Photoshop Elements 3 Solutions

Rating:
Summary: A Must Have!
Review: Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Elements 3 Solutions is a must have companion book for Adobe Elements 3.

His book has easy to understand large color illustrative before & after photographs detailing how each tool, option, or effect works. These are also included on the CD which comes with this book, a wonderful teaching tool!

He walks you through the tasks step-by-step helping one to easily grasp all that Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 has to offer.

Screen captures of dialog boxes, throughout this book, from the program also help you to see the exact settings used to achieve his results.

The highlighted notes which appear in their own boxes are an extremely valuable source of information!

Mikkel's vast knowledge of Adobe's Photoshop will get you up to speed quickly and easily. Before long, with the help of his book, you'll be fluent in Elements 3 and will be turning your digital images into your own masterpieces. I highly recommend his book!

Rating:
Summary: Could have been a 5
Review: Overall decent book but could be a 5 star if it had just one more chapter and some 'theory'. I want to know why/how the tools work not just be told to click here, check this and select that. The examples are great but when trying to do similiar things with your own work not knowing the basics can sometimes really slow you down.

I was quite suprised to find little to no organized help on some of the basics. i.e, what is feathering, hard or soft brushes. I still can't figure out how to use the 'Color Changer'. Scattered thru out the book are some detailed basics but they are hard to find.

The overview says the book has 'extensive coverage' of the Organizer, it should read 'getting started' with the Organizer. A 5 star book would suggest ideas on how to organize using Tags and Collections.

Now to the good....I have learned a lot and found the book very helpful. All of the examples are real world and quite realistic. If you are totally new to working with graphical editing on a computer I would not suggest this book.

Rating:
Summary: Mikkel's Done it Again
Review: Step-by-step techniques covered in this book explain the new Elements 3.0 features including the Healing Brush, RAW support and improved Red Eye Removal.

The technique for combining images using a Gradient Mask is one of the neatest tricks I've seen in a long time.

The book is chuck full of color images and all of the example files are on the CD.

The book also explains how to set up your preferences to take advantage of the software.

The book skips all of unnecessary simple stuff and gets right down to the meat of program including coverage of the Organizer (formally Album).