Customer Reviews

How to Do Everything with Photoshop CS

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Colin does it yet again... Although this book at first glance appears targeted at beginners to the software, Colin steps things up a few notches by delivering sound information and quality techniques that intermediate and even advanced users of Photoshop will find useful and informative. Colin is not only an exceptional teacher of all things 'graphic', but check out his forum and website at www.photoshopcafe.com and you will find he is a heck of a nice guy to boot. 4000+ members to his forum alone can't be wrong!

Colin has a well established presence in the gurus of Photoshop league. The book is nothing short of what you would expect. It is well layed out, with easy to follow instructions and helpful screen shots in color, to guide reader. I recommend it for beginner to advanced level users of Photoshop CS.

This books serves as an excellent teaching tool and all around great resource for Photoshop users of any level. It's well structured, with easy to understand content. What I like the most is that the book is filled with full color images and screen shots for easy reference. It's very hands on. Excellent value for the price.

The below review was written by someone who clearly does not value good advice.

I learned abotu so many features in photoshop, that I would have probably never ever explored! Really gives you insight to things you never thought neccesary.

You don't need images to have this book teach you, the instruction is perfect as is.

I got the book a little while ago, and couldn't wait to go through it. I was afraid it would be a step by step droning writer, but I don't think I could have any further from the reality. I think everyone will benefit from the in depth examples, and the greatest part about the book is so much valuable content contained in those pages. If you haven't ordered this book, I highly urge you to as soon as you possibly can.

Before I end this review I would like to add that the Camera Raw plugin is only valuable to people that own those cameras, and I am sure that is why the author didn't include it.

-mkeefe

Just a bit of background on my skill level with Photoshop. I took a 2 day course about six months ago and through my job did a minute amount of hands-on practical usage of that training. Hence my review of the book comes from some basic knowledge of how Photoshop works, but I definitely fall in the beginner category. This review was accomplished strictly by reading the book and evaluating it without confirming the accuracy of the authors descriptions of actual procedures. Since reading the book I have installed Photoshop CS on my home computer and look forward to spending time learning more about it.

For readers of this book, and probably particularly for the beginning level Photoshop program users, I found there to be numerous presentation 'glitches' that made the book difficult.

The first thing that I found was that while reading a description of a process, or an action, I would be referred to a specific figure; not at all uncommon in any how-to book. The problem with this book was that more often than was acceptable, the figure was on another page. I spent way too much time cycling between the figure and the text. Sometimes the figure was on the previous page - sometimes on the next page.

Early on in reading the book I was generous and told myself space can be a reason for figures not always being in close proximity to the descriptive text, but as I continued from chapter to chapter I found it less easy to be forgiving. I got the impression that "they", the author/designer/editor, were trying to fill the pages with as much as they could...minimizing 'white space' and keeping the page count to a minimum. I would much prefer paying a few more dollars for a book with more pages, than paging back and forth to make sense of what they are trying to teach me.

I found the labeling of figures to be, at times, confusing. There was no consistency in where a figure was labeled - on top, left, right, or bottom of the figure. When you combine this technique with crowding too much on a particular page it only exacerbates the readers confusion. In addition, figures frequently depicted multiple screen views with one overall figure number and alphabetic designators for each screen view. These alphabetic designators were so small in relation to the figure that they took time to find...all while you were reading the description, flipping back and forth to find the figure, and then isolating the correct letter! Toward the end of the book the designers would occasionally drop figure numbers altogether, and just refer to the area "below", or "the second illustration".

I encountered more than a few descriptions of actions that had figures or screen views that did not reflect what was being described, or inadequate descriptions. Some of the 'before and after' images didn't reflect much, if any change and in one instance the 'before' was on one page and the 'after' on the subsequent page. Made for a difficult comparison. I got the impression when processes were described and no sense could be made, that the author forgot the reader was a beginner.

There was one instance where, after reading a description and being totally lost, it wasn't until the next page that a figure showed what had been described. There was no mention of an associated figure with the earlier description. Generally when the author mentioned something in the text and intended to address it later, he would add a note, "See Chapter -", but there were times when I was left wondering if I'd find out more later or not.

I encountered quite a few typos, words missing, extra words, incorrect grammar, and figure number errors.

Throughout the book the author has inserted "Tips" and "Notes". It was confusing (and inconsistent) what was put in as a Tip, and what was a Note. One Tip that really amazed me was "learn to use the tools...will save you lots of time." Well, duh! Sometimes a Note was Tip, sometimes a Tip was a Note. Some of the notes were inane, almost like advertising what would be seen in subsequent chapters.

As the book progressed the author made poor attempts at humor; I certainly didn't buy the book to be entertained.

Despite my criticisms of the numerous negative presentation aspects of the book, I feel that it is technically a very good resource for the beginning Photoshop CS user. The readers can prepare themselves for lots of page flipping during the climb up the learning curve, but will ultimately have a very useful book to help them to understand the features and capabilities of Photoshop CS.

Everything? Come on, get serious. This sorry book never even mentions the ability of CS to work with raw camera files and its ability to do most things in 15 bit color -- probably the two most important innovations for digital photographers. The book should have been named "How to do in Photoshop CS the same things you used to do in Photoshop 7, with a couple of additions." It's just a re-hash of its ancestors.

It's obvious that the author was thinking of the reader when writing this book. He quickly gets to the point on the most important issues a Photoshop user needs to know. I wish this author would write a similar book on Adobe GoLive CS.

A one-stop shop for beginners...This book is very user friendly and set up as a nice resource for thumbing through looking for something you saw but forgot how to do. Looking forward to more of Colin's stuff

I am a kind of collector of Photoshop books, from beginner's level to advanced. I found this book one of the best Photoshop books ever-made, also because the author has succeeded in explaining in simple and clear way advanced topics such as for example channels (p.136) and layer blending modes (p.126). The book (contrarily to many other Photoshop books) is full in color, and I recommend it for beginners and even for advanced users (thanks to the bonus section at the end " Behind the Scenes - a gallery with techniques from the pros"). Suggestion for the next edition: please made the photos showed in the book available on a Web site or on an attached CD !