19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For Photographers, February 28, 2010
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Photographers (Paperback)
DISCLAIMER: In exchange for this review I received a copy of this book for free.
Make no mistake, Philip Andrews' Adobe Photoship Elements 8 For Photographers is a book for photographers. The book has a short digital photography basics section at the beginning, but it is by-and-large written for people who already have a good grasp on photography. There's no explanation of shutter-speed, f-stop, and ISO. This isn't one of the "_____ For Dummies" books, it's a book for people who already know a thing or two. This is purely about Adobe Elements 8.
And it should be. Focal Press and Andrews are trying to write a comprehensive guide to Photoshop Elements. It's well-written, easy to follow, and starts with the programs most basic functions and ends with some truly advanced, in-depth image manipulation.
I suppose at this point it would be useful for me to write a bit about where I'm coming from in relation to photography and Photoshop. I use photography and Photoshop as a tool in my design work. I do a lot of retouching, stylising, photo-correction and image-merging. For awhile I've been interested in learning more about Elements and how much it can do. So, with that in mind, I picked up Andrews's book in exchange for this review and got to learning.
The book is split into three major sections: An introduction to Elements, the tools available in the program, and an "Elements in Action" at the end.
The introduction section covers all of the basics of the program like importing, cropping, a helpful section on scanning, and some basic manipulation (like auto-contrast and red-eye removal). It goes through Elements on a very basic level. It's explained well and has instructions for Mac and Windows.
The tools section is where things start to get good. It begins with a pretty substantial chapter on organisation, which is great. It's crucial to learn the best workflow method and organizational system of a program to use it effectively. The great thing about digital photography is that it's easy to take hundreds of pictures, but having those pictures available and easy to sift through is just as important. Everything from your photos to your tools should be at your fingertips. The book does a good job of explaining how to get your pictures and your albums in top shape using Elements' Smart-Album feature and Adobe Bridge. For anyone planning on amassing a buttload of pictures, this might be the most important section of the book.
The book then moves on to the meat of Photoshop Elements. This is why you spent your money on Elements in the first place. You want to learn how to fix photos that look too dark, aren't framed quite right, or have the wrong color temperature. Maybe you want to make your photos look old-fashioned. Maybe you want to make all of the reds in your photo really pop. Or maybe you want to go crazy with it and make rave posters or photoshop celebrity heads onto naked people's bodies. The possibilities are endless, and this book covers a lot of them.
The book covers way too much ground to mention everything covered here, but it gets into layers, masks, filters, photo-merging, and pretty much anything else you can think of. There are a couple things that I thought were really helpful. They aren't flashy or anything, but they're good to know.
The first is a section on non-detrimental size changes. Sometimes, it seems like nothing is ever the right size. Some element is always too big or too small, so it's important to know how to re-size images without losing information. Unfortunately, the section is buried at the end of "Advanced Techniques," when I think it should go closer to the front-end of the book.
Another useful bit of information is Andrews's "10 Commandments for Good Filter Usage." It's a nice bit of editorialising in a book that's pretty hands-off when it comes to what you should and shouldn't do aesthetically. Some early photoshoppers get crazy with the filters, and their photos suffer as a result, so it's nice to see Andrews try to reign in that urge a bit. Also, the printing section is pretty good. Bad prints can not only ruin good pictures, but also become a substantial waste of money. Andrews' run-through is good for printing at home, but he doesn't go into large-format printing at all, which should have been included in a book with this much depth.
There are a couple minor problems that I have with the book. There are source images that Andrews uses throughout the book, but they are only available to download online. I would have liked an included CD or DVD. At $50, it isn't a cheap book and it would be nice to have all the source material in one package.
Another issue I have with the book is that it could use a glossary. There are hundreds of terms that are Photoshop specific, a glossary would save some backtracking. Another small problem I have with the book is that the keyboard shortcuts should also have been written in shorthand instead of written out in the text. He writes out "Hold the Control button then hit the S button" to save instead of something like "CTRL+S." I would prefer the shorthand in perentheses after writing it out, because it's easier to scan the page and see what the shortcuts are instead of having to re-read the paragraphs for the shortcuts. After all, learning keyboard shortcuts makes for more efficient photoshopping.
Photoshop Elements 8 For Photographers is a great book for learning the program. Honestly, the book really opened my eyes to what Photoshop Elements 8 is capable of and both the program and the book far exceeded my expectations. Good job.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
State-of-the-art quality guide, that provides so much hope..., March 29, 2010
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Photographers (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Philip Andrews has produced and written the quintessential guide for Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software users. There are already a few excellent reviews posted that carefully and thoroughly describe this book; thus I hesitate to duplicate them. The content is comprehensive, starting with the briefest coverage of digital basics, and then moving on to the elements of the Photoshop system. The essential and most valuable aspect of the book is the "hands-on" description, with examples, of the actual elements of this program. The guide's composition and style is an equal strength, as much as the actual content. There are numerous "screen captures," so the user can actually match the content to his computer screen. There are also numerous "before" and "after" pictures that help underscore the utility, nay, the necessity of having this software. As with all state-of-the-art guides, each page is color-coded by section. There is a brief appendix that covers usage on both the Mac and PC systems, and the book is indexed.
Hope! Not to recycle old campaign slogans, but that is the biggest plus of the book for me. Several reviewers indicate their perspective from which they approach this book, certainly a good idea. I realize that perhaps half or more of the readers have ONLY taken digital photographs. So, the section on "Raw" photographs and "Theory into Action" provide hope for the other half; yes, those that may have literally countless thousands of old slide photos on film that they are laboriously scanning into digital images. Maybe I'm half way through that process; pictures taken 10, 20, 30 and in some cases, 40 years ago, in unique places that it would be impossible to duplicate by any means. But so many of the photos are of marginal quality, and you constantly wonder - should I really run this one through the scanner? This book gives the unequivocal answer: YES. Because there really is hope of not just cropping out the bad; but also of "jazzing up" the mediocre in so many ways. And for the hope, Andrews should receive at least 5-stars.
But the essential book format of any software guide constrains such "euphoria." For many of us, it is always of such comfort to have the physical book around, tangible enough to trip over on the way to the bathroom at night. One can open it, bring up the "screen capture" image, and have your computer at that image, rather than trying to flip back and forth between that and an on-line guide. And the tangible book can provide a "goad" that you should do more today, which is more difficult for the ethereal on-line guide. But the downside of any guide book is its obsolesce, as the software manufacturers are racing to bring out their latest, even jazzier, and, of course, "improved" updates, and thus I couldn't give any software book more than 4-stars; after all, you very well may want to re-read "War and Peace" twenty years hence, but that is never true for a software book.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Resource For Photoshop Elements!, March 28, 2010
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Photographers (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I seem to collect books about how to use Photoshop Elements. Each book has a good feature - and a good reason for adding it to my collection. Some books have fabulous illustrations, others offer precise step-by-step instructions and still others just have a format that I find easy to use.
This book,happily combines all of these excellent features into one easy to use, well illustrated book! In the past I have found that Focal Press books are generally an excellent value and very well put together. This book is no exception. The books covers the basics of digital photography, proceeds on to how to actually use Photoshop Elements, how to organize photos, repair or fix photos and progresses to other topics like how to share, work with layers, photo merge, make photos work best on the web - and how to create a myriad of great projects. The one thing that I appreciate a lot about this book is that it covers not only PC use but, much to my personal joy, how to use Photoshop Elements on a Mac!
This book is a wonderful resource that anyone, PC or Mac user, will find to be a valuable addition to your library!
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