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What was once a consumer-grade, low-level program for beginning image editors and a junior cousin to the powerful Adobe Photoshop program has evolved and matured to stand on its own merits now in version 4.0. You won’t find much comparison between Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Photoshop in this book, nor will you see any suggestions that you should consider using Photoshop for one thing or another. We don’t make suggestions simply because Photoshop Elements is a powerful tool that satisfies many needs of amateurs and professionals alike. Who should buy Elements (and ultimately this book)? The range of people who can benefit from using Elements is wide and includes a vast audience. From beginning image editors to intermediate users to more advanced amateurs and professionals, Elements has something for everyone. We’ll even stick our necks out a little and suggest that many Photoshop users can benefit greatly by adding Elements to their software tool cabinet. Why? Because Elements offers you some wonderful creation tools that Photoshop hasn’t yet dreamed of supporting. For example, you can create postcards, greeting cards, calendars, and photo albums with just a few mouse clicks. You can place orders with online service centers that professionally print your photo creations. All these opportunities are available in Elements, and we cover these and many more creation ideas in Chapters 15 and 16. We have to make one exception here and say that Elements is not for everyone. The down side to the program is that version 4 is supported only on Windows. Adobe is no longer releasing a Macintosh version, so the poor Mac users can’t explore all the power available in this new release. Our suggestion to the Mac users: buy a second computer. None of the Mac programs gives you the power that you find in Elements when it comes to image editing and packaging creations. To set your frame of mind to thinking in Photoshop Elements terms, don’t think of Elements as a scaled-down version of Adobe Photoshop. Those days are past. If you’re a digital photographer and you shoot your pictures in JPEG and/or camera RAW, Elements has the tools for you to open, edit, and massage your pictures into professional images. If you worry about color-profile embedding, forget it; Elements can handle the task, as we explain in Chapter 4 (where we talk about Camera Raw format) and Chapter 14 (where we talk about color profiling and printing). For the professional, Photoshop Elements has just about everything you need to create final images for color printing and commercial printing. For the beginning and intermediate users, you’ll find some of Photoshop Elements’ quick fix operations a breeze to use to help you enhance your images, as we explain in Chapters 9 and 10. And when it comes time to print some homemade greeting cards, calendars, and photo albums, Elements provides beginners, intermediate users, and professionals easy-to-follow steps to package your creations, as we cover in Chapters 15 and 16.
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TaGs: Dummies, Elements, Graphics & Web Design, Photoshop
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Adobe Photoshop is one of the most important computer programs of our age. It’s made photo editing a commonplace thing, something for the everyperson. Still, Photoshop can be a scary thing (especially that first purchase price!), comprising a jungle of menus and palettes and tools and options and shortcuts as well as a bewildering array of add-ons and plug-ins. And that’s why you’re holding this book in your hands. And why I wrote it. And why Wiley published it. You want to make sense of Photoshop — or, at the very least, be able to work competently and efficiently in the program, accomplishing those tasks that need to get done. You want a reference that discusses how things work and what things do, not in a techno-geek or encyclopedic manner, but rather as an experienced friend might explain something to you. Although step-by-step explanations are okay if they show how something works, you don’t need rote recipes that don’t apply to the work you do. You don’t mind discovering tricks, as long as they can be applied to your images and artwork in a productive, meaningful manner. You’re in the right place!
This book is written for the person who has a good grasp of using a computer and navigating the operating system and at least a cursory knowledge of Photoshop. It is intended to be a comprehensive reference book that you can read cover to cover or reach for when you’re looking for specific information about a particular task. Wherever I can, I sneak in a useful tip or an interesting technique to help you put Photoshop to work for your project needs. Sometimes, knowing how to use a tool doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what to do with it. That’s why this book contains several Putting It Together exercises that help you make a connection between the multiple Photoshop tools at your disposal and the very specific task you need to accomplish. Want to get the red out of a subject’s eyes or create a collage? Just check out the Putting-It-Together sections in Books III through IX. These sections present info in easy-to-follow numbered steps, in a hands-on style, building on what’s presented in the chapter so that you can go to the next level, put concepts to work, and move on to the next task. You can find images that appear within the Putting It Together sections on this book’s companion Web site (www.dummies.com/go/photoshopcs2), so you can follow along precisely with the steps.
Congratulations! Brilliant person that you are, you use Paint Shop Pro! Thousands of other brilliant people also use Paint Shop Pro, and for one intelligent reason: It does darned near anything you could want it to do, from fixing photographs to animating Web graphics, and — unlike certain more famous programs — it doesn’t set you back a week’s salary. Guided by that same intelligence, you’re probably asking yourself, “Is a book available that gives me what I want, quickly, without dragging me through a tutorial? One with an attractive yellow-and-black cover so that it doesn’t get lost in the clutter on my desk? Preferably cheap?” Welcome to Paint Shop Pro 8 For Dummies, the attractive, inexpensive, yellow-and-black book that lets you get great graphics out of Paint Shop Pro without making you feel like you’re going back to school in an attractive, yellow-and-black school bus.
