Photoshop Elements 3 for Windows One-On-One [With CDROM]

Deke McClelland and Galen Fott's Photoshop Elements 3 For Windows One-on-One bundles a 2-hour 'total training' video hosted by author McClelland with a fine reality-based program which offers the next best thing to a personal trainer. Learn how to organize and categorize photos, how to make corrections and edt, and how to solve common color problems using Quick Fix. Want more? Use Photoshop Elements 3 For Windows One-on-One as a classroom text, too: each lesson ends with a test quiz.

Here is a book that can really help you use Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0. The author uses his experience as Photoshop teacher to offer a comprehensive learning tool in the form of a book and a CD. The book contains all color pictures, illustrations, and screen shots with step by step instructions with which one can easily follow along. The CD not only contains the pictures from the book but instructional quick time movies for each chapter which really add to the learning experience. Sprinkled throughout the book are "Pearls of Wisdom" paragraphs or pages with important facts and tips about the program. And for those who can't be bothered with menus, each chapter lists the lots of speed keys. To insure one has completely grasped a topic, there is a multiple choice quiz after each chapter. You will learn something by reading this book!

I'd give this book 5 stars even if it didn't have the fantastic video lessons on the included CD. I knew nothing about digital photography or image editing before buying this book, and now my pictures look great. Thanks, Deke! I strongly recommend this book.

McClelland presents a set of 12 tutorials in the form of this book. It may appeal to you if you are the type who gets fidgety and impatient by just reading a book. Most of us can learn a subject better by doing some problems or tasks in it. Some can only learn in this fashion. Hence the book and its enclosed CD could be handy. Perhaps aided by the CD containing not just the usual data files used in the tutorials, but also a 2 hour video of the author. Most other technical books with CDs don't go to this extent of providing a video. The tutorials themselves delve rather deeply into many aspects of Elements. Like the way it handles both raster and vector objects, where the latter is often text. So you get true proportional scaling of text. Elements, as you might know, is a stripped down version of Photoshop, in terms of its image editing abilities. Its forte is cataloging and publishing that catalog on the web. But in going through this book, it seems mostly about the image editing. The most difficult lessons seem to be here. Which may not be a bad thing. Even if your primay goal is to put up photos on your website, being able to enhance them is a good skill to master.

I've never even heard of Photoshop Elements before this book. I downloaded the trial version, and gave it a whirl. Like many others, I have oodles of unused pictures that have been sitting on my computer for quite some time. As I was going through the book, I managed to learn how to do so many things with those pictures that I now print them out for display. I can't believe it: me, literally a beginner, doing things that I would never imagine, thanks to this book. Although the book was quite wordy, it has plenty of illustrations and screenshots to keep me on track. A quick recap of what I think of Photoshop Elements 3 for Windows One-on-One Pros: Easy to follow Shows many tricks that I would have never imagined Plenty of illustrations, screenshots, and before/after photos Training video of CD Shows how to use the Organizer, a great plus Cons: Alot of reading Training video uses Quicktime, (but I'm just being picky) Overall: I definitely would recommend this book