Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre at best
Review: This book is essentially a book on layer styles. 90% of the lessons are BASED almost entirely on slapping on a layer style. Rarely does the author show you how to make a style, most of the time you are instructed to use a default, or worse use one from the CD-ROM -this isn't learning!! The book is well formatted and look's good on a coffee table. The cover is nice, the layout is nice. But they book's content is very shallow. The first 4-5 lessons were pretty good in my opinion but after that the book became very redundant. Every lesson starts with applying a style to slightly different shape, and ends with creating a SLIGHTLY different gif animation in Image Ready. Any half intelligent human would only need 1/4 of this examples. Do you really need someone to show you how to animate a blue sailboat across the screen, then follow that up with how to animate a green sailboat, then a yellow one. Hey Mr. Foster what happens if I'm ever am confronted with a purple sailboat, I won't know what to do?! There was no sailboat lesson really, but my point is the book teaches the same concepts over and over and over. 15 of the 21 lessons are slight variations of the exact same concept. The quality of the end result in most cases is also fairly low. Gif animations are ugly and annoying enough usually, but if you use the authors examples... well, please don't. Examples include, the old text 'Sale' in an exploding star shape animated to fly at the viewer; animations of text dripping and twisting and bending and twirling (all different lessons of course), and looping over and over again. There seem to be 2 types of Photoshop users, those who want to press a button and be immediately sastisfied with an instant 'magic' result, and those who want to understand how the program really works. I would like to think that users with experience (which is this book's target) would not fall into the instant result category, but based on the number of 5 star reviews of this book, this is not the case. I suspect some of these reviewers haven't finished the book, I liked the book when I was on chapter 4. The book should be really be called 'PS 6 Style Application Gimmicktry'. This is not a 5 star book. There are so many great photoshop books available that it would be best to get another one with more insight and less gimmicks. Generally the magic books are a good series, but this one's an exception.
Rating: 
Summary: Hands on - and coool stuff - in colors!
Review: This is THE additional book you will benefit from owning when working with Photoshop 6/Image Ready 3!
Large pages, deliciously laid out. Practical format to have between your monitor and keyboard! (It's wide pages stay open even if you lean the book towards the monitor, I have tried it, so I know!)
The illustrations are in colors, wow, wich is rare in the how-to-book-business. The illustrations are also very explaining, you see in an instant what you will get by doing what the text tells you to.
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