Our book review of Adobe Photoshop Elements 7: A Visual Introduction to Digital Photography in Paperback by Philip Andrews

Title: Adobe Photoshop Elements 7: A Visual Introduction to Digital Photography

Author: Philip Andrews

ISBN: 0240521579

Publisher: Focal Press

Edition: Paperback

RRP: £22.99

Dimensions: 456 pages

Philip Andrews should need no introduction to regular readers of WDC. A regular contributor to the magazine, Philip is also a worldrenowned Photoshop guru and an Adobe ambassador. This is his guide to everything Elements 7 has to offer, aimed at both new and regular users in need of a complete, one-stop reference guide.

At over 400 pages, it’s an exhaustive – and, for the complete beginner, often exhausting – guide with very few holes or information gaps. The book is divided into colour-coded segments with the first sections dedicated to understanding the mechanics and management of digital capture so that later sections will be easier to follow.

From there Andrews moves through simple, mostly automated, image changes before progressing on to more complicated techniques requiring manual control. There are also sections on how to add words to photos, photo stitching, creating albums and outputting images to the web or print.

Throughout the book Andrews offers his sage advice on how to best use something, and also how to spot when you’ve gone too far and overdone things. His tone is easy to follow and his advice always worth listening to.

Although in the main Andrews manages to make things clear and easy to follow thanks to the judicious use of ‘before and after’ imagery, we’d have to dispute the rear cover’s bold claim that it is ‘jargon-free’. Unfortunately, jargon is an inescapable part of the Photoshop/Elements experience, no matter how hard one might try to avoid it. It’s simply a language that needs to be learned if you’re to use these Adobe tools to their full potential. This book will help you learn it though, and that is perhaps one of its biggest strengths. Overall, this an excellent and comprehensive reference book for the regular user, as well a great introduction to what Elements 7 offers first-time users of the software

 What Digital Camera Rating: 91%