Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 Idea Kit

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Idea Kit is a good name for this book which includes everything you need to complete 17 easy and fun projects. All you need to provide is your own photos. The author, Lisa Matthews, provides you easy to follow, step-by-step instructions and demonstrates several techniques for Adobe Photoshop Elements. The accompanying CD has many project templates, textures and borders.

Matthews begins with a short introduction to Photoshop Elements' Photo Browser, Organizer and Creation Wizard. She then discusses common image corrections such as red eye, color casts, backlighting and cropping. Now that your photos are perfect, you are ready to start the projects.

In the first few projects, Matthews shows several ways to manipulate your photos by altering the background in a photo, changing a color photo to black and white, adding borders to your photos and using Photoshop Elements' painting tools to create some very interesting effects. She demonstrates how to use the software's Photomerge feature to create a panoramic image by combining several photos. Finally, she shows you how to create a collage by blending several images together.

In the next few projects, Matthews demonstrates how to print one photo in several sizes using Photoshop Elements' Picture Package and a Jewel Case/CD cover project using the Contact Sheet feature. Matthews also demonstrates Photoshop Elements' built-in PDF Slideshow and Web Photo Gallery features. Other projects use the many templates stored on the CD including a newsletter and photo transfer project. Finally, you use Photoshop Elements' Creation Wizard to make a postcard, poster, calendar and scrapbook pages.

Lisa Matthews is a commercial photographer and teaches photographic workshops. She also works for Adobe Systems creating demonstration and instructional materials.

Adobe Systems' main product is Photoshop. So to gin up sales and usage, they want to offer many handy ideas that add value to it. Thus one of their employees, Matthews, came up with this slender guide. Unsurprisingly, the information is laid out very clearly for the reader, given that Photoshop is about visual presentation of images and text.

The design tips are given in a nontechnical prose, for a general audience. There are two levels at which you can use this book. Firstly, and obviously, for the tips themselves. But at a metalevel, look carefully at how she arranges her graphics and text. A clean and minimalist design, that does not attempt to overwhelm the reader on any given page. Uncluttered. Quite unlike, say, Wired magazine. So you can try using this book as an implicit design document for your own work. Most readers will never try this, even though it's right in front of them.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 Idea Kit is a slim but idea-packed sourcebook of creative applications and tips, tricks, and techniques for getting the most out of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0. Written by Adobe Systems insider Lisa Matthews, Idea Kit is packed with full-color illustrations revealing its tips, tricks, and techniques from how to remove red-eye and touch-up photos to applying ready-made templates on the accompanying CD-ROM to create stickers, T-shirts, and tattoos, and much more. Straightforward instructions clarify everything from basic functions to design tips such as the "rule of thirds" for shooting panoramic images to be merged and much more. A superb introduction to what Adobe Photoshop is capable of

When I get a new piece of software I always like to try to see what it can do. This book gives 17 projects that use a lot of the features of Photoshop Elements 3.0. The projects are step by step and easy to follow. Once you have gone through the projects you have a real good idea what Photoshop Elements 3.0 can do and you end up with some spectacular results.

For the gentleman who post the review below about not getting a trial version of the software with the book, others who are wishing to try it out do not need to look elsewhere if their copy does not come with a trial version. One can simply go to adobe's website and download any of their products for a 30 day trial period! - I personally do not own these book, I own two of Scott Kelby's books, I highly recommend those and purchasing PE3.0 it is a very powerful consumer-level digital photo editing tool and much more!

***** I had to rate this item to post this message, Please disregaurd my rating as I have not read this book Thank you.*****

I agree with the editorial statement, "Best of all, the companion CD includes ... and a trial version of the software". However, my recently arrived copy does not include a trial of PSE 3.0.

I look forward to working my way through the book but first I have to buy the software! I was 90% sure that I would end up purchasing PSE 3.0 anyway so this is a somewhat minor annoyance.

For those of you who wanted to try PSE 3.0 before shelling out $100, look elsewhere.