Visual Quickstart Guide to Adobe Photoshop Album
Book Review by Rip YarnallOn the heels of Adobe’s new digital photo organizer program, PhotoShop Album, comes Peachpit Press’ Visual Quickstart Guide with hundreds of screenshots to help you wring full advantage from the application. From software installation and photo acquisition to creating projects and sharing photos, this handy illustrated guide can help you look like a multimedia pro in a very short time.
PhotoShop Album’s magnificent versatility necessitates a complexity that can be bewildering at first, but is quite intuitive, after all, to an experienced user. Hester’s spare prose and copious illustrations and examples flatten the learning curve considerably; especially if you are not one to boldly experiment with unfamiliar menu options or spend time studying users’ guides or wading through on-line help screens.
While this is not a book you would want to sit down and read cover to cover, (142 pages) the early chapters get you up and running; organizing your photos quite quickly. Then it works as a reference book, so you can skip around and learn how to use those features in which you are most interested.
In addition to showing and explaining how the program works, the Hester provides tips at the end of each section; allowing the user to benefit from the author’s experience with PhotoShop Album’s many features. Under red-eye removal, for instance, he cautions that red will be removed from the entire selected area and suggests that you may want to zoom in to 400-800 percent to isolate individual eyes before applying the effect.
Here is another tip from the author: "Though you may occasionally want to rename a particular photo, resist with all your might the temptation to do this. The reason? Photoshop Album was designed to make it unnecessary to worry about what a digital photo might be named. If you start renaming files just for the sake of tidiness, you’ll be missing the real run of having digital photos, which is to create cool projects with them."Bet you never thought of that either.
Visual Quickstart Guide to Adobe Photoshop Album
Author: Nolan Hester
Publisher: Peachpit Press
1249 Eighth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(800) 283-9444 (510) 524-2178
Fax: (510) 524-2221
www.peachpit.com <http://www.peachpit.com>
MSRP: $19.99 -- Canada $31.99