Animated Introduction to Adobe Photoshop Elements is a set of Photoshop lessons that offers you an original method of a quick but total immersion into the program environment. Perhaps you have heard some people saying that Photoshop is very complex.
This is partially true; learning all of this application may take you years. The "ASAP" (stands for "As Simple As Photoshop") offers you a faster way. It tells only the things you have to know at the moment, skipping the details, as you have lots of time to learn those when (and if) you need them.
Another speed-up secret is illustrations. The tutorials are packed with 224 full-sound movie clips (total running time: about 6 hours). So, you needn't choose between a Photoshop book and a Photoshop video any more. "ASAP" is more than just a book and smarter than just a video.
It takes you by the hand and shows you around Photoshop, allowing you to combine all the possible learning methods. Just read it, watch it, listen to it and follow it. (More about using ASAP)
The course is fully compatible with the 6th, 7th, 8th (CS) and 9th (CS2) versions of Photoshop (What's new in Photoshop CS2 ?).
Some tutorials are available online and downloadable as a demo video-book. However, if you want to learn Photoshop ASAP, to master all of its power, you need the full-versioned book.
The first chapter - Concepts - is a quick overview of Photoshop interface and the basic work principles intended for beginners. Just look around and have some feeling of working with the program. Online version is available here.
The tutorials of the Skills chapter explain the most essential Photoshop techniques - color and tonal adjustments, layers, transformations, selecting and masking. Some of the Photoshop tutorials are available online.
Recipes is a collection of practical solutions for photographers and retouchers. Real photos, contributed by amateur and professional photographers, are enhanced, retouched, manipulated for you in real time, showing most efficient combinations of the skills explained in the previous chapter. Online demo here.
Web is devoted to ImageReady, a Web-oriented Photoshop component. This chapter tells how to prepare your images for Internet publications, create animations and even compose interactive web pages. Online demo is available here.
Automate It chapter will help you to save your time and effort by using actions and batch processing. Did you know that most of your repetitive activity in Photoshop and ImageReady can be accomplished with a single click? This chapter offers hands-on tutorials and suggests some practical solutions for the both applications.
Tools is a comprehensive Photoshop Toolbox reference invoked to show you purpose and work principles of any Photoshop tool within a few seconds. Online version here.
