Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Beyond This Book

You can do thousands of interesting things with Elements that are beyond the scope of this book. The Elements Inspiration Browser and Help menu give you access to dozens of interesting tutorials right from Elements. Also, bookstores have loads of titles on Elements and Photoshop, and a lot of procedures are the same in both programs. And you can find all kinds of specialized books on everything from color management to making selections to scrapbooking.

POWER USERS' CLINIC: Making Elements Behave More Like Photoshop

Ever since Elements first came out, there's been quite a cottage industry devoted to figuring out ways to get Elements to behave more like Photoshop. If you've used Elements 3 or earlier versions, the odds are pretty good that you're familiar with the extra tools and action players created by Richard Lynch, Paul Shipley, Grant Dixon, and Ling Nero. Unfortunately, Adobe decided to write Elements 4 in a way that disabled the traditional route used by add-on tools to access some of the underlying Photoshop code needed for these additional features to work. That meant that many of the existing add-on tools stopped working in Elements 4.

For now, it's best to stick to actions written for Elements 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 to be sure they'll work. (See the box on Beyond This Book for more about installing action-based tools.) If you've been using extra tools or actions in Elements 2 or 3, then you may want to keep the older version of the program around just for them. ...