Digital Essentials
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Digital Essentials
Item #: B-HANSE
ISBN #: 1-893824-64-0
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Details
Details
Are you a quilter with a computer?
Then you’ll learn from Gloria Hansen’s book! This book gives you a rare opportunity to learn from an experienced professional who speaks like a quilter because she is one. Gloria has won over 150 awards for her quilts, and has created dozens of Web sites for quilt makers world wide.
Easy steps, for both Mac & Windows versions of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements & Paint Shop Pro make it simple to:
Work with Photos
- Prepare your digital quilt photos for show entry
- Straighten crooked quilt photos
- Crop photos
- Get rid of distracting backgrounds in quilt photos
- Turn color photos into black & white
- Make ordinary quilt photos look so much better
- Learn exactly how to “cut out the background” around your quilt photo, to make your quilt images look more professional.
- Plus tons of photo editing tips
Print like a Pro
- Make your printer color match your screen color
- Get the best quality printouts
- Understand your scanner
- Get ready to print on fabric
Prepare Web Work
- Make images for your Web site
- Create a logo image for your business
- Create PDF files to email or download from your site
- Know what size to make images and thumbnails
- Safeguard your images and files
Amaze yourself! Learn how easy it is to transform blah photos to brilliant photos. Perfect whether you want to print photos on fabric, or just improve your snapshots of your quilts, pets or grandchildren.
Learn About Your Computer
- Back up files so you won’t lose them
- Understand file types and resolution
- And much, much more!
Pages 208
Size 8.5×11
Softcover, sewn, full color
Reviews
Reviews
10 Reviews
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“So I’m really glad that I have Gloria Hansen’s book, Digital Essentials: The Quilt Maker’s Must-Have Guide to Images, Files, and More. Not only is Gloria Hansen a talented quilter and artist, but she’s highly digitally-literate and an excellent writer. Hansen’s book is well-written and edited, and the layout is really nice. She provides step-by-step directions, screenshots, and high-quality images to illustrate the information, and good formatting makes the information easy to understand. In general, the overall look and feel of this book is high-quality. This is one book that’s going to get a workout for years to come, and I would suggest that anyone who works with digital images or files—or who wants to start working with them—make this book a part of your reference library.”
– Michele @ Textile Traveler
Read the complete review here: textiletraveler.blogspot.com
“How do I make a photograph the ‘right’ size & pixels for entering in this or that show? How can I enrich or distort my photograph if I want to? So many questions always seem to come up when I want to do something specific to a photograph. Although I have quite a few books about using PhotoShop Elements, “Digital Essentials” is the book that will answer all of these questions & so very many more in a very user friendly way!
If you have had questions about how to manipulate your digital photographs & operate PhotoShop Elements – or PhotoShop for that matter – then this book really is a must have, essential for your reference library. Kudos to Gloria for sharing her knowledge & for publishing such a fine book! Get it – you won’t be sorry!”
– Marie Z. Johansen
Read the complete review here:
“Now that most quilt competitions require digital entries, don’t let technology pass you by. Gloria answers all your digital questions in easy-to-follow steps for the most common photo editing software programs.”
– Editor-Recommended New Books, American Quilter magazine, July 2009
“If you are like me, you have been using the hunt, peck and guess method of editing your quilt photos with an image editing software program such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Paint Show Pro. Once you download your pictures from your digital camera onto your computer and open them with one of these programs, you enter a foreign land filled with words like bitmap, jpeg, pixel, resample and unsharpened. In her book, Digital Essentials, Gloria not only defines the terms you will encounter into language that you can easily understand, she guides you through the steps required in each of these programs (both Mac and Windows versions) to achieve the end results that you need for your digital images.
After definitions, Gloria explains how to enlarge, straighten, adjust the color or even change or eliminate the background of your digital quilt photos. She gives explicit instructions for working with each software program, and illustrations include computer screen shots and drop down menus as she walks you through each task in a direct, step-by-step, fashion. Side by side photos showing the results of adjusting such settings as saturation, sharpen and brightness are found throughout the book.
