Carla Rose has been involved with photography since she was a young girl and has continued with her interest, expanding into the Macintosh area, and writing more than 24 computer books. Jennifer Fulton has written over 100 computer books for both the education and retail market. Together they have worked to produce a book that will get you up and going with Photoshop Elements 2 in a relatively short time.
Now the idea is not that you sit down and start to read the book, one chapter an hour straight for twenty-four hours. The idea is to provide the reader with enough information that they can then take an hour or two to work with what they've learned from reading the chapter, building their knowledge and confidence levels as they continue on.
Chapter One starts with the basic introduction to PSE 2 for the reader, explaining the Help resources including Tool Tips, Hints Palette, How-To's and the Help Button. Chapter Two guides the reader through the Elements Desktop, through Tools, Shortcuts, Options, Menus and preferences. Each chapter that follows continues to provide the reader with logical basic information for them to follow as they work their way through the program. Starting and Saving, Importing Source Images, Making Selections and Using Layers, Adding Type, Printing Picture and Posting to the Web cover the remaining 8 hours. The reader then works into Simple Corrections (Levels, Contrast, Color, Straightening, Skewing, Cropping/Resizing, Repair Recipes and Tutorials); Photo Rescue (Black-and-White pictures, Color Repairs, Removing/Replacing Objects, Improvement Filters) and the remaining 7 hours cover Creativity (Artistic Filters, Art from Scratch, Composite Images, Going Wild, Creating Background/Textures from Scratch, to name a few)
Each chapter/hour includes a summary, Q & A, a Workshop (Questions and the Answers) and Activities for the reader to put what they've learned to the test. Ms. Rose has even set up that examples of images used in the book can be downloaded from Sams Publishing's main site to work with as part of the Activities section in two of the chapters. While the book is in black and white, the authors have included a full Color Gallery that shows the images in the book as they would appear, including the page number and "hourÓ that the reader would be in. The book is logical, well thought out and is not overwhelming even for the brand new user or beneath a user that is familiar with Photoshop Elements.
MacMice Rating: 4 out of 5