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Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual
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Barbara Brundage
List Price: $39.99
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Product Details
- Author: Barbara Brundage
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- Binding: Paperback
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- Dewey Decimal Number: 006.686
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- EAN: 9780596514440
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- Format: Illustrated
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- ISBN: 0596514441
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- Label: Pogue Press
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- Manufacturer: Pogue Press
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- Number of Items: 1
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- Number of Pages: 586
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- Product Group: Book
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- Publication Date: 2007-10-20
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- Publisher: Pogue Press
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- Studio: Pogue Press
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- Title: Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual
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Product Description: Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual provides the best possible guidance to scrapbookers, photographers at every level, budding graphic artists--anyone who wants to get the most out of the latest Elements upgrade.
Author Barbara Brundages Top 10 Elements Tips
1. Always back up your photos as soon as you get them out of your camera. You can use the Organizer's backup or disc-burning feature (File->Backup Catalog to CD, DVD or Hard Drive) for this, or you can use your computer's built-in disc-burning utility. For really important photos (wedding and baby pix, for example), it's not a bad idea to burn a disc and keep that someplace else, like your safe deposit box or with a friend or relative. Then, no matter what happens, you won't have to worry about losing your photos.
2. Never, ever work on your original photo. If you use the Organizer, good news: Elements already has your back. It creates version sets, which allow you to save different states of your image as you edit. You can create as many different versions of a photo as you like and go back to any one of them at any time. And if youre working with RAW files you can't alter your original (only the conversion settings). If you don't use the Organizer, make a copy of the picture (File->Duplicate) and work on that. This way you can always start over again if you get a better idea later on.
3. Sharing photos with the Organizer. There are all kinds of fun, creative ways to share your photos in Elements 6, and the Organizer makes it super easy to explore them all. Try a slideshow with music and commentary, or upload your photos to EasyShare or one of the other online services to create mugs, bags, and other cool gift items with your photos on them.
4. Don't scorn the auto buttons. If you've never tried these one-click fixes--Auto Levels or Auto Color, for example--give em a try. Each version of Elements gets a little smarter and you may find that you like the results you get from one of these easy-to-use fixes.
5. Panoramas for everyone. You don't need to feel wistful anymore about the fact that your point and shoot camera's lens doesn't have a true wide-angle setting. Take a series of photos with, ideally, about a 30% overlap and Elements' Photomerge will automatically stitch them together into a panorama wider than you could have captured with the widest lens. (If you've tried Photomerge in previous editions of Elements, the Photomerge in Elements 6 is a whole new thing--totally automated and it does terrific blending to eliminate visible seams between images.)
6. Batch processing with RAW. If you shoot RAW format photos, now you can apply the same settings to multiple pictures at once. Just open all the RAW files you want to work on, and then click to select each of their thumbnail-sized photos. Elements will then apply any edits you've made to the current photo to all the pictures you've just selected.
7. Crop creatively. Unless you plan to print on standard photo paper, don't feel compelled to crop your photos to standard photo paper sizes and shapes. Use cropping to emphasize the best parts of your photo if you plan to use the image for the Web or to print at home.
8. Take credit, quickly. You can put copyright info on your photos by using the Watermark feature in the Process Multiple Files dialog box (File->Process Multiple Files), or you can create a custom brush: just type what you want (the copyright symbol is Alt+0169 in Windows, Option+G on a Mac), then select your type and go to Edit->Define Brush. Save your brush and from now on you've got a one-click copyright notice.
9. Black and white are beautiful. The Convert to Black and White feature in Elements does a great job, especially if you use the sliders to tweak your adjustments, but you can create even more dramatic black and white photos by using the Dodge and Burn tools to selectively enhance contrast after converting.
10. The very best way to learn Elements is to dive right in. Open a photo and try all sorts of different things. Nobody, even great Photoshop gurus, knows exactly what will happen to any given photo when you combine different filters and effects. Experiment, and you'll quickly see why Elements is so addicting. You can do all sorts of amazing things you never knew you could!
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Customer Reviews
Easily Informative
This is a great book for anyone new to PSE. It was very easy to read and understand. It was nothing like all other boring manuals out there. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Photoshop from scratch!
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Great book
This book is wonderful and fills in all the missing pieces. I know you can get all the information on the web - but it's great to have it all in one place and easy reference when working on a photo. I was new to photoshop and this book helped tremendously.
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Photoshop Elements 6
If you want to get right to the heart of the matter, this is the book to buy. You don't have to start with page one either. You can go to any section and pick up the right way to perform the many tasks available in Photoshop Elements 6. I highly recommend it.
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Good introduction to how and why to use Photoshop Elements
This book gives a balanced look at all the features of Photoshop Elements, without going into a lot of depth on any one topic. It is aimed at beginners. It has a reasonable amount of detail on the most common activities of enhancing photos and retouching photos, but these make up only a small part of the book. It tells you about many less obvious problems you may not have realized you had, such as color cast and perspective distortion.
This book is specifically for Windows, and there is a Macintosh version available: Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual I worked through the present book with the Macintosh program, and there's very little difference. Windows has an Organizer to manage your photos while the Macintosh program ships with Adobe Bridge, just like the full Photoshop CS3, but except for that you won't have any trouble using the same book on either platform.
The book is organized by task rather than by feature or tool. (An exception is a whole chapter on Layers.) The book is extensively cross-referenced; maybe TOO extensively. In the first half of the book I sometimes lost my place in the blizzard of cross-references and forgot what we were reading about. The chapter on selecting, although clear, was not well-integrated with the rest of the book. After reading it you know everything about selections except what they are good for.
There's a very thorough index, as we expect from the Missing Manual series. There were some puzzling gaps in the index. I suspected at times that it is an index of keywords; so if the book discusses a subject but doesn't call it by name then it might not show up in the index. For example, Perspective distortion is indexed, but only on p. 75 where the term is introduced and not p. 299 where the problem and its fix are discussed in detail. EXIF is not indexed even though it is discussed several places in the book.
The book goes beyond manipulating photos and tells you a good bit about what to do with your photos after your are happy with them. It goes into how to get high-quality printing, personalized merchandise, and web photo-sharing (although mysteriously Flickr is never mentioned).
Some Very Good Features in this book: (1) Calibrating your monitor: its importance and the news that colorimeter prices have come down sharply. (2) Using layers to fix major exposure problems (very short section but very useful; I get much better results with this than with Brightness and Contrast adjustments). (3) Throughout the author gives you her take on the various tools, even going so far as to tell you never to use tool X because tool Y always does a better job.
Bottom line: I learned a lot from this book, even though I've been using Elements for years. It's a good book!
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Truly The Missing Manual For PSE 6!
This book is another excellent publication for the Missing Manual series. It is more comprehensive than The Photoshop Elements 6 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter), but doesn't feature step-by-step illustrations like that one. However, the comprehensive index, menu reference guide, and plenty of full color screenshots will answer any question about PSE in minutes. This volume is for PC only but there is also a volume for the Mac Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual
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