Photo Restoration and Retouching Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo

I've been using Paint Shop Pro since version 9 and consider myself at the lower end of an advanced user. I have seven Paint Shop Pro books proclaiming to teach you how to use the program. With the exception of Ken McMahon's book they all fall miserably short. I was weary of ordering Robert's book thinking it would turn out to be just like the others that sit in the bookshelf collecting dust. Fear not his book isn't a dust collector. I won't go over what's already been stated in the other reviews. This book is everything the publisher, author, and other reviewers claim it is. One recommendation: If you're a beginner to intermediate user of Paint Shop Pro I'd recommend getting Ken McMahon's book "Paint Shop Pro Photo For Photographers" along with this book. McMahon's book covers the program and it's use while Robert's book covers techniques for photo corrections. The combination of these two books will greatly reduce your frustrations and enhance your skills, knowledge & techniques of photo corrections and manipulation using Paint Shop Pro. Thank You Robert for a great reference and teaching publication.

Others have written enthusiastically about this book. I concur! I regularly must touch up photographs for web or print use including conversion to b/w for newspaper ads. I'd used PaintShop Pro since V5 for this task but with Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 and this book, everything I've done has moved forward by a quantum leap. People won't notice the fine differences in your work because of your better photographic presentation but it WILL show, and the advice/tips in this book will make you wish you'd found it years ago! I am SO pleased!!!!!

A common lament among users of Corel's popular Paint Shop Pro series of photo editing programs is the lack of advanced tutorial material. Over time there have been a few professionally done video books and texts offered here and there, and author Robert Correll himself has put together two helpful video books based upon earlier versions of PSP, but in general those efforts concentrate on developing basic to low-level intermediate skills at best. Now Correll and Thomson Course Publishing (since become Cengage Learning) have come forth with an advanced PSP tutorial that goes well beyond the basics of photo repair titled Photo Restoration and Retouching Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo. In his new tutorial Correll (the similarity in names Correll/Corel is pure coincidence) has assembled 73 photo projects, mostly casual photos of his wife and children along with those of assorted kinfolk who were smiling into the family cameras as far back as 1919. The color and black and white photographs presented here have suffered a host of indignities over the years; fading, overwriting and smudges of all kinds, scratches, tears and holes in addition to the usual technical defects caused by bad film, poor lighting or poor scanning techniques. There are, of course, the human flaws as well; a pimple here and there, nose hair, dandruff - it's all here in gory high resolution detail, and each Photo Study's source photo is made available for download upon request to the author. I should add that Correll makes himself readily accessible to his target audience via e-mail, keen on cheering them on in their photo restoration efforts. Basically each Photo Study begins with a brief background about the subject(s) of the photo. Along the way you will meet the author and his wife Anne and their four small children who are introduced in a light-hearted fashion along with Uncle Jim and Grandpa Bud among others. Then the problems in the photo at hand are pointed out, and Correll begins his repair routine in a step-by-step fashion sometimes diverging to try alternative means of solving the issues being confronted. A pre-release version of PSPP X2 was used to do the repairs, but the included screenshots are taken from PSPP XI. I am still using PSP X, and for the most part had no problems following along though the capabilities of some of the tools in my older version differ slightly from those in the more recent PSPP X2. The Levels adjustment tool is one such example. The text and screenshots are of excellent quality and printed in color on high-gloss stock. My only niggle here is that my 73 year old eyes had difficulty discerning the small text shown in many dialogue boxes, and even my magnifying glass sometimes struggled to make out many of the dialogue settings which are not always specified in the explanatory text. In Photo Study One the author throws the reader off the leaning tower and right into the heart of photo restoration and retouching with a very challenging phot

As a relatively experienced user of Photo Graphic programs, I can recommend this book as a tool to gain depth in the use of Paint Shop Pro. I particularly liked the abundant color photos and the complete text that went along with each project. This is not an introduction to PSP, but how to optimize productivity using the program.

this book is exactly what the author says it is. it shows how to "fix" print and digital pictures using paint shop pro. it is not a tutorial for the program. it shows how to do this by using very good color and black and white pictures in a number of studies. the examples are long enough so that you understand the principles but not so long that you lose interest in what you are trying to accomplish.