Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Well written and informative book
Comment: Having read many articles and books on Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, I was keen to see something for Elements pitched at the advanced user - too often only the Photoshop books focus on the advanced. This book generally meets these objectives well.
Early on, unfortunately the author spends time discussing the "auto-everything" features and beginner functions, and I began to wonder if this was to be the tone for the book. Fortunately, these wasted pages behind me, the rest of the book is very good. There are plenty of pages packed with plenty of info, so discarding the beginner stuff, still leaves you with much to learn. I found the coverage of layers and layer masks good, especially as almost all other info on this subject is photoshop and not elements focussed. As a newbie to printing I also found the printing chapter to be very informative and logical.
Good on the author for explaining things well, and allowing Elements users to realise the full power of the application.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Writer and Useful Book
Comment: Phillip has written a very useful book for the intermediate to advanced Photoshop Elements user to take advantage of the latest features Adobe has added to Elements 6. I have a copy of this edition on my bookshelf and also have the previous edition of this book for Elements 5.
As before, there are lots of colorful images and illustrations to complement the text and many of the images can be downloaded from his website. This edition seems to make more improvements towards showing step by step instructions along with concise explanations of image editing concepts, image capture, editing tools and features to help the reader know "how" and understand "why".
For example, his step by step presentation of Camera RAW workflow and explanations of the Elements 6 RAW editor features are very clear and practical. He also explains a couple of methods for RAW editing of multiple images. Very well done, but one thing does seem to be missing, I couldn't find instructions on how to open a normal JPEG image for editing in the RAW editor.
There are a few typos here and there that appear to have carried over from the previous edition/version, but they are of no major consequence. I've used elements regularly since version 2 and Adobe seems to be indecisive with parts of the program as they continually reorganize and rename different features from version to version, albeit most seem to help improve it overall after you adapt to the changes. All of this makes it more challenging for writers to keep up with their shuffle of terminology, menus and overall layout. Phillip seems to have done well at this game!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Take Elements to the next step with this excellent book...
Comment: Written by the same author as 'Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 - A visual introduction', but covering more advanced topics as the name suggests.
The book starts with some basic concepts of digital imaging and leads on to some pretty complex projects which can be undertaken in Elements.
At the moment, it's firmly based around Windows version - all the screenshots and keyboard shortcuts refer to this and there's no indication of any proposed updates when the Macintosh version is released later this month - as a user of the beta version of the software I didn't find it difficult to navigate the menus and tools.
However, it's not restricted to users of v6 - each process has indicators showing which versions of Elements it can be applied to and they could equally be applied to Photoshop CS3.
It's written in an easy style to read - I found even the most complex of projects pretty simple to follow. However, no CD is provided as with his other book - not a major issue, but sometimes seeing a process in a video is helpful. Resources in the form of the images used in many of the chapters are available from the book's dedicated website along with some videos, but these are not particularly related to the contents of the book.
Good layout with clear graphics, before and after shots and staged walk-throughs.
The book is split into sections which are easy to navigate via a comprehensive contents page and index. A good book for dipping into when you need to figure out how to do digital hand colouring!
The sections dealing with colour management were particularly useful as this is a concept I've always
struggled with...
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Beyond the basics
Comment: Another good book by Philip Andrews. Where his Adobe PSE6 Visual introduction is the appetizer, this Advanced PSE6 for Digital Photographers is the entree. Mr Andrews covers what's happening in your camera and scanner and how you can control image output, fully covers RAW processing; and then goes into workflows that work. He then speaks to the application and projects and really gets into the detail of making the PSE tools work for you. The way Mr Andrews has written this book it is easy to understand and you feel like you have a mentor that really wants to see you succeed.
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