adobe Photoshop Elements because if we call it Lite everyone will think it’s a bit crap.”
Happily, having been given the chance to review Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, I can speak from a point of authority when I declare myself to be utterly wrong on almost all counts.
The ‘full’ version of Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool and, by most consumer standards, an incredibly expensive one. Many people are familiar with it and the internet is awash with illegal copies of it. There is a very good reason for this, and I say it without hyperbole: Photoshop has no equal when it comes to professional image editing.
For Josephine Bloggs organising her family snaps however, it is overkill – a shotgun to kill a fly – and the depth and scope of the options within are, in places, so esoteric or convoluted that the average user never has a need to use them nor the knowledge to do so should the need arise.
This is where Adobe Photoshop Elements comes in.

First of all nobody actually has truly white teeth – most people’s teeth range from a dirty grey to a deep yellowy-brown, as shown by our lovely model – try using the eyedropper tool to see the colour of your own teeth in a photo. Shocking, isn’t it? However, since we’re working on photo heaven here, we want all our teeth to be pearly white – a super star smile!In this tutorial we are going to use blending modes, layer opacity and layer masks to turn our example shot from an Medeival Peasant to Modern Playboy in just five easy stages:

* Select
* Isolate
* Desaturate
* Mask
* Blend