Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: Maximum Performance: Unleash the hidden performance of Elements [Paperback]

Mark Galer M.Ed. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 14, 2009

Using a unique combination of step by step projects, movie tutorials and sample images, Mark Galer guides the reader through the most powerful photo editing tools that Elements has to offer. Discussing and demonstrating the skills and know-how to create professional-quality results with this budget-priced software. Whether optimizing photographs for printing, enhancing images for maximum impact, or creating impressive, seamless montages, this book will enable any aspiring digital professional to get the maximum performance from the credit crunch approved software.

The package is complted with an astonishingly comprehensive DVD packed with over 7 hours of movie tutorials, 100+ sample images, a stock photo gallery as well as automated actions to get even more out of the software.

* Get Photoshop-quality results with Elements-priced software

* Create stunning images using powerful, little-known techniques

* Contains a comprehensive DVD packed full of far more content than any other Elements title - hours of tutorials, hundreds of images, and automated actions are just the start

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[C]omes with a comprehensive DVD and packs in over seven hours of movie tutorials. [A] 'must' for any serious Photoshop collection."--Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Mark Galer is the Program Director and Senior lecturer at RMIT University in the School of Media and Communication, Australia. He is also co-writer of their popular online photography courses. He has lectured in photography in the UK and Australia and has worked commercially as a freelance photographer on corporate and editorial assignments. He has written numerous top-selling photography books, including Photography Foundations for Art & Design, the Popular Photoshop Elements; Maximum Performance and Photoshop; Essential Skills series. He is an Official Adobe Ambassador for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Focal Press; 1 edition (December 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0240521838
• ISBN-13: 978-0240521831
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #399,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Galer is a Senior Lecturer in photography at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He has lectured in photography in the UK and Australia and has worked commercially as a freelance photographer on corporate and editorial assignments. He has written numerous top-selling photography books, including Photoshop CS5 Essential Skills, Digital Photography Essential Skills, Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 Maximum Performance and Photographic Lighting Essential Skills. He is an official Adobe Ambassador for Photoshop.

http://www.markgaler.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Helpful guide to getting the most out of Photoshop Elements, April 13, 2010

By 

Nathan Andersen "film lover, philosophy profe... (Florida) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: Maximum Performance: Unleash the hidden performance of Elements (Paperback)

(What's this?)

This helpful guide from Focal Press explains how to get the most out of Photoshop Elements. It's aimed above all at the aspiring professional or semi-professional shooter, who wants to go beyond quick and easy tweaks and fixes and get the best possible results. The lessons in the book are mostly addressed to issues any photographer faces, about how to improve and adjust ordinary photographs, rather than creating out-of-ordinary or magical special effects. (For that, see How to Cheat in Photoshop Elements 8: Discover the magic of Adobe's best kept secret, another excellent Focal guide.)

The book covers eight different projects, and provides high quality photo files (on the included CD-Rom) to work on for each, so that what you see described is exactly what you see on your monitor. There are also video files that illustrate the process, step by step, for more visual learners. There are benefits and drawbacks of this approach. The benefits are that it's easy to follow, and easy to recreate exactly the effects explained. The drawback, I found, is that it's not always easy to generalize the results. One thing I tried to do as I was reading the book was to open my own photos and attempt to create similar results with mine, and sometimes I could but it was hard to be sure I had gotten the best result. I think part of the problem may be that the author doesn't always explain the principles as clearly as he describes the exact steps -- and I would have liked to see him move back and forth a bit more between the specifics of the photograph examples and some more general ideas about what to do when faced with a range of related but different problems.

Still, I learned a lot from the exercises I tried. The advantage of a book like this over, say, the Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: The Missing Manual, is that what you really need to learn a piece of software this complicated is just to get busy with it and try things out, and this book is very practical. The book as a whole covers a very wide range of issues, that often involve using multiple layers to create subtle and powerful changes without distortion. In addition to including all of the photograph examples, mostly in RAW camera format, the CD-Rom that comes with this book also gives you hours of video tutorials that go beyond the book and provides several automated actions and photo effects that expand on the basic functionality of Photoshop Elements. It's a very valuable book, and I learned a lot going through it once, and know I'll come back to several of the chapters when I face specific adjustment issues. Good stuff.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very useful and helpful, May 22, 2010

By 

Grits (South, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: Maximum Performance: Unleash the hidden performance of Elements (Paperback)

(What's this?)

We do not have Photoshop Elements v.8 (we have v.6), but this was still very useful since most of the functions in v.8 are already in v.6. Neither of us is terribly familiar with Elements, and the bundled documentation is not too far above worthless. This book took us far beyond the Adobe-provided information and allowed us to achieve results that are very much appreciated. We're going through a lifetime's worth of photos, letters, etc. from recently deceased parents, and there is a lot of repair work needed in many of the photos. Starting out with Elements has a bit of a steep learning curve, but this book speeds up the process considerably. It's nearly a 5-star book, actually - we just reserve 5 stars for the absolute best of the best in our ratings. Highly recommended, even for "beginners!"

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the BEST Photoshop books available for 7.0 and 8.0, May 23, 2010

By 

ASP (NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: Maximum Performance: Unleash the hidden performance of Elements (Paperback)

(What's this?)

This book is one of the best Photoshop Elements books available today. It is packed with an enormous amount of information. I am a brand new user to Photoshop Elements, and after reading this book, I am able to accomplish intermediate manipulations on photos. I am using version 7.0, and even though this book is written for version 8.0, the author always provides directions for the 7.0 version if the instructions are different from the 8.0 version.

This book includes a DVD filled with images and movies that you can manipulate using the step-by-step procedures. The DVD is viewable directly, or through the Organizer in Photoshop Elements. The DVD also provides over 7 hours of movie tutorials recorded for version 7.0 and 8.0. The DVD also contains, RAW, TIFF, and JPEG images, as well as printable PDFS containing shortcuts.

What makes this book great? It's easy to understand, with full instructions on how to accomplish each step, usually supported by a full color photo. This book is filled with full-color photos on each page supporting the instructions given. I admit that I did have to read a few instructions a few times only because I was still learning where everything is in Photoshop Elements. And this book also contains a glossary filled with words from Photography and Photoshop Elements.

The book is broken into three parts, with seven to nine projects in each part.

Different projects include the following:
Part 1) Working with RAW images (ACR-Adobe Camera Raw), Local adjustments in photos, adjusting levels & correcting clipping, Curves (control contrast using adjustment layers), Hue/Saturation & Luminance, Sharpening images, and preparing your computer/printer/Photoshop for printing.
Part 2) Manipulating Depth of Field, creating dramatic lighting effects, turning color images black and white & luminance, adjusting tone/shadows/highlights, enhancing character portraits, enhancing glamour portraits, creating motion blur and manipulating backgrounds, fixing low-key images and adjusting exposure to perfection, and working with the Channels panel.
Part 3) Creating photo montages and replacing backgrounds, replacing a sky, layer blending (blending layers of two photos together), manipulating multiple images to create a single perfect picture, preserving shadows, working with high dynamic range, Merging photos (Photostitching), Transplanting/manipulating Hair.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in developing advanced techniques with Photoshop. My rating: 5 out of 5.