digital scrapbookers recommend book for Photoshop elements

[disneyfan2]

I am looking for books to help with the program and i am new. I want help for scrapbooking but my library only has older version of books. Will the older versions still be helpful for the version 5?

Also, will the books have any sections geared to scrapbooking.

I am looking at trying to add clip art to my digital pages and get stuck because some elements have the white background and i want to be able to lay the entire clip are on top...

 

[beasleybear]

Version 4 is pretty close to v5 in most respects. I know that Renee Pearson's book, Digital Designs for Scrapbooking, uses PSE4. It starts out with the basics, step-by-step. So it may be a good place to start if you want to focus solely on scrapping with PSE. I found my copy at a local Michaels, although I had to check 3 of them to find it. Other good books, like Scott Kelby's Photoshop Elements for Digital Photographers series, is good for learning the program but will not focus on scrapping. Another good book for just learning the program is the Missing Manual series by Barbara Brundage.

BTW, Renee Pearson's follow up book, Digital Designs for Scrapbooking 2: Making Your Own, is out now. I can't say for sure, but I bet it uses PSE5.

And I believe the Digital Scrapping FAQ that Fran wrote for this board has links to sites that have free tutorials. Her poor FAQ hasn't been stickeyed yet, so it may be back a page or so.

As to what you are talking about doing...usually the Magic Wand tool can be used to select white out of a picture, and then you hit Delete to remove the white. It can be a bit more complex than that, but that's the basic idea.

 

[stenogoddess]

I highly recommend the downloadable book at scrapgirls.com. The name is something like Secrets to Scrapping with Elements, something like that. The book is for 4, but I just bought it and went through it and I'm using 5 and it was still great. I learned a ton. They also have a really large nice free kit called Refresh that you can dowload so that you'll have something to work and play around with.

I really can't say enough about how great the book was. It's all Quicktime movies so you actually see someone doing it, which really helped me. I started my first layout almost immediantly. It's about $29, which I thought was so worth it. Plus, you can get started right away and not have to go drive and pick up a book or wait on shipping.

Just my .02. It sounds like I get a kickback or something, but I really don't. I just liked it and learned a ton.

Good luck!