Digital Photo Projects for Dummies
Product Review
Publisher: Wiley Publishing
Price: $34.99
Pros: Digital Photo Projects for Dummies comes with a DVD, making it a great Package. The book shows the novice how to take great shots and transform them into awesome photo projects. The software program on the DVD is Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is available for both Windows and Macintosh systems.
Cons: The book contains too much information about taking photos. This information should be in a “Taking digital photo for dummies” book, not this book. This book should just focus on the steps after the photos have been taken.
Product Rating
Impressive
by Robin Walters, AAUG Member
If you are just starting digital photography, there are many, many books in the bookstore that can help you get started, but there always seems to be one element left out. This is not the case with “Digital Photo Projects for Dummies”. With this book, Digital Photo Projects for dummies, you start out learning the basics, then progress to expert projects. The book gives the basics to get good results from your digital camera, without assuming you are an “expert”, by overloading you with lots of technical background. The book takes you from the first step of shooting the photo, to starting the appropriate software for your camera, to how to retouch and enhance your photo.
This is a step-by-step book for those of us who need training from the very beginning. This book covered everything from finding the right camera, printer and software to taking you into shooting a photo; where it explains exposure, color and focus. After taking the photo, it explains how to download the software that belongs with your camera onto your computer. Then, it talks about simple photo-editing tools, retouching photos, tips on red-eye, covering blemishes and whitening teeth. I learned how to add text, take out people from my photos and add new backgrounds. I was amazed at how easy it was to fix a photo that I thought was a complete loss, and turn it into a photo that I could print. It was easy to do simple tasks on a photo, but also get creative and turn photos into digital collages, postcards and calendars.
The best selling point about this book is that it comes with a DVD that contains video tutorials that show you how to accomplish projects in the book and a few additional ones that are not in the book. The DVD is about two and a half hours long. The DVD also has some free trial versions of photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop Elements that you can try before you buy. The DVD was easy to follow right along with the book. The book also gives tips as a sidebar and warnings of potential pitfalls to avoid. There are even technical tips for the more advanced; making the book useable by the more advanced photographer.
Overall, the book and DVD were of great help to me in learning the basics then incorporating them into my photo editing skills and giving me an end result that I was
proud of. I would highly recommend this book to all digital photographers