digital photography

I have learned more from the first few pages of this book than in three years of playing with images in Photoshop and Elements and using my digital camera. I started using the tools immediately after installing them from the CD -- they work right in Elements! The author answered my question about the installation directly. The person in that other review who had difficulty should contact him via the book's website hiddenelements.com, or by email, which you can find on the book's web site.

The book starts with a great demonstration of how color works by showing you how to make a color image from some images shot before there was color film! Then you move right along into understanding how to separate channels -- and why you want to. I found that chapter on the Sybex website -- you can read the whole thing right there. It is why I got the book, and then I found what the tools could do! They really make the program much more like Photoshop!

The examples in the book really drive the points home. All the images from the examples are on the CD, and the step-by-steps are easy to follow. It has some advanced technique, but it really doesn't seem hard the way the author goes through it. The best is, I have tried th techniques on my images and see immedate improvement. I love this book!

I use Photoshop at work as a graphic artist and just can't afford to buy it for home. I've been an Elements user for a while because of that, and this book is a godsend. I can do all the things I do at work, and all it cost was the upgrade to this book! The 'tools' from the CD (they seem more like time-savers) add in curves, channels, and lots of other stuff that I use at work but couldn't in Elements, till now. They install easily and what I need works like a charm. I am very indebted to the author, who not only saved me time and money, but showed me some great technique that I now use in Photoshop!

I'd encourage any home designer to consider this as an option: get Elements and this book instead of Photoshop for use at home. If there are tools Elements is missing now that I have the book, I don't know what they are.

It is a ten (or eleven!) star value.

I'm an experienced film photographer just now returning to photography after 20 years away from it, learning digital for the first time. I'm very grateful for this book; it really is a great course in digital editing technique.

I think it is a worthy successor for Ansel Adams' Basic Photo Series in which he outlined his "Zone System", a tool that made densitometry accessible to working photographers. Like Adams' books, The Negative and The Print, Lynch offers photographers a technical vocabulary and systematic approach which disciplines and liberates visual imagination, not just a list of tricks and special effects.

Every time I think of a tool or something to add, I study some more and there it is. The author continues to develop the potential of Photoshop Elements and communicate his insights with his readers through updates and newsletters from his website.