Photoshop Elements Drop Dead Lighting Techniques - Barry Huggins > Reviews > Photoshop Elements Drop Dead Lighting techniques

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Degree of Information
How interesting was the book?
How useful was it?
Would you read it again?
Value for money

Advantages:	Concise yet easy to follow, some impressive looking projects, well presented
Disadvantages:	Special effects section, a little light (sic) on explanations

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

One thing that often separates an average photo from a great one is the quality of light. Real life rarely serves up the sort of light we'd like (especially in the UK) and so we have to fall back on post processing and editing to tweak things.

To the inexperienced user, this can be a bit of a hit and miss affair so I was very pleased to spot a copy of Photoshop Elements Drop Dead Lighting Techniques in the bookshop. The author Barry Huggins runs a multimedia and training consultancy at www.matrixtraining.com and has had his images used around the world so he ought to know a thing or two.

The first thing that strikes you is the gorgeous presentation of the book. Ilex Press titles we have seen have always been impressive in this respect with superb quality brilliant white paper, excellent layout and flaps on the thick glossy cover for bookmarking purposes. These books just ooze quality.

Photoshop Elements Drop Dead Lighting Techniques is aimed at middle to experienced Photoshop Elements users and is divided in to six main sections plus a reference section. The first part covers the basics such as the tools, making selections and working with layers, just to make sure you're fully orientated for the tasks ahead.

Part 2 covers shadows and projections. Here you can find out how to create your own shadows in images and how to create light casting effects such as simulating the light through a stained glass window. In common with the entire book, the final images get a page to themselves so you can see exactly how they come out. There isn't a huge amount of background detail or discussion, instead each project is presented as a series of steps with screen shots

The next section covers reflections with the obligatory water reflection by the seaside to kick things off. The water around here is pretty murky so the example to my eye looks a little to metallic and shiny but it is still an impressive example of what can be achieved. A more interesting example is a saxaphone which has various reflections and effects adding producing a very convincing result.

The section on quality of light is one of the best with explanations of warming, cooling, high and low key effects as well as a nice example of adding a candle and its associated warm glow to a scene. Another example of adding a faked neon light worked less well for me though.

Special effects with light such as film noire, coloured spotlights on an image and simulated smoke and dust are next. Some of these are again impressive but an image with whispy smoke added looked embarassingly bad. On the other hand, a fairly average image of a church bell got turned in to an evocative grainy black and white image that looked truly inspiring.

Conclusion

Whilst there are a some projects that really didn't work for me, the bulk of this book provides essential reading for any Photoshop Elements users who want to give their images that extra tweak needed to make them look a bit more interesting. With almost all books that cover this territory being resolutely Photoshop or Photoshop CS based, the value of a book that uses Photoshop Elements to achieve the same goals should not be underestimated. It also goes some way to show that Photoshop Elements, whilst a far cheaper sibling to the full blown Photoshop, is capable of some extremely effective editing tasks. I'd have liked a bit more background detail or variations but as it stands, this is a good book that shouldn't disappoint.