Rating: 
Summary: excellent
Review: This book is full of techniques which go beyond simple basics. I almost did not buy it because of the negative reviews included here but now that I have it I am totally pleased and baffled by the negativity seen in some of the reviews. The photos, colors, illustrations, and text are excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: Dreadful For many
Review: This book is very good for those who like to look at pictures. The only problems with this is that it dosent explain what its doing. A beginner I know read this book cover to cover and still new nothing about adobe photoshop, I am a self taught user of photoshop and i wanted to know more, this book seemed to skip important bits and i got lost. Not for the basic user, not for the intermediate user!
Rating:
Summary: Great job
Review: This edition goes over ALL the new tools and does an excellent job of helping familiarize the reader with the changes in Photoshop. Having browsed/bought other "How to" photoshop books this is by far the most useful of the lot.
Rating:
Summary: The most useful book I have found on applied Photoshop
Review: This is a *fantastic* book (providing you don't own the previous versions of it). What some people are calling its main weakness is its greatest source of strength: it has been refined and iterated so many times that the material VERY well-written and usable. Things I appreciate most: The focus is on teaching techniques with Photoshop, not features... many other books show you individual features without the context of a real world problem. Here, they show you how to use combinations of features to reach a desirable, artistically tasteful outcome. They don't just tell you what all the features are, they tell AND SHOW you WHY you would want to use them all and how you need to think about them. (2) they cover all the major ways that one would use Photoshop... for compositing, for web work, for photo touch-up and so on. As such, it's a great reference and I've looked things up over and over in it in the 3 months that I've used it. (It's also in color which gives it a huge advantage over many other books.) Photoshop is an extremely hard program to learn without help, and this the first and only book to have vaulted me into competence and understanding of what is going on.
Rating: 
Summary: A Useful Book, With a Special Effects Focus
Review: This is a useful Photoshop book, with good information on basic techniques (selecting, layers, filters, tools, etc.) as well as techniques for creating and improving images. There is a lot of information on special effects, which doesn't interest me as a digital photographer. My wife teaches Photoshop in high school, and the kids love the special effects stuff.However, even if I disregard the sections on special effects, I consider the book a worthwhile addition to my Photoshop library. I wouldn't buy this as my first (or even second or third) Photoshop book, though.
Rating:
Summary: A Useful Book, With a Special Effects Focus
Review: This is a useful Photoshop book, with good information on basic techniques (selecting, layers, filters, tools, etc.) as well as techniques for creating and improving images. There is a lot of information on special effects, which doesn't interest me as a digital photographer. My wife teaches Photoshop in high school, and the kids love the special effects stuff. However, even if I disregard the sections on special effects, I consider the book a worthwhile addition to my Photoshop library. I wouldn't buy this as my first (or even second or third) Photoshop book, though.
Rating:
Summary: Ditto Ditto
Review: This is like buying a new Elton John record. Same old tired act. I've owned the previous Wow books and everytime am hoping for new material and actual sample files on the CD to use for the book tutorials. I think they just put a new cover on it and sent it out of the printer's shop. I wonder what the big wait was for, since the publicatin date was pushed up so many times. It couldn't have been new material added.
Rating:
Summary: Could have been so much better
Review: This is my first WOW book and I'm sorry to say I am greatly disappointed. I bought this book to learn more about Photoshop and I found a few good tips and tricks...But several images on the companion disk are mis-labeled or non-existent. I would like to go through each exercise to learn how things are done and if they don't give you the original images as a starting point, what good is it?
Rating:
Summary: Great Reading
Review: This was a great book with tons of tips and tutorials, it really improved my skills, and I've been using PS for a long while now.
Rating:
Summary: Save Your Money If You Have Photoshop 4 Wow Book
Review: To be honest I was extremely disappointed, I was hoping for an all new Photoshop 5 Wow book with new, never before seen tips and techniques and instead I got Photoshop 4 Wow book in disguise with a new cover. This book is a re-hash of the Photoshop 4 Wow Book, they just re-vamped it to reflect the new changes in Photoshop 5/5.5. There is really nothing new in this book. This book is fine for the person who never had previous Photoshop Wow books, but for those who own Photoshop 4 Wow like I do, it's nothing more than a trip down memory lane. Plus, I have been using Photoshop 4 Wow with Photoshop 5 program and it is very easy to adapt the techniques to Photoshop 5.0/5.5. So if you have Photoshop 4 Wow book, I would hold out until Photoshop 6 Wow and beyond is released.
|
