Readers of PCPhoto know that for my professional work, I depend on Photoshop CS2 for my image enhancements. For pros like me, it’s the coolest program around. However, Photoshop Elements, CS2’s little brother so to speak, offers many professional image-enhancement features, too. In fact, most of the image enhancements and creative stuff you want to do can be accomplished in Elements.

Recently, my good friend Karen Ippolito e-mailed me a fun self-portrait. Karen is a good photographer and a talented artist who has taken many creative photographs with her Canon EOS 5D. However, for this self-portrait, she used a tiny point-and-shoot digital camera.

In my workshops, I used to tell students that the background was almost as important as the main subject. Today, I tell them that it’s just as important as the main subject and that it can make or break a photograph. When we’re traveling, we don’t always have control over our subject’s surroundings, so we may have to take photos with backgrounds that distract from the subject.

Technically, the Posterize adjustment in Photoshop is designed to analyze the pixel colors of a selected area of an image and reduce the number of colors—while maintaining the “look” of the original image. Creatively, you can apply this adjustment to make photos look like wood-block color artwork.