Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Fun With PhotoShop Elements 3
Rhoda Grossman's new book is full of fun photo projects.
| Product | Fun With PhotoShop Elements 3 |
|---|---|
| Company | Sams |
| Web | www.samspublishing.com |
| Price | From £17.99 |
| We like | Good range of projects |
| We don't like | Instructions could be better, no explanations |
| Rating | |
| Requirements |
The first thing that strikes you about the book is how small it is. With just 200 odd pages, the £18 price feels a bit high. On the plus side, every page is in full colour with copious illustrations.
As the title suggests, this is a guide to doing all sorts of fun and bizarre things with Photoshop Elements 3. It consists of 40 plus projects spread over 12 categories. These cover a wide range of tasks from changing people's heads around, modifying colours, removing spots (adding spots!) or making a nice shiny car look beaten up. More advanced jobs include changing the decor on a photo of a room, ageing people and removing unwanted individuals from photos.
Despite sounding promising, I did find this a frustrating book. The projects indicate it is aimed at beginners yet the instructions leave a lot to be desired. Unless you are fairly familiar with Photoshop Elements 3 and where everything is, you may end up struggling. It would have been much better to have more information on where to find the functions and why you are using them. A few screen shots of the icons or menu options would have helped enormously. Some of the needed information is presented in an appendix, almost as an afterthought but it really needs to be in the main body of the book.
Another negative is that in many cases, the end results do look pretty amateurish. Where two images are combined, there is little effort to match colour or lighting. The final images often look exactly like what they are, one picture on top of another.
Conclusion
The book does contain some useful snippets and the projects are often good ideas but there are better books that teach the basic whys and hows in far more detail. As it stands, this book fails to deliver unless your an Elements user who knows their way around but is in need of some ideas.
