Adobe Photoshop 5.0 Classroom in a Book [Paperback]

Adobe Creative Team (Author), Adobe Press (Author)

Book Description

Series: Classroom in a Book (Adobe) | Publication Date: June 9, 1998

Adobe Photoshop 5 Classroom in a Book teaches users to master Photoshop 5.0 in short, focused lessons that explore all of Adobe Photoshop's tools and techniques. By following along with the cross-platform CD and the book's lessons, readers get hands-on experience mastering the most powerful graphics application available. The illustrations and text guide the reader through results they can see on the screen, teaching techniques that can be immediately put to use.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book is an excellent tool for learning how to use Adobe Photoshop 5 for Macintosh and Windows. The writers--actually a team from Adobe--guide you through the basic and advanced tasks of using the image editor and paint program to create and enhance a wide variety of photographs and images.

You don't need to know the previous versions of the program to get right to work. You use the practice files on the included hybrid CD-ROM as you follow the lessons throughout the book. There are step-by-step instructions, explanations of features, and plenty of illustrations to help you as you work, and each chapter has review questions and answers.

First you learn the basics of the interface as you tour the options for selecting, using layers and filters, painting, retouching, and saving files. Next, you learn the essentials of opening files, navigating the interface, getting help, and creating layers and selections. After that the chapters get much more specific, teaching you how to use the paint, editing, and pen tools; work with selections, masks, channels, and layers; and apply photo-retouching techniques and special effects. You also learn how to combine graphics from Adobe Illustrator with those from Photoshop, prepare images for the Web, manage two-color print jobs, and fine-tune color preferences for ideal output. The projects involve both fine art and commercial art---everything from composite images to color-corrected photographs. Finally, you work with Adobe ImageReady 1.0, the new package for creating images and animations for the Web and other multimedia projects.

A full-color section shows you the finished artwork from the various chapters, color models, and, in a few cases, the various versions of an image as you apply changes to it. This section also shows you how to use all the Toolbox tools, including the selection, paint, stamp, sharpen, sponge, pen, type, gradient, eyedropper, zoom, and measure tools. This section is particularly helpful for users who are trying to get up to speed with Photoshop's many features. This tutorial will take you well past basic interface issues and have you creating some pretty amazing images.

From Library Journal

Both of these Adobe books are excellent self-paced training guides; they would also make excellent in-class texts for anyone teaching these tools. Less well-known than Photoshop, Premier allows the manipulation and editing of multimedia, including video, animation, and static graphics. The CD-ROMs include all examples and lesson files, but you will need your own copies of the programs actually to use the lessons. The Photoshop book includes coverage of Adobe's new product for web graphics, ImageReady, and given Photoshop's broad popularity, it belongs in most collections. Premier is for larger collections.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: MacMillan Computer Publishing USA; The Official Training Workbook developed by the staff of Adobe edition (June 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568304668
• ISBN-13: 978-1568304663
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #492,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great hands-on tutorial, April 28, 2000

By 

+++ (OR, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop 5.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

Adobe Photoshop "Classroom in a Book" belongs to the series of "hands-on software training workbooks", published by Adobe. This book is written by people who know Photoshop better than anyone else, and is apparently intended to be an exercise book additional to the Photoshop manual. Indeed, it even uses some of the images which appear in the Photoshop manual. However, it can as well be used as an independent tutorial. The book is amazingly well written. Each chapter briefly explains the function of the tools discussed below, and then offers a practical lesson using images from the enclosed CD. The language of the book is very concise and easy to understand, which makes it suitable for people with every background, from middle-school students to professionals. The balance between the complexity of the tasks and the amount of information to learn is very well maintained. Description of the steps to follow is very accurate. I found only few minor mistakes in the text, which did not cause any significant misunderstandings.

Despite all these advantages, two issues should be emphasized to avoid disappointment. First, this book does not contain much more than can be found in the Photoshop Manual or online help. Therefore, this book can be recommended primarily for the beginners, maybe for some people on the intermediate level, who are learning the basic techniques of Photoshop. It does not go into details of how photoshop can be used to make those amazing tricks with photographs which can be done by photoshop experts. Secondly, this book IS a workbook, a practical tutorial, but not more than that. This means that you read it from the beginning to the end, do the tutorials, hopefully learn a lot, but most likely will never use this book again. This book is not a good reference, and it makes little sense to repeat the lessons more than once or twice. Therefore this book frequently appears on Amazon auctions, sold by people who used it and do not need it anymore. But it is still a great book!

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Need a quick and dirty jump start.....?, March 8, 2000

By 

Mark Clyde - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop 5.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

Just get your hands on the software? Started the program for the very first time and watched your screen fill up with all those different windows and wonder - "Oh my God. Where in the world do I start?" Photoshop manual a little overwhelming?

Then buy this book! Seasoned photoshop-ers will more than likely not find this book of too much value, but for the beginners (or even tried and true users of other graphics editing software) will most assuredly find their dollars well spent on this book. The software has SO MUCH to offer. This book will not cover all of it. But if you need to familiarize yourself with the specifics, and you like learning from a structured and well organized presentation, then this book is for you.

However, the book does assume that you are familliar with the basics of computers (i.e. file management, navigation, etc.) It will, at the very least, get you off on the right foot and have you working with images from the very first page. Where you go from having finished the book is entirely up to you, but you'll have a WAYYYY better feel of the software and be much more educated as to just which book you need to buy next. (Personally, I found the Photoshop 5 Bible - Gold Edition to be my favorite bookshelf reference material.)

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW.......If I had only discovered this series earlier, November 1, 1999

By 

Adobe Fanatic (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop 5.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

I just spent a great deal of money to learn this program. If I had only had the book sooner, I could of saved almost a months rent. The book is designed to teach all users of all skill levels at a pace in which they feel comfortable. Each lesson is laid out logically in a very dynamic user freindly fashion. You are immediately impressed with the programs ability before even making it past page 23. What I liked best about this style of book was that you can learn at your own pace. You decide when its time to move forward. It takes the functions that you learn on one lesson and incorporates them into the next. Therefore enhancing and strengthning your knowledge. I am so impressed with the series that I will be purchasing the remainder of the books available for the programs I already own