The Photographer's Guide to Photoshop

Rating:
Summary: Easy Tutorial Guide To Photoshop
Review: At last a guide to Photoshop which is in clear concise terms with instructions that are so easy to follow...I am just so impressed with the layout of this book and all the lovely colour illustrations. Every other book on Photoshop which I have looked at is presented in a heavy text book style, this one is like a Coffee Table book which is a pleasure to pick up. This book is set out so that even anyone without any knowledge of Photoshop would be able to follow and learn from it.. I am fortunate that I also have the teaching CD tutorials which Barrie Thomas produces and I was able to buy from his web site www.barrie-thomas.com. With this wonderful book and the CD.s Photoshop becomes easy..I just wish Barrie Thomas lived in Australia instead of England.

Rating:
Summary: A very good intro to the art AND craft of Photoshop
Review: In my experience, when it comes to Adobe software, there are "print" people (who are most comfortable with PageMaker and InDesign) and there are "image" people (who are happiest using Photoshop). I'm one of the former and while most layout programs seem perfectly intuitive to me, I've had to struggle to make sense of the last few versions of Photoshop. Thomas is a photographer (rather than a printer) but he seems to be entirely a self-taught techie, as am I; he's obviously old enough to have learned his photography long before there were personal computers. He had to work at this stuff to figure things out, and he's pretty good at passing on the results of that learning process to the reader. There's only a brief introduction on the theoretical basics -- pixels and equipment choices, bitmaps vs. vectors, RGB vs. CYMK, and so on. After that, he sticks pretty much to explaining in plain language what the principal groups of Photoshop tools are for (the names Adobe gives them are not always intuitive), how to carry out basic processes (like masking and selecting), and how to avoid making dreadful mistakes. The section on the Pen Tool is less well done, though, because he demonstrates how a Bezier system works without ever explaining *why* it works; he seems to think just experimenting with it will be sufficient. And maybe he's right. His discussion of layers and channels, though, is quite good. The book is crammed with well-rendered photos, usually shown in various stages of editing and modification. This is not a reference manual, and it's certainly far from being the only Photoshop book you will ever need, but it's an excellent place to start.

Rating:
Summary: A very good intro to the art AND craft of Photoshop
Review: In my experience, when it comes to Adobe software, there are "print" people (who are most comfortable with PageMaker and InDesign) and there are "image" people (who are happiest using Photoshop). I'm one of the former and while most layout programs seem perfectly intuitive to me, I've had to struggle to make sense of the last few versions of Photoshop. Thomas is a photographer (rather than a printer) but he seems to be entirely a self-taught techie, as am I; he's obviously old enough to have learned his photography long before there were personal computers. He had to work at this stuff to figure things out, and he's pretty good at passing on the results of that learning process to the reader. There's only a brief introduction on the theoretical basics -- pixels and equipment choices, bitmaps vs. vectors, RGB vs. CYMK, and so on. After that, he sticks pretty much to explaining in plain language what the principal groups of Photoshop tools are for (the names Adobe gives them are not always intuitive), how to carry out basic processes (like masking and selecting), and how to avoid making dreadful mistakes. The section on the Pen Tool is less well done, though, because he demonstrates how a Bezier system works without ever explaining *why* it works; he seems to think just experimenting with it will be sufficient. And maybe he's right. His discussion of layers and channels, though, is quite good. The book is crammed with well-rendered photos, usually shown in various stages of editing and modification. This is not a reference manual, and it's certainly far from being the only Photoshop book you will ever need, but it's an excellent place to start.