My husband and I are taking a beginning Photoshop class at the local adult school. Instead of a more extensive and difficult text we chose to supplement the class with Photoshop Elements 4 For Dummies. It moves in more logical sequence than the class and enabled us to begin editing our photos immediately. It also allowed us to focus on class instruction without taking notes.

Good reference for ideas of how to do almost anything in Photoshop.

Thee seems to be a trend in software that they have to keep comming up with new releases to get people to send in more money. But after version three or four, it seems that the new features that they are adding aren't really features that you'd use. Look at Microsoft Word, which of the new features do you really use? But also look at WordPad. It's grown until it's about the equivalent of Word 3.0 or something like that. It's faster, smaller, easier to use and pretty much does what you want, in some cases even better than Word itself.

Photoshop Elements is kind of the same way. It was once a consumer grade, junior version of Photoshop. But it's now in it's fourth edition. It still doesn't have some of the features found in the full scale Photoshop, but would you use those features? And remember Photoshop Elements is $45 on Amazon, full blown Photoshop is $578.

This book describes what you can do with Photoshop Elements. It's one of the new full color 'For Dummies' books; it would kind of have to be to be meaningful for this kind of software. Amateur or pro just turning digital, this is an excellent book.

The "...For Dummies" is a great series. I have used these books for a number of subjects. The Photoshop Elements series has been especially helpful. Although the Elements series by Photoshop is not as complicated and intricate as the Photoshop 7,8 and CS it has many operations that really allow this amatuer to produce some startling results.