Review: The Photoshop Elements 8 Book
Ian Waugh takes some pics and learns some new tricks...
| Product | The Photoshop Elements 8 Book |
|---|---|
| Company | New Riders |
| Web | www.newriders.com |
| Price | $49.99 £29.99 |
| We like | Full colour, great tips, well explained, demo files available |
| We don't like | Not much new from previous version |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
Although Photoshop Elements is a trimmed-down version of Photoshop, it's still a feature-packed program, easily powerful enough for all your digital photography needs. In fact, many professionals use it and you need to be very pro or very specialised to want the full program. But even Elements is not the easiest program to understand or, indeed, to get the most out of.
The Photoshop Elements 8 Book is not about teaching the basics but about how to actually Do Interesting Stuff. It assumes you have a working knowledge of Elements but, having said that, if you have a smattering, you should be able to work your way through the examples learning an inordinate amount about the program as you do so.
Get Organised
A fair number of pages is devoted to telling you how to import, organise, tag and find your photos which everyone should know how to do. Once you've taken a few dozen photos you'll appreciate the benefits of organisation. When you have several hundred or thousand you can't manage without being organised.
The authors suggest editing your photos in Camera Raw mode rather than using the processed photos most cameras create for you. There's an Auto Correct function in Elements which has a stab at correcting the overall exposure but you know the author's would rather you made basic image adjustments such as white balance and exposure manually and there's a section on that.
Then we get to the meat of it. All the tips and tricks are things you've probably wanted to do but didn't know how or things you never thought about doing but which will improve your photos.
More Tips Than PG
To list them all would be to list the contents of the book, a veritable litany of processing and manipulations. But here's a few of our favourites.
Creating sharp black & white images, fixing shadow problems, straightening images, resizing just parts of an image, Adjustment Layers (new to Elements 8), colour correction, adjusting flesh tones, fixing areas that are too bright, lightening dark subjects, correcting camera distortion, creating a group shot montage, selecting irregular shapes, selecting areas by colour, and removing unwanted objects.
There are also lots of tips on retouching faces and portraits - yes, whiten teeth and remove wrinkles here! There's even a tip on how to turn a frown into a smile and how to remove 10 or 15lbs. Who needs a diet!
Trendy FX
Another section covers special effects and includes trendy high-contrast portraits, soft spots, panoramas, retaining spots of colour on a B&W image, sky replacement, using gradient filters, and creating montages. There's also a chapter on sharpening.
There's a useful section on how to watermark and add copyright info to photos and one on colour calibration and colour management.
One nice feature of the book is the authors' 'humorous', chatty style. Ok it won't appeal to everyone but it sure makes a change from the usual dry, instructional texts so this gets a Big Thumbs Up from us!
The projects are well illustrated showing before and after examples and the instructions make it clear what you need to do to get the final result. If you want to be picky, some of the results are quite subtle and don't show up well in a book. However, the sample files used can be downloaded from a website so you can work with exactly the same material they use.
On the subject of downloading, although the book is also suitable for Mac users, the Mac version of Elements hasn't quite caught up with the Windows version, particularly in the Organizer area as it still uses Adobe Bridge (which comes with Photoshop CS4). So there is also a special Adobe Bridge chapter for Mac users that can be downloaded, too.
Work And Learn
As you work through the book and learn the techniques, you may also start to look at the way you take photos more closely.
The book is updated from earlier editions which covered Elements 6 and 7 and as there's not a lot new in Elements 8, there's probably not enough new in this edition to make you want to buy it if you have an earlier edition. However, if you don't and want to get more out of your photos, this is the book to help you do it! Highly recommended!
The RRPs are a little high but don't worry about the price - Amazon has 40% off.