Whether you want to use your images to simply print, print on fabric, combine images, prepare a Power Point presentation, upload you quilt photos to a website or create image sizes which conform to the requirements for quilt show entries, Digital Essentials has the answer. There are also instructions on how to create logos, protect your images on the web and register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Digital Essentials will increase your knowledge of how to handle your digital quilt and other images greatly in just one reading. Using it also as a reference guide (utilizing its handy index in the back), there will be no stopping you from editing your beautiful images and having them available for any use that you may way or need.”
– Machine Quilting Unlimited, Winter 2008 page 12 – Books and DVD reviews
“Everybody who has been awake the last ten years knows that computers have profoundly influenced every aspect of modern life, and quilting is no exception. People design blocks and quilts on computers, they scan photos and fabrics into their quilt designs, and they print out templates and patterns. Even sewing machines are computerized. Computer graphics is a complicated subject of its own, however, and most of us do not have the time to master all the finer points of sophisticated photo editing software. We need the essentials, and that’s just what Gloria Hansen offers in this book.
Aimed at users of both Macintosh and Windows computers, Digital Essentials addresses the key image editing issues in the specific context of quilting and its special requirements. Quilters now need to submit digital photos to juried quilt competitions instead of prints or slides as in the past, and Hansen covers this topic comprehensively in its own chapter. Another chapter explores the advantages of dedicated quilt design programs over painting and photo-editing software. Need to prepare pattern diagrams and instructions that look professional? The information is here.”
– Planet Patchwork, http://www.planetpatchwork.com
Read the full review
“[This] is a book for which I have waited for what seems like a long long time! The author, Gloria Hansen, along with her London based partner, Derry, are the designers of my website.
I got to know Gloria on the Quilt Art list. In addition to being a very knowledgeable resource, she has always been more than generous about sharing her knowledge with all of us. I am the kind of person that buys software and then flies by the seat of my pants, trying this and that and picking up bits of wisdom and know how when and where I can. Now, I will feel as if I have Gloria right here in my office.
Digital Essentials will be a very handy resource, residing next to my computer. Gloria covers every thing from the tiny pixel to the big picture and everything in between. For those who are saving money by doing their own photography and submitting digital images for juried quilts shows, this book is a must. From calibrating the color management on your computer to removing the background from a quilt, it is all in this handy manual. She covers a variety of software and PC and Mac environments. Want to know how to print better images on fabric? It’s in there.”
– Gerrie Congdon
Read the full review on Gerrie’s blog
“It’s very seldom (make that never) that a computer book arrives at my house and makes my heart go pitter-patter. But I was genuinely excited when Gloria Hansen’s Digital Essentials arrived… I’m very seldom so effusive about a book, but a book has so very seldom seen a need and met it in such a cogent and useful way.”
– Virginia Spiegel
Read the full review on Virginia’s blog
“At last, a primer on digital design for the artist! Written in plain English with easy-to-follow steps, Digital Essentials demystifies digital imaging software, whether you have a MAC or PC, whether you just want to resize pictures and print them out or design a whole quilt on the computer. Because Gloria knows both computers and quilting, she can tell you what you need to know and why. Working with this book is like having a kindly expert sitting right beside you, guiding you through the digital maze.”
– Editors Pick in Quilting Arts Mazagine – Sept. Holiday issue 2008-2009
“Bottom line: if you take digital pictures, enter quilt shows, want to print photos onto fabric, want to print photos from your printer at home, want to design quilts on the computer, or learn to manipulate photos, or learn to use your photo editing software more effectively, want to know how to get the color in the photo to look like it does in real life, and THEN want the print to have the same colors… BUY THIS BOOK! This book will be an essential reference tool in my library, I can tell already. It is not a sit down and drool over the pictures book, but it is a book you will use again and again and again!”
– Sarah Ann Smith
Read the entire review on Sarah’s blog
“If you have Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro and are having trouble learning how to work with your images, buy this book. Gloria shows you step-by-step how to calibrate your monitor, resize, work in layers, crop, adjust the color, and choose the best format to save to. She explains everything clearly and gives plenty of additional resources for information once you’ve mastered these basics.”
– Martha Sielman, Executive Director, Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc.