50 Fast Digital Photo Techniques [With CDROM]

Gregory Georges without a doubt laps the field on "How To" books when it comes to simplifying the complexities and shortening the learning curves for digital editing. As an advanced photographer who still uses 35mm film and a film scanner, I use Photoshop Elements as my primary editor before printing. It has taken me 2 months on my own learning level without this book just to learn the basics Elements has to offer. This book takes you through techniques in an easy to follow manner that will reduce your learning curve significantly and make you a confident editor of your work whether you are just wanting to send a friend an edited image via email,website, or to output your work to a printer for the sale of your work. This book is a MUST HAVE. Adobe should include this book with their Elements software.

"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.

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.

Photoshop is the holy grail of image processing programs, but it can also be fairly difficult to master. This book doesn't necessarily demystify PShop, but it does provide some quick, easy-to-use techniques for making something more out of your digital images than just nice snapshots in a digital album.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.

First of all it is worth mentioning that this book is really focused on being used in conjunction with Adobe's Photoshop Elements image editing program. Yes, you could probably use this book with other editing programs but it will not be as effective. As far as this being a fantastic way to learn Photoshop Elements...It receives an A++. I bought PS Elements and only had very limited knowledge of how to take advantage of the features. After going through each and every one of the 50 techniques I feel very confident. The CD-Rom that accompanies the book has all the images you will need to learn the 50 techniques and the author does a very good job of walking the reader through step by step. If you are diving into digital photography I would point you toward PS Elements for your editor and this book for learning how to get creative.