The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) Details
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Reviews
I learned a lot from this book, but I found it to be lacking in many areas. The primary approach that this book takes is to teach by example. The examples are laid out very well, and are easy to duplicate. However, many examples that manipulate layers are presented without much explanation about what you are actually doing. This leaves you unable to extrapolate the techniques to new situations that are similar but slightly different.Kelby also likes to use shortcuts rather than the menus. That would be fine if he would also tell you the menu selection. For instance, he tells you to hit CTRL-J to duplicate the background layer. What he doesn't tell you is that you can do the same thing using the 'Layers' menu. He also doesn't explain clearly why you want this duplicate layer, and how it relates to the layer beneith and above it. I found out by accident that CTRL-J will duplicate any layer and put the copy just above it.Layers are a very complex subject, and some of the examples are very advanced. For instance, there are examples that link a layer to the one immediately below (by pressing CTRL-G), but not enough information about why you would want to do that or what effect that it has.He also talks about foreground and background colors, and tells you to hit D to set the foreground color to Black, but nowhere does he explain what the background and the foreground colors are for. Another place, he says to hit X to set the foreground color to white. I finally figured out that what X really does is exchange the foreground and background colors. I still don't understand why sometimes he has you paint with white to expose something and other times it is with black. Apparently, white allows an image from a layer below to pass while black blocks it, but Kelby doesn't explain that.I think that if you already had a firm understanding of layers, this book would be very useful. However, if you are trying to learn the basics about layers, this book is not adequate.