Adobe Photoshop Elements has come a long way from being the limited version of its big brother Adobe Photoshop. It used to be that Adobe Photoshop would be released and then a few months later Adobe Photoshop Elements would be released with a few key features missing like actions, channels and things that Adobe deemed beyond the scope and need of Adobe Photoshop Elements audience. Now however Adobe Photoshop Elements is off on its own development cycle and is now starting to offer features and enhancements that are unique to it. Also, the interface is also off on its own as well. While many of the interface conventions are similar to what Adobe Photoshop offers it is still different.

Because of the changes in features and enhancements that you won’t find in any other Adobe product and because of the more unique interface one can’t rely on what they now about Adobe’s other products and their interfaces. Adobe Photoshop Elements more now with version 5.0 requires a bit more learning to get the most from it. One of the best books for this is Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Classroom in a Book Front Cover. This 340 plus page full color book is design to teach you how to use Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 from the basic tools and features to the more advanced tools and features. The only thing it can’t teach you is how to be creative. That is left up to each reader. Thankfully Adobe Photoshop Elements makes it so easy to be creative. It allows anyone to become a photographer and/or artist and it allows you to have fun doing it.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Classroom in a Book is loaded with color screen shots as well as step-by-step instructions. It covers such topics as the organizer interface, the editor interface, cataloging your images using the organizer and then how to find the images you want to work on, creating greeting cards and web photo galleries, printing, photo restoration, color adjustments, exposure adjustments, working with text in your images, fonts, and much more. What I like about this book besides the ample color screen and sample shots and the step-by-step instructions is that it covers the basic things like how to use the fill tool, but it also covers the advanced things thing like color correction, image restoration and things like that. It really is a complete course in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0.

Chapters:

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: A Quick Tour of Photoshop Elements
Chapter 3: Basic Organizing
Chapter 4: Advanced Organizing
Chapter 5: Creations
Chapter 6: Printing, Sharing and Exporting
Chapter 7: Adjusting Color in Images
Chapter 8: Fixing Exposure Problems
Chapter 9: Repairing and Retouching Images
Chapter 10: Working with Text
Chapter 11: Combining Multiple Images
Chapter 12: Advanced Editing Techniques

While Adobe Photoshop Elements doesn’t have some of the advanced features of its big brother Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 is still very powerful and is for most users all they will ever need. Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Classroom in a Book will help anyone get the most from this wonderful program. I highly recommend it.

Included with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Classroom in a Book is a CD. On this CD you will find the lesson files for the lessons in the book making it even easier to follow along in the book and try out the various techniques presented on the same images as those in the book.