The Guided edit mode

As the name suggests, the Guided edit workspace is packed with step-by-step advice to guide you through a range of editing tasks; there are 47 to be exact. These are presented in a beautifully designed and easy-to-use format. All that's needed is for you to choose one of the effects and follow the steps—easy!

Topics include Basics, Color, Black & White, Fun Edits (highlighted overleaf), Special Edits, and Photomerge, which is a mini-application designed for stitching images together into widescreen panoramas, among other things:

The screenshot shows what the Guided edit screen looks like (with the Fun Edits tab selected). Note that while this screen is visually quite busy, its interactive design makes it quite clear what each of these effects looks like when applied to the samples pictured:

All that's needed is for you to swipe the cursor left or right to reveal the effect in a before/after style. This is a good, practical software design that, in my opinion at least, should be incorporated into many other software applications.

The Guided edit mode is a great source of creativity, more so perhaps than the current Home screen. For example, if you are a bit stuck with what direction to take your photo editing in, just open a picture in this mode and try some of the effects offered; most of them are bound to get your creative juices flowing nicely.

It's hard to illustrate the Guided edit mode because it's packed with so many great features, so where do you start? The screenshot of the suit-wearing man perfectly illustrates a feature new to Elements 2020 called the Pattern Brush.

There's been a Pattern Stamp tool in Photoshop CC for years and I always found it hard to use—and rarely will you ever see anyone else demonstrating its application, I suspect, because it's not very good. This new feature is completely different as it combines an automated subject selection algorithm to mask the important parts of the shot, in this case, the seated male model, while adding a range of patterns in the background. All you do is click and drag the mouse across the image to make it happen. It's fun, easy, and effective:

Another Guided Edit that's new to Elements 2020 is called Object Removal (under the Basic tab). Again, this renders a complex editing action involving selections and object cloning to a swish of the cursor. Brilliant! More on this feature in Chapter 6, Advanced Techniques – Layers and Masking.