Customer Reviews

Fun with Photoshop Elements 3: Foto-Fakery for Everyone

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I teach Digital Photography to 8th graders and thought this book would be filled with ideas for fun projects.

The poor quality of this book's printing means that you cannot see the "marching ants" that the author demonstrates in her examples of selections. Worse, images that she has combined (such as a person's face with an animal) are so poorly done that they look completely fake and unprofessional. (My own students, novices at Elements and only age 13, did a much better job of photo composites and selections than the author, whose renditions look like really bad tabloid front page fakery!)

While I can appreciate a juvenile's fascination with "gross-out" effects, the author's use of Elements to manipulate photographs is simply mean-spirited. Is showing people at their worst (making a woman look like she has oral herpes is one example that comes to mind) her idea of "fun?" I feel sorry for the models used in this book, since she used stock photos (not requiring their permission) to make them look like repugnant freaks.

No, there is nothing "fun" about this book, which is a pity, because Photoshop Elements CAN be used creatively and effectively to enhance and alter photographs. (Examples include Surreal Digital Photography by Huggins and When Pancakes Go Bad by Muchnick, and some of the WOW! books). Don't waste your money on this offensive, poorly executed book.

Photoshop expert Rhoda Grossman's Fun With Photoshop Elements 3: Foto-Fak-ery For Everyone superbly showcases just what can be done for fun with Photoshop! Extraordinarily informative, even the most novice user of Photoshop software can immediately engage the program and turn out fun and useful projects. Readers will learn all about key Photoshop Elements tools in a thoroughly "user friendly" and hands-on approach. Sidebars provide additional information for Photoshop CS users. The diverse projects provided as learning templates and examples include: combining the best elements of two photos into one finished image; head transplants; background switches; extreme makeovers for your face, clothes, and home; grafting animal images together to create comical beasts undreamed of through evolution; editing people into and out of images; creating artistic greeting cards, outrageous T-shirts, personalized calendars, phony product labels, fake street signs and so much more. 224 pages.

Easy to understand instruction for many of the manipulations you can do in Photoshop elements.