If marketing folks want to breathe new life into an existing technology, the method du jour is to tack “digital” onto the name. Today we have digital cable, digital cell phones, digital fuel injection, and now, digital video. But unlike some other technologies that have recently earned the digital prefix, digital video isn’t just a minor improvement over the old way of doing things. Digital video is a revolution that is changing the way we think about and use moving pictures. Regular folks have had the capability to record their own video for many years now. Affordable film movie cameras have been available since the 1950s, and video cameras that record directly onto videotape have been with us for over two decades. But after you recorded some video or film with one of these old cameras, you couldn’t do much else with it. You could show your movies to friends and family in raw, unedited form, but there was no confusing your rough home movie with a professional Hollywood production. Digital camcorders provide a slight quality improvement over older camcorders, but the real advantage of digital video is that you can now easily edit your video on a computer. I don’t have to tell you how far computer technology has progressed over the last few years, and you know that modern Macs and PCs can now do some pretty amazing things. In a matter of seconds, you can import video from your digital camcorder into your computer, cut out the scenes you don’t want, add some special effects, and then instantly send your movies to friends over the Internet — or burn them to a DVD. The capability to easily edit your own movies adds a whole new level of creativity that was — just five years ago — the exclusive realm of broadcast and movie professionals. In a culture so accustomed to and influenced by video images, it’s actually kind of surprising that personal moviemaking hasn’t burgeoned sooner. Video is the art of our time, and now — at last — you have the power to use this art for your own expression. What will you draw on your digital-video canvas?
Like anything else, digital photography is easy — if you know what you’re doing. It’s getting to the point of knowing what you’re doing that can be frustrating. This book gives you the little bit of help you need. The steps for using this book are:
In this book, I cover the art form of digital art photography. I start by giving you an introduction to the world of film-based photography and how it relates to digital photography. From there, I go on to cover the whole gambit of digital art photography, from shooting great photos to tweaking them in Photoshop to producing final output fit for a gallery wall. If that sounds intriguing, this book is for you whether you’re film-based or digital-only or both.
It may be hard to remember, or it may seem like only yesterday, but some years ago, the personal computer was introduced. The rise and rise and rise of the personal computer — with maybe an occasional stumble but never a real fall — seemed certain to be the most important social and technological event at the end of the twentieth century. From Wozniak and Jobs’s Apple II to Bill Gates’s Windows 95, nothing, it seemed could ever be bigger, or more life-changing and important, than PCs. But, people do talk. In fact, talking is one of the main things that people are all about, and in the beginning, the personal computer didn’t let you interact with others. However, first with modems, and then with networks, and finally through their combination and culmination in the Internet, personal computers became the tools that opened up a new medium of communication. The most visible and exciting part of the Internet is the World Wide Web. Now communication, not computation, is the story. Computers are still important, but mostly as the means to an end; the end result is to enable people to interact. If the most exciting channel of communication is the Web, the means of communication is the Web page. Ordinary people demonstrate amazing energy and imagination in creating and publishing diverse Web home pages. And although ordinary people have a desire to create Web pages, businesses have a need to set up shop on the Web. So the rush to the Web continues, often with the same people expressing themselves personally on one Web page and commercially on another. So you want to be there, too. “But,” you ask, “Isn’t it difficult, expensive, and complicated?” Not any more. As the Web has grown, easy ways to get on the Web have appeared. And we discuss the best of them in the pages of this book.
The Creating Web Pages All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies is intended to be a reference for all the great things (and maybe a few not-so-great things) that you may need to know when you’re creating or expanding a Web site — from designing a cool-looking page to creating multimedia effects and e-commerce capability. Of course, you could go out and buy a book on each of these Web-development-related topics, but why would you want to when they’re all conveniently packaged for you in this handy reference? Creating Web Pages All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive reference for every last detail of all things Web. Instead, this book shows you how to get up and running fast so that you have more time to do the things that you really want to do. Designed using the easy-to-follow For Dummies format, this book helps you get the information you need without laboring to find it.
I’ve spent the past few years perfecting my processes with Photoshop — which can be a very intimidating software program. The last few versions offered even more capability to master — the File Browser, the new Bridge program, and Camera Raw, now in its third or fourth version. This book gives me the opportunity to share that knowledge with photographers who shoot in raw format and want to get up to speed with these new Photoshop capabilities. I’ve selected the content of this book based on what’s most important to us as photographers. The chapters are also organized in a manner in which we use parts of Photoshop according to order, or in an overall workflow. Some of these topics include
