Our book review of Advanced Photoshop Elements 7 for Digital Photographers in Paperback by Philip Andrews
Title: Advanced Photoshop Elements 7 for Digital Photographers
Author: Philip Andrews
ISBN: 0240521587
Publisher: Focal Press
Edition: Paperback
RRP: £22.99
Dimensions: 456 pages, 24.1 x 18.8 x 3.3 cm
In his second book to grace this round-up Philip Andrews takes the lessons learned from the excellent, albeit mostly introductory, information in A Visual Introduction on to a higher level to demonstrate just how powerful Elements 7 can be in the right hands.
In keeping with the introductory book, early chapters in Advanced Photoshop are dedicated to understanding professionally slanted tools that can be used in advance of reaching Elements 7 in the digital post-production workflow, such as advanced camera settings, and Raw conversion techniques.
From here, the book really gets into the meat of things with detailed chapters covering advanced selection tools and techniques, digital darkroom editing and professional retouching. From advanced dodging and burning to adding realistic depth-of-field via toning down skin highlights and shadows, there isnt much that goes uncovered. Its fair to say that if youre not an expert after reading these sections you probably never will be.
The final chapters of the book are dedicated to advanced digital panorama techniques, web optimisation, photo collages, and printer output before a short advertorial for Lightroom 2 concludes things a sort of The extra bits that Elements does section, if you will. Useful as the information in the final chapters may be, after the thrills of the middle section, it does feel like something of a damp squib. Overall, given the comprehensive and hugely practical nature of what goes before, this is a serious body of work for anyone looking to take their Elements skills to the next level and seamlessly integrate the software to their digital workflow.
What Digital Camera Rating: 90%