Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 in a Snap …
This Sams Teach Yourself book is jam-packed with information to help you learn how to effectively use Elements 3. There are 763 pages plus a short Foreword. The print is large enough to be quite readable and there are many pictures, but there is still much information to be digested.
The authors, Jennifer Fulton and Scott Fulton are quite experienced. Jennifer is a trainer and consultant, in addition to being an author and has used just about every graphics editor ever. Scott is an editor, programmer and artist.
There are four Parts with 24 chapters in the book, each with several subchapters. The book uses a somewhat unusual method of indexing. There are the common page numbers, but each subchapter (call them a subject) is numbered separately and may take one or many pages to complete its explanation. This method of identifying subjects makes it easy to refer in one subject to another subject, without having to refer to page numbers.
In addition to the text itself, there are many accompanying photos, most of which show where to access a menu, tool or option referred to in the text. This is very helpful, since Elements 3 has many ways to choose these things. When a new user of the program tries to find something mentioned in the text, the screen shot pointing to that item is really quite helpful. All the screen shots are black and white, except a center section of color photos. In most cases, the black and white is adequate, but the color photos show vividly the effect of a particular operation.
One other feature of this book is helpful, the Tips and Notes (there are also Key Terms, but I didn’t find this especially useful). The Tips and Notes are in the left and right margins, close to a related subject in the text. A Tip gives you one or more very practical way to use or perform the text operation. While I found Tips to be helpful, most readers won’t have time to read both the text and the Tips. They are there for your use, though. Notes contain additional information about a task or operation.
The Parts are
| | · Organizing Items in the Catalog
· Working with Images
· Editing Images and Sharing
· Creating and Having Fun
|
The numbered Subjects total 191! Several examples are: Review Images, Print an Image, Select a Color to Work With, About Color Management, and so on. Each Subject is covered in some detail, usually with a general paragraph describing what the Subject is about. Proceeding from the general to the particular, instructions are given for how to do all operations within that Subject, what various options do and mean, screen shots showing the steps to accomplish the operation and Tips and Notes amplifying the text information.
Part 1 starts out with a Subject called Start Here. Beginning sections of books don’t generally hold much interest for me, because they are too general and tell you a lot of what you already know. This Subject chapter is different. It describes why digital and film photography are different, formats for digital photos, about resolution and why you should care, different color schemes, why printed photos look different from what you see on your monitor, and then proceeds to describe the Organizer and the Editor parts of Elements.
Just a word about resolution, one of the most misunderstood subjects in digital photography. There are three applicable resolutions: photo (the picture you took), monitor and print. Each can be different and can be controlled. Knowing what the differences are and how to control them is one of the important subjects in this book. If you only learned this, the book price would be amply repaid!
The Organizer is used to collect, organize and display photos. The book shows and tells you what all the Organizer tools are and how to use them. It’s done in an informative way, with screen shots and call-outs so you can find each of the tools and understand all the options available to you.
I warn you in advance that PE3 has a lot of tools! You cannot progress through the book a page at a time, in my opinion. To do so would take more time than you probably have and you would have a difficult time remembering all you had read. The section references make it possible to look at the reference inside the front cover to find the subject you want to learn about. Within that section you can refer to other sections as necessary to understand how to do what you didn’t know. It’s a lot more efficient than going through page by page, for me, anyway.
The Editor is used to create and manipulate graphics. Here, too, there are many tools available to you and many functions you can perform. The book organizes the types of functions you can perform, so that it’s easy to find out how to do a particular thing. In addition to working on your digital photos, you can also create graphics, to use for various purposes, web, print, greetings and so on. Here, again, the book leads you through these processes very well.
The Editor Chapter spends a lot of space on the various file formats that may be used for photos, how to change formats and what the significance of the save options are for each. This takes a lot of space to do thoroughly (some 50 pages!), which the book does admirably.
Another troublesome subject dealt with elegantly is printing. How many of us have printed an image only to find that it looks really bad or is the wrong size or takes forever to print? This book tells you how to use PE3 to solve all these problems, and more.
The Editing Images Chapter tells you how to make corrections to a photo, how to retouch it if needed, repair (scratches, tears, etc.) and, most importantly, how to improve a photo. The book even tells you how to fix a photo that is out of focus.
The Sharing, Creating and Having Fun Part deals with sending your photos to someone else, printing through an online service, changing the photo to improve its impact, and making modifications other than the photo itself. The modifications might be adding visual effects (neon glow, ocean ripple, chrome, stained glass and many others), making a photo look old or make it look like it was drawn (even by Andy Warhol, if you want!). Of course, you can add text of various types, too. How to do all this is clearly described in the final Part of the book.
This final Part also describes how to make scrapbook pages using PE3. Scrapbooking, in case you don’t know, is a multimillion dollar business today. Those who want to create special presentations for their photos can do so with special supplies available at many shops. But you can do it without those supplies if you use PE3 and your computer. The book tells you how to do it!
The final pages of the book are devoted to an index and a glossary of terms. The index is a sample of what this essential tool should be like. It is a page-number index; the section index is inside the front cover. These two indexes let you find whatever you want one way or the other. I found the page-number index to be remarkably complete and, for the items I checked, accurate.
The glossary of terms will be helpful for those not familiar with the terms of art, like alpha channel, saturation and error diffusion.
This is a remarkable book, extensive, complete and yet clear and understandable.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 in a Snap, one of the SAMS Teach Yourself series
Samspublishing.com About $30 ($21 if you become a Sams member for free)
