[vestige]

Book Review
As suggested by Damn Brit

Advanced Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Digital Photographers by Philip Andrews

I agree completely with this quote:
"This book is detailed, comprehensive and inspirational, making it the perfect accessory for those who've recently invested in the fifth installment of the Elements program" - What Digital Camera April 07

I just returned this book back to my local library and it is very comprehensive. It is labeled advanced but it is more of a how to book. There are pages of detailed procedures on how to do just about anything to your images that you want. Each subject is covered in one or more pages with illustrations and before and after photos.

The book is superbly illustrated with hundreds of color photographs.

* Produce professional results quickly from your raw files with a complete workflow solution based around Elements.
* Produce darkroom effects digitally
* Transform your photographs with step-by-step, illustrated color tutorials into results that will amaze you (and your friends, family, colleagues, and customers)
* Increase your productivity with timesaving tips, workarounds, and advice to create an efficient, smooth workflow
* Master professional retouching techniques
* Create awesome panoramas
* Much, much more

Companion website Advanced Photoshop Elements for Digital Photographers including practice images and video tutorials provides even more tools to hone your skills with

* Images for you to manipulate as you follow step-by-step book projects
* Video tutorials and printable lesson plans
* Links for examples, updates, and further learning
* Raw and 16-bits/Channel files to examine and put to the test
* And more!

Contents
The Next Level; Scanner and Camera Techniques; Photo Organization and Management; Pathways to Editing in Elements; Image Changes - Beyond the Basics; Darkroom Techniques on the Desktop; Professional Retouching Techniques; Making Better Panoramas; Extending Your Web Abilities; Producing Effective Graphics; Photo Creations and the Content browser; Finely Crafted Output; Photo Creations; Appendices; Blend modes; Plug-ins; Jargon buster; Keyboard shortcuts; Elements/Photoshop feature equivalents

Paperback, 424 pages, publication date: DEC-2006

The above review is made up of personal observations, usage and Amazon’s description. I did use this book and can highly recommend it! I am buying a personal copy of the new one for Elements 6.0.
Review date 5-24-2008 by vestige

[spyglass]

Another good informative read (as well as being a decent user manual) for Adobe Photoshop CS3 is "Adobe Photoshop CS3 for photographers" by Martin Evening. It even comes with a DVD to get you involved with some hands on exercises. It approaches Photoshop from a technical perspective to build a solid understanding of the software from the ground up. The photo examples and screen shots are very well done. The book is organized very well and starts from the basic mechanics of the program and leads into the tricks and creative opportunities. It is a book that you can read cover to cover, and have as a handy reference guide beside the computer.

[calicojack]

As I sit here at my computer, I have just to the left of my left hand a copy of "The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby. Its labelled for intermediate - adsvanced users. ISBN# 0-321-47673-5. USA list at $39.99 (available cheaper from the usual sources) Books | Kelby Training
This has answered many questions for me and is an easy enjoyable read.
Brian

Just saw this thread Vestige. Thanks for posting the review.
Spring is nearly over and after helping other people with their gardens, I'll need to spend some time working in my own and then I'll get down to writing a review (or two).

In the meantime, here's two books, with a brief intro, that I have found extremely useful;

K10D Magic Lantern Guide, really good step by step guide and you get a free, fold up, credit card sized cheat sheet with the newer version.

The other book is Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Maximum Performance (Mark Galer). It comes in three sections and is project based; Part 1, Optimize, has 8 projects. Part 2, Enhance, has 9 projects and Part 3, Montage, has 8 projects. The books come with a DVD that contains all the projects, including photos, so that you basically duplicate what the writer has already done. I haven't used the DVD yet but what I did do was, find a picture of mine I wanted to work on, find a project in the book that matched what I wanted to do and followed the steps. It worked out pretty well.

Gary

Just had a thought, I think it would be a good idea if one of the Mods could move this thread to the Post Processing section of the Forum.
Gary

[Canada_Rockies]

I just purchased "Photoshop Elements 6 for dummies" and find it points out the starting points at least for the things I have never used, such as layers. It seems readable, and is fairly well organized.

[Kerrowdown]

Here's something to share with you all and get your thoughts and comments.

Being new to CS3, I did the usual thing and bought a variety of books on the subject. As always happens, the best one is the last one purchased (if I had bought this one first, would have not needed the all the others).

The book to which I refer is Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers by Martin Evening. It’s just fantastic IMHO and full of good stuff.

This little gem just blew me away, (page 261 for those who have it) you know how we all check our histograms, well I quote

“The histogram that appears on a compact camera or digital SLR screen is unreliable for anything other than JPEG capture. This is because the histogram you see there is actually based on the camera processed JPEG and is not representative of the true raw capture. The only way to check the histogram for raw capture is to open the image via a raw processing program such as camera raw”

Is this the case for our beloved Pentax DSLR's K10D, K20D etc, or have I missed something?