Product Description

Having trouble getting an artistic idea out of your head and onto the screen? Want to produce amazing creations in Elements without reading pages and pages of instructions? How to Cheat in Elements is the can't-miss book with the can-do attitude. Under the expert guidance of Elements masters David Asch and Steve Caplin, you'll get the hands-on experience needed to quickly craft inspired images that captivate the imagination.

Fool your friends by creating montages and manipulations that look like the genuine article. Save time with invaluable shortcuts and tips to cut through unnecessary steps, helping you to work faster and smarter. Work through each section to build up your skills or dip into a project to learn a new technique:
* turn day into night
* add snow, shadows and water to your scenes
* make fire and smoke
* give your car a re-spray
?if you can imagine it, we can show you how to do it in Photoshop Elements!

Covering the latest tools and features in Elements 7, this book contains cutting-edge projects, tips and techniques as well as activities relevant to previous Elements versions. QuickTime movie tutorials and images for all projects in the book are included on the accompanying CD-ROM, with additional support and an active reader forum on the website for the book: www.howtocheatinphotoshopelements.com.

* Fun and creative, with more than 80 full colour, step-by-step projects, supported by QuickTime movie tutorials and image files
* In-depth coverage of photomontage and image manipulation you won't find in the wealth of Elements books focused on photography post-capture editing
* Part of the successful Focal Press ?How to Cheat in? series, featuring Steve Caplin's best-selling How to Cheat in Photoshop titles

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73399 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review

Praise for the previous edition:

"How to Cheat in Photoshop Elements 6 is an excellent how-to book that will get you up and running in no time flat." -- Rangefinder Magazine

"During your school days, did you ever sneak a peak at the teacher's edition of your textbook? It was just like yours, only it had all the answers filled in! Imagine if you took your teacher's book and took out all the boring background stuff, leaving just the questions and answers. That's exactly what How to Cheat in Elements is like: no boring background, just all the answers!" -- Retouchpro.com

About the Author
He is a beta tester for Photoshop Elements. He contributes to Mac Format magazine, and is co-author of Digital Photo Doctor and contributing author to Drop Dead Photography Techniques.

Customer Reviews

Cheating on Photoshop
This is a very useful book showing many tricks that fall outside of normal Elements instruction and tuition. Great for creating special effects and those one-off dramatic images. Many of the methods shown here can also be used in the full versions of Photoshop and are not confined to Elements.

How to avoid buying Photoshop!
So what do David Asch and Steve Caplin mean by cheating? Before I read the book I thought they meant that using Elements rather than Photoshop for post processing was cheating, but in their introduction they say that what's on offer is shortcuts to creating photomontages. The cheat is in the shortcut and in the notion that a montage is a photo of something that does not really exist.
That admission made my heart sink a little, because it's very easy to make a bad photomontage, even without taking shortcuts. By that I mean that when you a "photo" of a giant kitten wandering down Times' Square, you never quite feel convinced about it. Beyond the obvious, there is something wrong that is usually hard to spell out, and at its worst it can just look like what it is, two photos on top of each other.
To be worth reading, this book would have to get past that somehow. Did it? For the most part, yes.
In broad terms, the structure of the book is:
Explain how to make complex selections in Elements 7
Explain how to use layers
Explain to how hide bits of layers non-destructively
Given the previous techniques, show how to make the resultant montages look convincing
Making selections in any package (Elements/Photoshop/GIMP etc) is one of those things where you can pick up the basic techniques in a few hours, but spend years trying to practically master how to do it. This book helps with the former, but only experience enables the latter. That said, the main techniques are brought together in one place, and there are some nice examples. These do look a little artificial, but that's because they need the techniques described later in the book to appear more realistic.
The section on managing layers is perhaps the weakest part of the book simply because it is so short. People have written entire books on this topic, and the examples the authors choose are a little simplistic. There is some good information on layer styles though.
On a more positive note, I quite enjoyed the section on masking non-adjustment layers. Adobe has handicapped Elements by only allowing masks on adjustment layers, and the authors have found a couple of neat ways around this. If you consider the price gap between Elements and Photoshop, this justifies the price of the book all by itself. It is at this point in the book that the authors move from bringing together what most Elements users probably already know to helping readers to make their montages look more than simply a mash-up.
Techniques include how to convincingly change the colour and lighting of objects in an image. The authors also talk about less obvious things that often make the final result hang together very well.
Along the way to montage nirvana, several other nuggets are strewn. We learn, for example, about sharpening techniques, making rainbows and adding motion blue. Faking fire and smoke also get a mention. I had mixed feelings about this. It did seem a little off topic, but it doesn't hurt to have them there.
So were the montages convincing? I think they were for the most part. The authors were at a disadvantage from the off, because the reader knows that the finished images were "faked". That meant that images are more likely to be closely examined for any inconsistencies. There were however several images where the before and after shots made me think, wow, they've nailed it.
This book is definitely worth a look if you're an Elements user wanting to do more. It will put off the financial pain of buying Photoshop for a while at least.

The excitment of montage.
This is just the sort of book you need to stimulate your imagination. The large range of ideas and techniques on offer can't help to excite anyone who enjoys a creative challenge. The style of writing is very accessible and supportive with a clear and logical step-by-step approach. It is not meant to cover all the ins and outs of Elements, others do this already, but is an important supplement to such basic instruction manuals. This is for those who want to go beyond the obvious.