Product Description

You will learn how to create professional quality digital images with Photoshop Elements 4.0 without the need to upgrade to Photoshop with this unique guide from best-selling author Mark Galer. This complete package of book and DVD walks you through Elements' powerful and less well-known post-production editing techniques showing you how to get maximum results from this low-price program.

A series of creative projects, packed with tips and tricks and illustrated with large, full-color screengrabs, guide you through a wide range of advanced techniques for professional quality editing.

Including coverage of new Elements 4.0 features, the straighten tool and the auto extraction tool, all the main features of Elements are covered - camera RAW, 16 bit editing, Healing Brush, Shadows/ Highlights, Reduce Noise and much more.

The projects are supported by a DVD containing 4 hours of QuickTime movie tutorials, over 200 high-resolution images as well as loadable presets. Completed multi-layered project files are also available on the DVD so that you can compare and analyse these projects against your own.

All the content is suitable for Mac users. Visit the book's webpage on www.focalpress.com for information on how to adapt keyboard modifier keys when using the keyboard shortcuts.

Other Photoshop Elements 4.0 titles published by Focal include Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0: a visual introduction to the program for those starting out in digital imaging; Advanced Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Digital Photographers: an advanced book aimed at photographers; Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 A-Z: an alphabetical listing of the main features of Elements, with shortcut keys and techniques.

* Gain the same professional results with Elements 4.0 as if using full-version Photoshop with fantastic lesser-known techniques and workarounds
* Create superior advanced effects by following jargon-free, step-by-step tutorials with full color screengrabs
* DVD packed with movie tutorials, royalty free high-resolution images, multi-layered project files and loadable presets will boost your learning

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #527005 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"A great training aid for the Elements user." - Which Digital Camera

About the Author
Mark Galer is a Senior Lecturer in photography at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. He is also co-writer and teacher on their new online photography courses. He has lectured in photography in the UK and Australia and has worked commercially as a freelance photographer on corporate and editorial assignments. He has written numerous top-selling photography books, including Photography Foundations for Art & Design, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Maximum Performance and Digital Photography in Available Light. He is an Official Adobe Ambassador for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

Customer Reviews

A great book to learn with
Mark Galer's new Maximum Performance book looks at both the complex and basic aspects of Photoshop Elements with equal measure. Great for beginners and experienced alike, the title presents all the information you want to know in a very readable format. Stuffed with expert performance tips, easy to follow step-by steps and a very useful free DVD of demos and royalty free images to practise with.

The book contains inspirational portrait, landscape and travel shots by the author and some fantastic Photoshop edits to make your images stand out form the crowd.

Much recommended from me

Tim Daly

Stunning images without breaking the bank!
In his aptly titled book, Mark Galer pushes Elements' capabilities to new levels. Using crafty work-arounds to reproduce effects and techniques normally associated with Photoshop, he proves that this often belittled program can produce truly remarkable results.

The content is split into three distinct sections: the first concentrates on corrections to the overall image such as straightening and cropping, sharpening and preparing for print. Part two brings a little more creativity into play and features techniques for adding depth of field, changing the lighting tone of a portrait to add mood and airbrushing for a flawless face. The final chapter focuses on image montage. This section has projects for creating professional looking studio scenes from crudely shot subjects; panoramas and merging photos to create high dynamic range images.

The work-throughs are well laid out with clearly presented visuals. The stages are explained in detail, so there is a good sense of why a particular setting or operation is being performed. The text also contains useful tips on the tools being used as well as helpful shortcuts to speed up workflow. My only quibble is the omission of Mac versions of the modifiers for the keyboard shortcuts.

The accompanying DVD contains Quicktime movies of all the techniques in action (albeit slightly abridged versions). The supporting image files are available in four different formats (JPEG, TIFF, PSD and RAW) so the reader can choose to follow the techniques from start to finish or skip the time consuming stages and move on. There are custom settings used for certain stages and a collection of royalty free images to try with the various projects.

I would especially recommend this book to anyone who still believes Elements to be just a quick-fix editor. It's also well worth considering even if you use another program such as Photoshop.

Maximum performance you can afford!
Mark demonstrates very clearly and comprehensively that professional editing can be achieved with this more affordable software package.

All the essential processes are simply explained and the sections deal with the sequences of image processing in a logical manner.

In Mark's usual style, he explains every stage in detail using superb visuals. The accompanying DVD contains super, royalty free, images to work through the projects with.

I would strongly recommend this book to beginners and experienced image editors alike. I learn something new every time I open one of Mark's books.

Well done again Mark.