Book Description
He's back! Adobe's already-powerful imaging editing software has just grown a whole lot more powerful, and best-selling author Scott Kelby (editor of Photoshop User magazine) has returned to unlock even more of its secrets. Using step-by-step instructions and nearly 700 full-color images, Scott reveals precisely how to achieve some of Photoshop Element 3's most closely guarded special effects. By the end of the volume you'll have learned more than 300 new techniques for using Adobe's affordable consumer-level software. Packed with creative ideas, layouts, and design techniques, the volume does more than just rehash masking, pixels, and file formats and resolution: It provides you with the Elements chops you need to unleash your own creativity.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
This book is about creating effects with Photoshop Elements 3 that look like you sweated all week on them. Don￯﾿ﾽt tell anyone it only took a few minutes. Definitely don￯﾿ﾽt tell them you￯﾿ﾽve just started using Photoshop Elements 3!

Author Scott Kelby is President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). He talks to more Photoshop users than just about anyone on Earth, and he￯﾿ﾽs learned just about more cool Photoshop tricks than anyone, too. Well, Photoshop Elements 3 has evolved to offer a surprisingly huge percentage of Photoshop￯﾿ﾽs effects capabilities. In this book, Kelby leverages his immense knowledge of both programs to present step-by-step techniques you just won￯﾿ﾽt find anywhere else.

You￯﾿ﾽll start with basic portrait and studio effects: sharpening foregrounds and blurring backgrounds to call attention to your subject; depth-of-field effects; soft-edged portraiture, trendy fashion blowout looks. You￯﾿ﾽll learn backscreening and cool magazine pop-up effects; how to blend images for quick collages; how to add a ￯﾿ﾽmagnifying glass￯﾿ﾽ to call attention to one element of your image.

Kelby offers a whole chapter of advertising effects, ranging from quick, elegant product backgrounds to classified-ad effects, fake credit cards, and transparent infoboxes. Want to fake a hand-drawn silhouette? Transform a photo into an oil painting, or woodcut, or line art? Create great edge effects -- for example, ripped edges or simulated photo mounts? Preview a product package in 3D? Make shadows that actually look real? Add lightning to your landscapes? Create a corporate logo in minutes? All that￯﾿ﾽs here, and plenty more. Bill Camarda, from the February 2005 Read Only

FROM THE PUBLISHER

If you're ready to learn the funk and not the junk; if you're ready to start creating the same effects that you see in magazines, on television, and on the Web; if you're ready to unleash a world of eye-popping special effects that dare not speak its name-this book is for you!

Best-selling, award-winning author Scott Kelby (Executive Editor of Photoshop Elements Techniques newsletter and one of today's hottest Photoshop gurus) unlocks the secrets of the most closely guarded Photoshop Elements 3 special effects. Using his simple step-by-step method, with hundreds of full-color images, you'll see exactly how it's all done. The book is written so clearly, and it is so easy to follow, you'll immediately be able to create all of these effects yourself. You'll learn: The latest photographic special effects, The tricks pro photographers use to show off their work, How to fake studio shots (you'll be amazed at how it's done), The latest cutting-edge type effects, How to turn snapshots into works of art, The most requested advertising effects, Plus loads of effects that look hard, but are easy once you know the secrets