Books by author: Scott Kelby

Scott Kelby remains the gold standard among authors who write about digital photography software. I have been a fan of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for a couple of years now, and a user since it's first release. It is by far the best photo software I've seen, in large part because Adobe has managed to include all of the features a digital photographer needs for 99% of his work, and stripped away everything else. Most of the functionality is straightforward, but a few of the controls are subtle and non-obvious if you are not a professional.

Kelby's exposition is, as usual, apt, accurate, and easy to follow. He highlights everything you need in a typical workflow and points out lots of tricks to make it go more quickly. His chapter introductions are as corny as ever, but I've learned by now to just skip them. If you use software for digital photography, buy the Scott Kelby book that goes with it.

Lightroom is far and away the best photo-editing and -organizing software that I've seen (and I've tried a lot of them), and this book is a rock-solid overview of how to use it.

Scott Kelby's guide is, as usual (and I have read a half-dozen of them), the best way to cut through the mass of features in any photo software and get to a workflow that makes the best use of its capabilities. I would have liked a little more depth on the features that are new to Lightroom 3, but I extracted enough that I feel confident using the new software.

In this book, Kelby takes the reader under his wing and gives dozens of pearls of wisdom about digital photography without going into all of the physics and optics and electronics that make them true. It's a quick read, and it's full of good advice. I took away a few new tips about proper camera height when shooting portraits, techniques for taking good panoramas, some new thinking about what lenses I "need", and many other bits of good advice were reinforced. I don't particularly like Kelby's sense of humor, but this book is full of good material for beginner and intermediate photographers.

I've flipped through a handful of books on Photoshop editing techniques and found most of them to be overly simplistic or too geared toward web publishing and Ebay. I was thrilled when searching on Amazon to learn several very useful and nonobvious tricks in the handful of pages of Kelby's book that were available online. So I bought it, in spite of the fact that it covers Photoshop 7 rather than Elements (which is what I own).

Having read the entire book, I don't entirely regret my choice. It is true that much of the content of this book is useless in Elements, since the necessary tools and menus just aren't available. However, there are enough useful techniques, and the presentation is given in such a straightforward "here's how to fix this problem" manner, that I believe I've received my money's worth.

The bottom line is that in a weekend of experimentation with the material presented in this book, I have gained a great deal of confidence in my Photoshop abilities, and the results are visible in my photos. (It doesn't hurt that I also recently purchased the NeatImage noise-reduction plug-in, which does a tremendous job.)

I've now read three versions of this book, aimed at three different versions of Photoshop, and I'm convinced that Kelby's books in the "for digital photographers" series are the best single-volume guides to using Photoshop for digital photography. Since the features of Photoshop change with each release, it is important to read the version that's matched to your version of the software.

I find Kelby's sense of humor a bit annoying, but he mostly limits it to brief chapter and section introductions. The meat of the instruction is very clear and to-the-point, and it usually includes all the details you need to achieve a similar result. Most of the photographs aren't great art, but they illustrate Kelby's points well.

I'm looking forward to Kelby's volume on Lightroom.

This is the one book every user of Photoshop Elements should read. Like Kelby's Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers (based on Photoshop 7), this book provides a large array of very useful and easy-to-apply techniques for improving photographs in Photoshop. In spite of the fact that the content overlaps tremendously with Kelby's other book(s), I bought this version because it specifically covers many of the tools that are now available in Elements 3 for the first time.

By the way, Elements 3 is fantastic. The addition of the healing brush, drastic improvements to red-eye correction, and the full integration of the photo browser is a huge improvement over Elements 2. Both it and this book are highly recommended to digital photographers.