This book delivers what so many others promise.
Written: Apr 26 '05
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Pros: Everything is accessible, can be done regardless of experience level. Efficient and very well explained.
Cons: There's lots to PhotoShopCS. I want more chapters or Volume2 in same excellent format!
The Bottom Line: Buy it unless you're already a seasoned PhotoShop Pro. It lives up to its promise: you'll be doing cool things the first try and you'll continue to refer to it.
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| tjustice's Full Review: |
My wife is an established pro photographer. It has fallen to me to design and manage her web site http://www.aerphotography.com and to facilitate her migration from the darkroom to the computer (film to digital).
To this end we purchased Creative Suite CS and this and a couple other books to get us started. I had no prior experience with PhotoShop, long reputed to be complex and difficult to learn. Well PhotoShop is very powerful and anything that complex is at least difficult to master, but I'm finding that I'm able, even as an admitted novice, to make great use of the program with the help of this book.
My wife shoots primarily now with a Canon EOS 1D Mark II, a wonderful digital camera, but one with the notorious habit of collecting dust on the sensor. We must use PhotoShop to retouch a significant percentage of what she shoots.
This book takes an eminently useful approach which reminds me of the old AT&T/Bell System "Task Oriented Procedures" (TOPS) which are a proven method for stepping technicians through highly complex procedures successfully. This book uses a similar approach, but it's a far more interesting read and the pictures are excellent and pertinent.
For a perfect example, there is a segment in Chapter 12 that takes you through 13 sequential, well-illustrated steps to apply an embossed, semitransparent watermark and copyright to your image. Then four additional steps explain how to record and save this sequence as an "Action" allowing you to batch process entire folders of images in highly automated fashion. In my experience, a task this intricate is seldom explained so clearly (and never this efficiently) in a how-to text.
Not satisfied with that magic trick, Kelby goes on to teach you the even neater trick of creating custom brushes for a similar purpose. I feel this method does a better job of allowing you to compensate for the variety of color composition you'll be working with, but I wouldn't want to deal with thousands of images this way! I just recently (for the first time ever) used this second procedure and manually processed over 200 images in less than an hour.
I find that I open this book virtually every time I open PhotoShop. My opinion is that if everyone had this book handy while initially learning PhotoShop, it wouldn't have such an intimidating reputation. I highly recommend this title.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tjustice
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Location: Little Torch Key, FL USA
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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