Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

A truly very informative book....should be in the box. One draw back to this book is some of the graphics that are almost black and could not be viewed even with a magnifying glass. A part from that this is a well written book that is written in detail but very easy to understand. Would recommend this book. I did not give it a five star rating because of its dark graphics.

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!

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.

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.

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!