How To Do Everything with Photoshop(R) Elements 2

Rating:
Summary: Not very elegant
Review: Digital photography is all about color. Why would any publisher release a book on the manipulation of color images in Photoshop with mostly black and white examples?

Save your money

Rating:
Summary: Might have been a great book with color
Review: I found the book well-organized and quite lucid. The author clearly understands the program well. The book's Achilles heel (and probably the reason for its relatively inexpensive price) is that there are only a few color illustrations in the center. All of the other illustrations are done in low resolution B&W, making it nearly impossible to appreciate the techniques or changes in images. If the publisher had raised the price a few dollars and done the illustrations in color, the book would be vastly more valuable.

Rating:
Summary: My Best Photoshop Elements 2.0 Reference Book
Review: I have three other PSE 2.0 books, but this is by far the best one. Plotkin takes you through every element, tool, method, etc. He has two chapters (52 pages) on layers alone, which to me was especially important. Although he doesn't have a lot of color pictures (using less expensive black and white), the explanations and effects are quite clear and easy to understand. I was really only scratching the surface of PSE 2.0 before I got this book.
I highly recommend it. It is also very reasonably priced as compared to some others I considered.

Rating:
Summary: Cover Art as a Loss Leader
Review: The only well printed page (in color) is the cover. The book is printed in material that is virtually newsprint -- extremely hard to read and illustrations are poor as a consequence, some to illegibility. The book is in no way an improvement over the original Adobe manual -- or rather, it is in no way comparable. A waste of time and money.