Photoshop Elements 2 Search Results

Shows search results in How To and Help
Default location is closed until search is done

Rather than going to Help > Photoshop Elements Help and then clicking the Search button, you can access search directly from the edit window by typing your query into the search box at the top of the screen.

Your search results will depend on how specific your search terms are, and how good your spelling is. In any case, you’ll almost always get some mysteriously unrelated results that are more interesting than what you thought you wanted to find out. For example, when writing this page, I wanted to find more information on the Search Results palette, itself. I entered Search Results into the Search text box. Though the first entry in the results was what you would expect (a Help topic called Search), here is part of the rest of the numerous topics that appeared:

It’s not hard to get Search to misbehave (I believe the word “Results” was the cause of the above), but, in all fairness, it does a very nice job for most search terms. You can sort the list into Help Topics or Recipes (which are now found in the How To palette).

The search results on the left, below are what I got after I entered Adobe Gamma in the Search box at the top of the screen. As you can see, these results are reasonably on target.

On the right below, you see the results when I typed the word Color in the Search box. That is word is clearly too broad to get an accurate result. If you look at the scroll bar on the Search Results palette, you can see that there were probably over a hundred topics (every page in Help that contains the search term).

In the Color search results, you can see the icons for results in Recipes (brief step-by-step tutorials found in the How-To palette) at the top.

And, below the Recipes results is the icon for results in Help.

You can have the palette show only one or the other by choosing your preference from the menu at the top of Search Results, though I can’t quite see why you’d bother. The things are already sorted.

To display any palette which is not currently on the screen, choose Window > [palette name]. To close a palette, click the X in its upper right corner. You can group palettes under a shared blue bar by dragging the name tab of one under the blue bar of another.

To hide all palettes and the toolbar, press the Tab key. To hide the palettes, but leave the toolbar in view, hold down the Shift key while pressing the Tab key. Pressing the Tab key again will bring them all back. This can be a big help if the palettes are overlapping an image you are trying to work on.