{"id":59514,"date":"2026-01-27T14:03:27","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/?p=59514"},"modified":"2026-01-27T14:03:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:03:27","slug":"tutorial-tuesday-photoshop-elements-255","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/2026\/01\/tutorial-tuesday-photoshop-elements-255\/","title":{"rendered":"Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick Trick: Curses… That Cursor!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Today’s Quick Trick<\/strong> is a touch self-serving, but I can’t be the only one who has old eyes… My mom turned 90<\/strong> on Sunday and I wanted to surprise her with my favourite black-and-white photo of her, taken in 1963. But it was COVERED in dust specks, and I couldn’t leave it like that! So I opened it up in PSE<\/strong> to fix it. Well. The Spot Healing Brush<\/strong> cursor has become completely invisible to my rapidly declining eyes when the background is any shade of gray and I soon had a headache from trying to see it. There’s a little trick that can help locate it – using the space bar<\/strong> to change the cursor momentarily to the Hand Tool<\/strong> – but it’s very<\/span> momentary, and if you try to move it, POOF! I needed a better solution, so I did a web search. The results weren’t encouraging… there’s no way to change the colour of the cursor, which would have been perfect. So I tried some of the suggestions people offered. Changing the “pointer” settings in Windows<\/strong> didn’t do anything useful, but I did find something that worked, sort of. I’ll show you what I settled on.<\/p>\n

Oy, these screenshots don’t show well here. So I’ll narrate. I clicked Edit>Preferences>Display & Cursors…<\/strong> to access the cursor settings.<\/p>\n

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These were the settings I was working with for the Painting Cursor<\/strong>, which is what Elements<\/strong> classifies both the Spot Healing Brush<\/strong> and the Clone Stamp<\/strong>. These settings were Normal Brush Tip<\/strong> and Show Crosshair in Brush Tip<\/strong>. That setting appears as a circle with crosshairs inside it. It shows up well on white – it turns black and pops nicely – and black, because it’s white. But any shade of gray and it’s totally invisible to me.<\/p>\n

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I tested some other options and didn’t like the ones that use an eye-dropper icon. When I switched to Precise<\/strong> and left the Crosshair<\/strong> box ticked. the cursor changed from that faint circle with the crosshairs to just a plus sign, but it was infinitely more visible even against most shades of gray. The one drawback is that the SIZE<\/span> of the Brush Tip<\/strong> isn’t obvious with this setting. The Shield will appear when you click the Brush over a spot, and you’ll have an idea of size that way. I can live with that.<\/p>\n

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I will be writing a Lasso-vs-Magic Wand Selection<\/strong> post for you, but I’ve discovered I’ll need more time to prepare it than I expected. Since my husband’s eye surgery I’ve been doing all of our son’s care and transfers in addition to all of my own usual tasks, so I haven’t had a ton of spare time. He has another follow-up with the ophthalmologist on Thursday and hopefully will be cleared to get back to normal. Watch this space!<\/p>\n

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Quick Trick: Curses… That Cursor! Today’s Quick Trick is a touch self-serving, but I can’t be the only one who has old eyes… My mom turned 90 on Sunday and I wanted to surprise her with my favourite black-and-white photo of her, taken in 1963. But it was COVERED in dust specks, and I couldn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[229,102,92,62],"tags":[373],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-28 20:36:53","action":"change-status","newStatus":"private","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59519,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59514\/revisions\/59519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}