I've owned Aaland's book for more than a year, and I've read sections of it several times, but until now, I'd never pored through the whole thing. For beginning and intermediate Photoshop Elements users, it's a useful text. Aaland covers a wide range of editing techniques, giving mostly straightforward instructions. On the topic of layers, Aaland's text falls flat; it was only by reading Kelby's book that I was able to gain a good working understanding of their expressive power.

For a book with the audacious subtitle "The Art of Digital Photography", Aaland's volume falls quite short with regard to the photographs themselves. Many of the retouches in his examples are blatantly obvious, and they make Photoshop Elements look like a toy. The techniques used to generate the examples are sound, but it will require a more artful eye than is evident here to use them tastefully.