Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at
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Photoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your digital images. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove red-eye, or distort shapes. With easy, step-by-step instructions, Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual gets you ready to make the most out of all the features available.
Photoshop Elements 8 Tips and Tricks
1. Highlight an object with color. It’s super easy to turn a color photo to a black and white image with only one colored object in it. In the photo on the left below, the waterlily looks fine but the dying leaves are distracting, so it might look better with only the flower in color. It’ll take you only a few seconds to get that effect. Just pick one of the Black & White settings for the Smart Brush and then drag over the lily. Elements does a pretty good job of finding the edges of the flower and makes it black and white, leaving the rest of the image in color. But if you turn on the Inverse checkbox before you drag, the lily stays colored and the rest of your image becomes black and white, saving you a lot of work.
2. Get rid of empty space. The new Recompose tool is great for fixing photos where squabbling siblings or cranky coworkers refused to stand close together. It’s also handy if you ever have to do how-to illustrations—you can easily get rid of extra space in a screenshot of a dialog box, for instance. You can also use Recompose to squish out unwanted elements in the middle of your photos, like in this seascape. In the pictures below, it brought the boats closer together and got rid of some of the condo sprawl in the background. Doing this left a little debris behind—a couple of stick-like lines from the largest condo—but one quick drag with the Healing brush, and there’s a lot more undeveloped beach left in the world.
3. One photo, two ways. The new Exposure Merge feature is great for blending together multiple (bracketed) exposures of the same scene, but if you only managed to get one good shot, you can process it twice in Elements’ Raw Converter—once for good shadowy areas, once for good highlights—and then merge the two into one image with good exposure throughout. You don’t even have to have a Raw format photo—it works with JPEG images, too. This is a JPEG photo where the interior was so underexposed that the lawn outside disappeared into a white glare when the interior was properly adjusted. So I made two versions, one for the indoor areas and one for the outside, then did the simplest exposure merge in Elements: an automatic merge. If I’d wanted to get fancy I could have had more control over the end result, but even the automatic merge is a big improvement over the first photo.
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- ISBN13: 9780596803476
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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 Detailed, yet user-friendly treatment of a feature-dense product |
| Review Date: November 28, 2009 |
| Reviewer: 35-year Technology Consumer, Maryland, USA |
Like earlier versions of Photoshop Elements (PSE), Photoshop Elements 8 is both powerful and complex. While it has some automated functions, users hoping to harness its full power are going to need some help. Barbara Brundage offers this help in a detailed guide that explores the higher functions of PSE, while respecting the challenges many readers may have in grasping complex technology.
Brundage offers both conceptual overviews and tutorials of PSE 8's interface and functions. She effectively breaks down the the concepts of file management, basic editing, image manipulation and sharing of the results of these digital editing techniques. Particularly useful are the two appendices, which provide a summary of ALL of the (many many!)menu items in the two main components of PSE (its editor and the organizer).
Minor deficiencies are present in this book. While it certainly provides sound advice on avoiding Adobe's deliberate efforts to guide consumers to a purchase of the "Plus" version of the online extension to PSE 8, it doesn't mention the wide scope of Adobe's data collection of user activities associated with this (in both the free and "Plus online adjuncts). Advice to consumers to read the EULA if they have concerns about how Adobe will collect their data would have been a welcome addition. Also, the book correctly states that PSE 8 can be installed with earlier versions of PSE. While this is true (and you won't be forced to uninstall any earlier version), it doesn't mention that PSE 8 will force you to choose which single version of PSE you'll want to keep using. Finally, the book says that "the help files that ship with Elements are sometimes incomplete". More correctly, in PSE they are absent. The Help menu in PSE 8 launches a browser and takes you online, where all the help content is located. You can download a 27 MB .pdf help file (which users without persistent connectivity should consider).
These are small shortcomings that do not detract seriously from the overall worth of this book, which is valuable tool with great utility for serious amateur (or frugal professional) photographers or digital artists expanding their craft.
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Get This Book!!
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| Review Date: December 12, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Eric, Iraq |
| I recently ordered Elements 8 and I have used many photo editing programs but knew if I wanted to get the full use of the software I would need a guide beyond the help menus. I ordered this book and Elements 8 for Dummies thinking that this book would be more tech talk-ish. I was wrong this book is the one I use more! It is very easy to follow and has much better in-depth info! I was also amazed that it got to N. Iraq in 7 days!..thanx Amazon! |
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Tagged with: asin • elements • manual • missing • photoshop • ReviewAZON • windows
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