Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop CS2: Photographers' Guide

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

 

 

The book attempts to do what many photoshop books do, cram the basics, with some technique, throw in a bit of advanced stuff and leave you with a bit of everything in the end. A majority of the photos used in the book are average. Topics which I think are crucial to the art include colour accuracy, getting the best rom RAW images, calibration, output control. All these topics were lightly touched on with no real meaty goodness.

The book feels suited towards the beginner, but I believe there are better choices

I think you'd be better of with Martin Evan's Photoshop for Photographers for a more focused, indepth book on the topic, and possibly a general book covering aspects of Photoshop, perhaps Real World Photoshop by Bruce Fraser.

I liked the idea of this book, providing people with a background in conventional photography with a book to learn photoshop. The end result is really poor though. Some of my complaints with this book are:

Commands are listed in the wrong menus. The excercises are poorly explained. But the worst for me is that at the end of an excercise he will say things like "for my final image I combined this with another version in which I had edited it to..." with absolutely no details of how this would be done. In most cases these statements actually require editing that is more complicated than what has been presented, and use entirely different techniques. So, if you are a photoshop guru I suppose you could do this, but if you are trying to learn it is useless.

Also, the photos really aren't very good. There is an example in which he refers to "brightening a scene". Of course, he doesn't mean "brightening" he means changing the colour cast, by changing the hue and saturation. His end result that he says looks "much better" is horrible. He does make the sky look good, but he winds up with a purple lake.

There are much better books out there on photoshop, keep looking...

Exactly what the title says. I would've learned more by just fiddling with Photoshop.