Customer Reviews

Photoshop Elements 2 Special Effects

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is what kept me from rating it higher. Usually Wiley publishes quality books. I feel that this book was rushed to the presses. Good authors usually have their work reviewed by their peers and the critics before publishing. Had that been done this book would have been first rate.

For example, tutorial 1 step 2 has one loading a JPEG from the "projects" folder in the included CD-ROM. Search all you want, the "projects" folder and the particular JPEG is MIA. To add to the frustration, if you go to Al Wards's website, you must subscribe, at the tune of $49, to ask him where are the missing files. Some of the instructions are not well thought out, sometimes it requires doing a step several times to acheive the intended results. Some of the menu items one is supposed to click on do not exist or are mislabled.

The tutorials will give one the foundation to create special effects and come close to profesional looking results. Like anything else it depends on how well motivitated one is, and for this book one better have lots of motivation.

The bulk of this book is step-by-step guided exercises that I had hoped would demonstrate the myrad features in Photoshop Elements. A CD containing art work and support files required by the exercises is furnished with the book.

Unfortunately, my experience with a half dozen exercises left me less than pleased. Some of the exercise steps described items in Photoshop Elements that didn't exist. In some cases I found things that came close... I think. My guess is the author was working with a different version of the program as he was developing the book and never went back to check things with the final version. A further complication were several instances where the instructions called for files on the CD that didn't exist. Finally, the author provides cookbook-like instructions without saying what it is you are trying to accomplish.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but as I go through these very long set of instructions, I get lost. All of a sudden I'm staring at a dozen layers, and I can't figure out which one I'm suppose to be applying yet-another-filter to. Sometimes I don't even see the menu item that's being refered to. For example, Page 40, near the top, says "Choose Edit->Deselect" - Well I don't see it. But if I choose Select->Deselect instead, then the following instructions don't seem to work either. So I'm lost. Then, on page 42, it says to load the file "crate_texture.jpg" from the included CD. Well I browsed the CD and did a file search and haven't found it. In fact, the CD mentions being installed, but there are no EXE's on it!

I have to admit that it's helping me learn the basics of Photoshop Elements 2, I mean you use the basic tools and layers over and over again and they're reasonably easy to figure out. But then the book pulls out 10 filters in a row, and it looks cool, but it doesn't explain why it works; Why they are performed in the order that they are; Why we use a parameter of 100 instead of 25; Why Radial instead of Linear - I might as well just run a prewritten script! There is no explanation for anything, just a long list of type this, click that.

I cannot find the project files on the CD-Rom as noted on the books cover. I sent an email to Wiley asking them what the hell was going on and waiting for a reply. I'm not happy with the book so far. At least as far as the projects are concerned. Tried to go to the author's web site, but, you have to pay in order to ask him anything.

In this book, Al shows you how to do all kinds of things that you didn't think could be done with Elements. Great special effects and well written, this book shows you things you won't find in the manual or other places.