Customer Reviews

Be a Photoshop Guru - Unlocking the Hidden Genius Behind Photoshop's Tools

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
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Jim Zuckermans "Be a Photoshop Guru" DVD is a wonderful training tool for people who edit & enhance images in Photoshop. Jim shows you how to create actions, use selection tools, easily replace skies & backgrounds, make composites, add reflections, simulate polarizers & many other editing tools.
I have been using Photoshop for 8 years and have taken a couple of Photoshop classes with Jim (through Better Photo) so I already knew many of these techniques (I consider myself an intermediate/advanced user) but I still learned new tricks and better ways to accomplish editing tasks more efficiently after watching this DVD.
If you are a beginner/intermediate PS user and are not familiar with the tools & editing techniques listed in these lessons, you will be using these tools with ease very quickly. They are essential tools for everyday Photoshop users and will elevate your image editing capabilities. You will be able to transform that dull/flat photo with a white sky into a rich, vibrant work of art in just a few easy steps.

Very educational DVD.

Be aware, it is a DVD disk with computer files for viewing on a PC, not a DVD movie for watching on the TV.

I love the way Jim Zuckerman go through the different procedures and demonstrates everything in a simple manner. He touched on a couple of these in his DVD New England Color - Field Techniques for Great Pictures after following his suggestions there I decided it was a good idea to get this DVD for a more complete instruction. It is. Layers, selecting just certain parts of the photo, replacing things like Sky or a background and much more are covered in good detail, that even someone compleatly new to Photoshop can learn. In Photography school I had to pay a couple hundred dollors on books to learn Photoshop as part of the class. I think they should scrap them and just have a person buy this DVD. Much simpler to learn and covers most of what the books do. It is by far the better deal.

The one thing that does annoy me is I had to move the files from the disk to my hard drive and use Quicktime to watch it. This is easy, all you have to do is open it from "MY Computer" and drag and drop the listed files into a Folder and run it through Quicktime. If you use a Mac it should be similar or even easier since Quicktime is a Apple program. It will not run in a regular DVD player or Windows Media Player. I have never really liked Quicktime as I don't think Apple ever came out with a version that worked yet. Xbox360 reads it as a mixed disk so it even failed. I would of much prefer it to run like a regular disk so I can relax on the couch when watching it instead of sitting at the PC.

This is still a great DVD and well worth getting. I have already watched it twice in the past day I have had it, and am having a blast going through all my photos on the PC thinking of all the things I can now do with them. I plan on also buying his other Photoshop DVD and hope it is more regular player friendly.

This DVD have my higher recommendation. It teaches you an easy and comprehensive way to see photoshop. I have learned with this DVD more than with classes that I have taken including books.
If you want to learn short cuts to photoshop and produced wonderful products, this is the DVD to buy.

This DVD is like the other DVD I reviewed by Jim Zuckerman. The DVD is for advance users but, amatuers can learn a lot from what he illustrates as well. Jim shows powerful ways to create creative photos. He goes over the tools that he uses most in order to create the effects he captures.

Amazing, absolutely amazing. If you've ever wanted to look over the shoulder of a master photographer in his "lab", this is your chance.

Jim moves these projects along at a perfect pace, explaining the how's and why's as he goes. He has a real easy going style and is very articulate. As someone said earlier, you can watch these videos over and over again.

I also purchased Jim's "Dazzling Photoshop" video, and feel the same about it. In that DVD, he emphasizes particular photo projects with the way he groups the lessons, rather than by different skills as in this one. Both are packed with information and technique.

While these videos are not specific to any particular version of Photoshop, they are geared somewhat toward the most recent versions up to CS4 -- I can hardly wait to see what Jim does with CS5!

Be A Photoshop Guru DVD is very informative and rewarding. He makes working with Photoshop® simple and easy to understand. His approach is straight forward step by step and he reveals his thought process as he attempts difference approaches to solve a problem. Layers, selecting just certain parts of the photo, coping to scratch pad, replacing the sky or a background, adding the moon to a scene and much more are covered in good detail. I recommend it to highly.

He presents important concepts used in Photoshop® rather than just a bunch of steps. Although, there are steps there, but if you don't understand the concepts, you will probably forget the steps. I did take notes to refer to later. I think of his DVD as a shorthand approach to many of the tools that I want to master. Not all of us spend 8 hours a day in front of Photoshop® so it's nice to see a fresh practical approach to solving routine problems.

Mr Zuckerman explains the techniques on his DVD in a relaxed, easy to understand way. He unlocks the "secrets" if you will. The only negative is my copy has a number of delays for 6 or 7 seconds that appear in random sections. I tried it on 3 computers so the disc must be defective. I decided to live with it instead of going through the hassle of returning. It is a minor irritation on an otherwise well produced product.

I found this an excellent presentation, for me it was spoilt because there was no access to any written notes.Very difficult to absorb everything during the presentation.!!