Bad Pics Fixed Quick: How to Fix Lousy Digital Pictures

by Michael Miller and Michael Miller

This book shows amateur digital photographers how to quickly fix their bad pictures, using Adobe Photoshop Elements. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0789732092
• ISBN13: 9780789732095
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Que
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.0" x 10.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book for the average digital photographer

As the author says this book targets the "average consumer with a point-and-click digital camera and not much time or patience to fix what went wrong". It offers a diverse collection of flawed pictures that the average consumer encounters after shooting a digital picture. Photoshop Elements 3.0 is used to correct these problems. Fixing the most common problems like pictures that are too big, too small, too dark, too bright, blurry, grainy, tilted and color casted are illustrated with Before and After examples. In most cases, 2 or 3 techniques are applied to tackle one problem. Each fix is simply explained and mostly involves no more than 5 or 6 steps. The book also covers at some length on retouching a person's face eg removing wrinkles, whitening teeth, getting rid of teeth-braces, taming messy hair, smoothing skin tone/color, glamorizing a plain Jane's face. The techniques covered here are again simple 5 or 6 step processes and the results are clearly not the type of photos you would encountered in glossy Glamor magazines. Finally, the book also touches on Changing picture backgrounds and removing unwanted objects or people. The coverage here is again on fixing things in few steps. Overall, an excellent book that serves its objective well of targeting the amateur digital photographer. My only regret is the author did not provide the photos used in the book for the reader to practise the book's techniques.

Sure is optimistic!

The title is certainly optimistic. Any of you who have taken digital photos soon realises that the camera is no panacea for cruddy photos. So what Miller does is give an extended excursion into the depths of Photoshop Elements 3. With the upsurge in digital cameras, now surpassing traditional film cameras, it has created a chance for Adobe to broaden the market for Photoshop. Just a few years ago, the typical Photoshop user was a professional running it in her workplace. Well, Miller disabuses you of that, at least as far as Elements 3 is concerned. The example photos are carefully chosen. Not just to show how to use Photoshop to clean them up. In addition, the subject matter is often what you might take photos of - family and friends, in casual surroundings. It underscores the narrative, which walks through the various Photoshop menus, showing how to do your fixes. Also, there is not much traditional photography jargon, about f-stops, apertures and the like. This also carries through into digital cameras, of course. But the book's purview is with what happens after those photos are taken. Needless to say, if you have traditional photos and want to clean them up, try scanning them into a computer. Then apply anything you can find germane in this book to them.