The Photoshop Elements 7 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video

The Photoshop Elements 7 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) Details

This book breaks new ground by doing something for digital photographers that’s never been done before–it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly “how to do it.” It’s not a bunch of theory; it doesn’t challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure things out on your own. Instead, it does something that virtually no other Elements book has ever done–it tells you flat-out which settings to use, when to use them, and why. If you’re looking for one of those “tell-me-everything-about-the-Unsharp-Maskfilter” books, this isn’t it. You can grab any other Elements book on the shelf, because they all do that. Instead, this book gives you the inside tips and tricks of the trade for organizing, correcting, editing, sharpening, retouching, and presenting your photos like a pro. You’ll be absolutely amazed at how easy and effective these techniques are–once you know the secrets. Each year we train thousands of digital photographers and, almost without exception, they have the same questions and face the same problem–that’s exactly what we cover in this book. You’ll learn: • The real secrets of how the pros retouch portraits• How to color correct any photo without breaking a sweat (you’ll be amazed at how they do it!)• How to use Camera Raw for processing not only RAW photos, but JPEGs and TIFFs, too! (And you’ll learn why so many pros like it best–because it’s faster and easier)• The sharpening techniques the pros really use (there’s an entire chapter just on this!)• How to deal with common digital camera image problems, including removing noise and avoiding halos• The most requested photographic special effects, and much more! THE BOOK’S SECRET WEAPONAlthough Elements 7 offers some digital photography features that Photoshop CS4 doesn’t offer, there are plenty of features that Photoshop CS4 has that Elements 7 still doesn’t have (things like layer masking, Channel Mixer, etc.). But in this book, you’ll learn some slick workarounds, cheats, and some fairly ingenious ways to replicate many of those Photoshop features from right within Elements. Plus, since this book is designed for photographers, it doesn’t waste your time talking about how to frame a shot, setting your exposure, etc., and there’s no talk about which camera or printer to buy. It’s all Elements, step-by-step, cover-to-cover, in the only book of its kind, and you’re gonna love it!

Reviews

Clearly, the authors of this book are experts in Photoshop Elements. This book will teach you tricks and techniques you would probably never be able to learn on your own. In addition they give "cookbook" line by line instructions which even a complete novice can follow. For the most part, the book is organized in a task-oriented manner which is convenient when you have a specific modification you want to make to your photo, i.e. modify colors, restore old faded photos, merge pictures and a thousand other ways to improve your pictures. The authors obviously know their subject well and are enthusiastic about passing on this information. The task oriented approach does have some disadvantages though. The book does not have chapters meant simply to explain each button, tool, etc in the program, rather you learn about the tools as you use them for a specific task. This is ok, but makes the book difficult to just sit down and read cover to cover in order to learn how to use the program. Rather it works best when you look up a topic one by one when you have a specific task you want to try. This probably works well for most people, but if you buy the book planning on just reading it from start to finish you may be overwhelmed. It would have been nice to have a chapter or two introducing different tools and concepts. My biggest complaint is the way they handle the layers tool. The authors state that every other book on elements goes through the basics of using layers, so they are going to skip this. Instead, layers are used frequently to achieve many techniques, with step by step cookbook instructions. Since I have not read a previous book (other than a previous edition of this book which takes the same approach), I don't understand the layers toolbar and just copy their step by step instructions (which give amazing results!). Nevertheless, in my opinion, a chapter explaining layers would help me understand layers better-- then I might be able to perform these tasks by myself rather than just memorizing the steps. I can't comment on whether this book is a good update if you already own their immediate previous edition as I upgraded from a previous edition for Elements 3. The upgrade is clearly worth it to me as there is substantial new information compared with the version for Elements 3. In summary, this book has an amazing amount of information presented in a step by step fashion easy to reproduce at home. It will teach you both simple and complex techniques to do amazing things with your pictures. I give it 4 stars because it is short at times on explaining concepts, particularly layers, requiring me to keep the book open and follow each step rather than being able to leave the book behind and apply the concepts I learned.

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