The Photoshop Elements 6 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)

Scott Kelby writes in a humerous style that makes a teaching manual a lot more interesting to follow. I always look forward to the next chapter. He covers the material without getting deep into technical jargon but you learn the techniques quickly that a photographer needs to edit his photos.

I'm sorry I bought this book!
The authors are more interested in writing for their own amusement than in providing useful information. And trust me - they are not amusing. I'm writing this to save others from wasting their time on this inane diatribe.

The book is badly organized and it's almost impossible get answers to basic questions. Like, for example, what is RAW? Simple question. You'll get a whole page about Arnold Scwarzenegger's movie "Raw Deal," but at the end you still won't have a clue about RAW photos. It has something to do with Adobe, but that's about all you'll know.

How does Elements organize photos? I wish I could find out, but I'm not getting any answers here. The step-by-step instructions are massively longer than they need to be because the author's think they're here to entertain us. Can I just please get an answer! Do I have to read a novel to get through one step in a 3-step process? The KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle is nowhere to be found in this book.

Do yourself a big favor. Pass on this one.

I have previously purchased Scott Kelby's books on Photoshop CS and Elements 5 for Digital Photographers. Both books are very well done and easy to follow. However, I just recently purchased Elements 6 plus Scott's book on Elements 6, and am very disapointed to see that the example windows shown in the book are grey background with white text just like what you see on your monitor, but they are much smaller and it is impossible to read the text without a magnifying glass. Areas where you are supposed to click on the windows are circled in red, but you can't read the text to see what you are clicking on. Using this grey background with white text is a stupid blunder by Adobe, not everyone using these programs has 20/20 vision and a large monitor like the geeks designing the system. We gave the Photoshop Elements 6 program and Scott's book to a young friend of ours who has much better vision than I do. She has since commented that it is difficult for her to see also since she has a laptop computer, but she will try to get used to it. I will not buy any further Adobe products that use this grey and white bit.

This book dives right into HOW to do things with Photoshop - complete with pictures on every page. If you go through the book and practice some of the things a few times, you'll learn everything a beginner needs to learn - in a fun and hands-on way.

The book also spends some time going over how to use the organizer, which is very important for any photographer.

What the book does NOT tell you is what every single function does - because there are so many advanced functions in photoshop. So, if you are looking for a dictionary on Photoshop's functions - this book is not for you.

This was an extremely well written book. Scott Kelby is very knowledgable and shares with his readers in a humorous way. I thoroughly enjoy reading anything he writes. I highly recommend this purchase.