Customer Reviews

Photoshop Elements 3 Down & Dirty Tricks

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Excellent Book! Full of useful information that is made simple by step by step insructions. Great information for someone who understands the basic tools of Photoshop, but wants to create more prfessional looking photos. Wonderful examples that inspire new ideas and twists on classic pictures! Highly Recommended!

After reading Kelby's book "the photoshop elements 3 book for digital photographers" I just had to have this book. I am enjoying it as much as the first book. I enjoy reading the humourous prelude to each chapter and then we get down to business. Beautiful pictures are included with step by step instruction, all in colour. It's very easy to understand and leads you along. You can skip around the book and do not need to read it from the start as each set of instructions include the full instructions.

I read the book cover to cover while using it as a companion tutor to an on line dslr course. I found many of the steps not complete. I had basic questions on basic elements of PSE 3.0 and didn't find any mention of them in the book or index. I was left "wanting" for my answers on the basic of uses in Organizer and Editor.

This is yet another book from the man who is trying to take over Photoshop with his "Photoshop Professionals" organization.

Someone should take Scott Kelby into a quiet room and tell him some home truths. The first one, in fact probably the only one, is that he's just NOT FUNNY.

If you want a second one, the most important word in the English Language is not one character long, usually expressed in upper case, and is the character that appears between H and J in the alphabet.

And here's one that might save people some money - if you see a neat technique in advertising, it is a good idea to remember it (cut out the page, if necessary) and try to reproduce it yourself. There are a number of "Down and Dirty tips" like this - the one I recall is the one using a watch.

In fact, the tips here are more Up and Clean than Down and Dirty. If you want your Photoshop work to be slightly more interesting (but not too interesting), this is the book for you.

This book bears all the hallmarks of a book done by several authors, none of which had too much interest in it. I don't know whether Mr. Kelby contributed every word in this book, but there are parts with altogether too much sophomore humor (and I'm doing it a favor rating it that high), along with mildly interesting techniques. The humor is something that was passe at the time of DOS for Dummies, and the only reason that I give this two stars is that someone can use the techniques.

However, the techniques shown are yawn-inspiring. There's little or nothing that will blow your socks off, and this book comes a long way behind the Elements One-Click Wow! book.

According to the blurb, this book shows you "Photoshop Element 3's most closely guarded special effects." If you think about this for a minute, why would Adobe want to guard the special effects you can make with its program? And why would Scott Kelby need to have the words in the title "Voices that Matter"?

If a book can't stand on its own merits, why should it need to be bumped up? And why can't the author put over his points without obscuring them with unfunny remarks?

Look elsewhere. This book is for the Windows version only (not that I care that much, because I use Windows). There are plenty of better books on Photoshop Elements techniques.

I like this book as a starting place to help with learning some of the ins & outs of Photoshop Elements (PSE) - I actually happen to be using v. 5. It is a bells & whistles book, not a general tutorial book for how to use all the features of PSE.

I just started digital scrapbooking about a month ago, so I wanted a few tricks for making my photos better and beginning to create some elements, so for me it has worked out very well. I've gotten a couple other books that ended up being too simplified and the results somewhat "cheesy", so I found this book more of a middle ground for a beginner who learns quickly - not too simplified, but not complicated.

The bokk was inthe condition you said and it is a great book and I would highly recomend the seller

I am an Adobe fan. I have Adobe Album 2, Elements 3 and Photoshop CS. Using a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II camera with my Epson 4000 Printer going through Photoshop CS is a marriage made in heaven. But first, I want to store and organize my photos in my own way. This I did with Album 2, 2nd Version, to the limits of its capability. Its limits, I can see are mostly overcome in Elements 3 and I want to transfer my Album 2 organization to Elements 3 with its much more sophisticaled capability. I have 5,000 photos. There is nothing in Mr. Kelby's book about organizing photos at all. His index is 4 pages long. Under the word "photos or photographs" there is nothing. Under the word "organizing" or "organization" there is nothing. Under the "word" albums, there is nothing.
Yet this is the first thing this Elements 3 Program wants to do is to collect all my "bmp's" and "jpegs" and drop them in one file for me to organize. With 5,000 photos, I don't want to go through this very time consuming procedure again. If there was some space spent on this first step, I could figure how to transfer my Adobe Album 2 photo organization to the expanded capability of Element 3. The organizational ability of Elements 3 is ignored. The other aspects elaborated on are much better done through Photoshop CS. The lack of explanation on the basics of photograph organization makes me feel this book is of little help.

If you are interested in doing ad work, this is a clever, easy to read handbook by Kelby. visuals very good. Otherwise, gives a few good tips for others...great shadow technique, for example