Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills

by Mark Galer, Philip Andrews

An inspirational and user-friendly guide to creative image editing, this book provides direction for photographers and designers alike who have ventured into the realm of the 'digital darkroom.' Photoshop Essential Skills offers a progressive curriculum to guide you through Photoshop with a series of clear, step-by-step projects designed to place knowledge into a practical context. You will build a useful and essential set of skills for creative and professional image editing and, whether you simply want to retouch an image, create a glamour makeover or create a highly sophisticated montage - this book will give you the essential skills to complete the work to a professional standard.

The accompanying CD-ROM and website, www.photoshopessentialskills.com, offer additional teaching and learning support materials which form a library of indispensable supporting resources All of the images used in the text * Over four hours of QuickTime movie tutorials to support the practical projects * A range of presets (including layer styles, curves, shapes and gradients) * Camera RAW files * Free extra chapters in e-book form.

384 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2005

Reviews

[Andrew Ives · Rating 3 out of 5]

(without the CD) Let me start by saying that I've been using CS2 for about 10yrs and Photoshop, almost daily, since v1 on Win95, so I'm hardly a beginner. That said, I had hoped to pick up a few hints and tips from what is, a very thick, colourful and official-looking book that I found for 50p in a charity shop. There is a slight Mac bias here, although Windows users won't exactly get lost because of it. The first 100 pages or so really dragged by, with details of the ins and outs of every monitor, printer, paper, ink, scanner, camera and file format. The author is primarily interested in using Photoshop as a photographer might, rather than as a web graphics designer, artist, games programmer or anyone else might. If you're one of those, basically, you're out of luck, although the photos included here are very pretty and well reproduced. By the time we start to actually learn anything useful (p104), regarding layers and channels, the rate of progress is at times so very slow (due to repetition, going through simple tasks in a long-winded way, and being bogged down with details) and at other times overly fast (due to mentioning some functions then skipping past without much detail). The writing was rather sloppy and 'jocular' in a website or magazine-like way. I was reading Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days at the same time and the contrast in intelligence and writing quality was striking. This book would benefit from a quick run through with a spellchecker and I'm fairly sure "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" was by Keats, not your dad. The authors seem to love masks and the awkward pen tool, yet the useful types of fill and the powerful 3D lighting function are glossed over with nary a mention. Montage projects 8, 9 and 10 are hardly what I would call convincing. No8 is unpleasantly ugly, the light source in No9 is coming from the wrong direction, and the flower in No10 looks superimposed onto the sand. For some of the other examples, I would argue the Photoshop work actually worsens the original picture, or at least the improvements are negligible. Special Effects projects 4 and 5 at the every end are very easy and basic, again repeating fundamental procedures that even the doziest learner should've grasped by now, whereas earlier projects are long-winded and more difficult. Suddenly, the book ends without any kind of 'things you might like to try' suggestions. Essentially, they have managed to take what is an intrinsically fun and interesting pastime, making it as tiresome and arduous as can be. I'm sure many learners will give up halfway through this, yet even those that go the distance to the very end might hardly consider themselves much more adept after all that they have learned here. Just about 3/5