Customer Reviews

Julie King's Everyday Photoshop for Photographers

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This is the second book about Photoshop that I bought. I started with How to Wow Photoshop for Photography... when I found you already need quite a bit of foundations to work with this book (I will let you know how it works when I get there). So the following week I went to the bookstore and go through all the beginners Photoshop books I could find.
This one caught my atention and I have to say that it has totally opened my eyes to PS. I haven't finished reading it yet (four chapters to go) but I am already able to adjust exposures and colors with levels and curves, adjustment layers, crop without altering the quality of the image... Awesome, all that in two weeks! Every single effect explained in the text has worked for me. The flow of the book, although a little boring at the beginning (two chapters making selections), works very well (I had to go back to those two chapters many times).
Also appreciated the lack of technical language and the moderate sense of humor that keeps you up without feeling you are being fooled with stupidities.
Overall, I am amazed of the profusion of details, for both PS 7 and CS, Windows and Mac operating systems, tricks to speed and improve your work, pictures ilustrating the before and after of the technique and almost every step in between!.
If you have been scared of Photoshop as I was, this is your book. It will help you go through the basic operations you need to improve your photographies and prepare them to print or share on the internet.

Before I use a book, I give it a feel test. I'm looking for a useful feel; is it inviting, does it compel me to open it, are the pages easy to read, is it easy to navigate, does the index work? Julie King's Everyday Photoshop for Photographers, passes all my preliminary feel tests with high marks.

The pages are laid out so the chapter headings flip across the top in an easy to read fashion. They are large and descriptive, so when I searched for masking, I flipped quickly to Chapter 6, Selective Editing: Masking in Photoshop. The right hand page lists the Part section in vertical type. I really appreciate a book that flips well.

The information presented utilizes brief concise paragraphs with lots of bulleting and bold headers. Snippets of important information are specifically color coded to content, Remember(Blue), Watch Out!(Red), and Time Saver(Green). These are strategically placed with excellent information.

However, when working with a subject such as Photoshop, it is extremely important to visualize the techniques discussed with images reflecting sometimes subtle differences. There's just nothing worse than portraying Photoshop results with lousy pictures. King has an excellent collection of high quality images that faithfully reproduce the techniques discussed. They are bright, clear and visualize even the most subtle Photoshop effects. The qualities of the images are crucial to the text and often self-explaining.

Included are excellent screen shots of Photoshop's tools and palettes. They are easy on the eyes in the context of the text. Tables list speed keys for tools and commands. King also added Tool Tricks, more blocked snippets of ready to use information such as:

Press a number key to adjust the opacity of the next stroke you paint with the Brush tool or Clone tool. Press 0 for full opacity, 9 for 90 percent opacity, 8 for 80 percent opacity, and so on. To adjust opacity in increments smaller than ten, type the specific value: 85, 23 or whatever.

King provides a basic background on the use of Photoshop, how to move around within it, providing basic element descriptions using common, everyday language that a novice user can understand and relate easily. She discusses manipulating photographs via cropping and color controls, masking techniques, levels filter use to control exposure and color variances, remixing and replacing colors, fixing defects with the cloning tool and healing brush. Her text will be useful to the novice or the expert.

Mary Kuster
Member, D-MAG.org

I have learned sailing, chess, computor languages, photography, tennis, and other skills out of a book. Personally Photoshop is a very user unfriendly software package but also the most capable one as well. After getting this book 1-2 years ago, it has been used extensively. The directions are excellent and the clarity is remarkable. Without question, I would recommend this book to any begginer using Photoshop. There really is no better book. I still refer to it often.

I purchased the Photoshop book primarily because of my good experience with Ms King's book, D90 for Dummies. I was not disappointed. Writers of software sometimes unintentionally obfuscate the instructions for their products. Ms King clears the muddy waters splendidly.