50 Fast Digital Photo Techniques with Photoshop Elements 3

Learn how to improve images that are iffy, embellish them with vignettes, color changes or filter effects (watercolor, ink sketch and others)or composite them for wholly new images. None of these techniques are hard to follow, and all can be accomplished with a variety of image-editing programs, not just Photoshop. It is, in fact, geared more towards the lower-end Photoshop Elements than the full program. But the information is just as relevant, and though it often requires a bit of translation between program menus, this isn't a difficult thing to do.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to get involved in digital image-editing, digital art or just a slightly more hands-on approach to improving the summer vacation snaps.


Great if you want to learn Photoshop Elements   November 11, 2001
Richard Patton (Palm Harbor, Florida USA)
29 out of 29 found this review helpful

I bought this book about 3 weeks prior to purchasing Photoshop Elements and began studying it before using the program. After loading the software, I was editing photos that evening and accomplishing remarkable techniques within 3 days. This is more than a re-writen instruction book- it is a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish 50 different, mostly easy projects that would have taken me weeks to figure out with the instruction manual alone. The results using Photoshop Elements, which is an exellent program, are outstanding.
If you want to use Photoshop Elements, wish to do more than just print snapshots, and want to unleash your full power of artistic license, buy this book.
The author also wrote "Digital Camera Solutions," which is an introduction to digital photography, and which I also enjoyed.


Very helpful in getting the best of your digital images   January 25, 2002
Vladimir Antimonov (Moscow, Russian Federation)
29 out of 32 found this review helpful

I've bought 2 books on digital photography, this one and the "Complete digital photography". My intention at the time of ordering was to buy a book to learn more about hardware features of digital camera, and how to combine different settings to get the best shots. I thought: "I've got an excellent Canon G2 camera, and the photos it makes are just too fine to edit them with any image processing software". Nevertheless, I ordered this book because it had a very good rating.

To my surprise, the "complete digital photography" did not came out to be of any use for me, because my limited (as I thought before) knowledge of digital camera features was really quite good, and this book (and I guess oll of this kind) is oriented on ONLY THE BEGINNERS in d-photography. Besides, the CD supplied with the book contained images of poor quality.

Contrary to this book, the "50 fast digital photo techniques" came out to be very useful, as it adresses few but VERY USEFUL methods to greatly improve the quality of a digital photo, including advice how to eliminate color cast, a very new (to me) way to make the photo more sharp etc. The great thing about this book is that it contains a CD with 100 photos of a very high quality and size: 50 original photos, and 50 "corrected" photos. There are 50 lessons in the book, and each lesson addresses one specific photo. There is also a very particular instruction how to correct the original photo by YOURSELF to get the final image.

Finally I should say that because I have to shoot too many photos without having enough time to set proper settings on the camera, this book helped me to make an excellent photos of those original shots wich I wanted to delete before.


Great Photoshop Elements tutorial   January 3, 2002
Judith Lahore (Seattle, WA USA)
28 out of 28 found this review helpful

"50 Fast Digital Photo Techniques" is basically a great tutorial on Photoshop Elements, better than the other 2 books I've seen in the bookstores. The CD contains before and after images so you can see how you do on the projects, and every one is self-contained, so you don't have to refer to some earlier project and do that first. All of the projects are quick and practical, and his results are really artistic. Two tables at the end of the book compare the commands of Photoshop Elements to Photoshop LE 5 and Photoshop 6; and to Paint Shop Pro 7, Photo-Paint 10, and Photoimpact 6, so you can also use the techniques with those other programs. I highly recommend this book, which is the best "hands-on" book on a graphics program I have ever used. I am currently trying out the demo version of PE included on the CD and will soon order PE to use with my new digital camera, and with other graphics programs, such as Painter. I am delighted with both the book and the Photoshop Elements program.