Customer Reviews

Photoshop 6 Artistry

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Being both a professional graphic designer & webmaster and a part-time photography buff, I get the opportunity to use Photoshop regularly. With the introduction of Photoshop 6, Adobe added quite a few new features that will really interest those of you who are into editing photos.

Barry Haynes has published previous versions of this book, which I must admit, I had never read. Now after having had the opportunity to read this one, I have to say, I am sorry I didn't read his books sooner. This book rocks. It contains a TON of information not only about photo editing, but also the using of Photoshop to a truly advanced level. I think the reason this book is so extremely useful is due to the fact that the author is a professional photographer. This means he has personally practiced what he is preaching. The layout of the book is easy to read and done in full color throughout. The book is part regular instructional text and part hands-on projects using materials found on the accompanying disc.

Both the instructional material and the projects are extremely detailed. While the book assumes a level of knowledge, it does however work really hard to help you gain that professional edge. After reading this book, I felt both inspired and prepared to push some serious pixels. I have to warn beginners out there that this will blow them all away. This is definitely an intermediate to advanced book. If you are a beginner, I suggest you try Scott Kelby's Photo-Retouching Secrets (ISBN: 0735711461). Once you master that, run to the store and buy this book.

This said, here is a run down what the book contains:

SEC. 1 - ESSENTIAL TOOLS & FUNCTIONS (107 pp) Navigation, Preferences, Tool Palette, Picking & Using Color, Selections, Paths, Masks, Channels, Layers, Layer Masks, Adjustment Layers, History Palette, History Brush, Snapshots, Transform Images / Layers / Paths / Selections, File Formats / Compression and Automation with Actions.

SEC. 2 - COLOR CORRECTION AND CALIBRATION (100 pp) Color Corrections Tools, Digital Imaging and the Zone System, Color Spaces, Device Characterization, Color Management, Color Preferences, Monitor / Scanner / Printer Calibration, Image Resolution, Scanning Film, Digital Cameras and Steps to Create a Master Image.

SEC. 3 - OVERALL COLOR CORRECTION, SELECTION & LAYER TECHNIQUES (52 pp) Detailed Lasso, Quick Mask, Color Selection Techniques, Overall Color Correction, Correcting a Problem Image, Replacing Color, Color Range, Mask Blur for Selection, Color Change and Color Matching Images.

SEC. 4 - ADVANCED COLOR CORRECTION AND RESTORATION TECHNIQUES (26 pp) Duotones, Complex Color Correction and Retouching, Restoring Old Photos, Colorizing B&W Photos, Combining Bracketed Photos or Two Scans to Increase Dynamic Range, LAB Color Correction and Using Layers to Tune Opposite Color Areas.

SEC. 5 - COMPOSITING MULTIPLE IMAGES WITH LAYERS, ADJUSTMENT LAYERS & LAYER MASKS (26 pp) Basic Composting, Seamless Composites, Color Correction of People and Complex Composite Production Ad.

SEC. 6 - CALCULATIONS, PATTERNS, FILTERS, COMPOSTING AND EFFECTS (82 pp) Blend Modes, Calculations, Apply Image, Layer Clipping Paths, Shape Layers, Layer Styles, Posterize, Bitmaps, Textures, Patterns, Using Built in Filters & Effects and Considerations for Multimedia, Premiere, Director, After Effects and the Web.

SEC. 7 - IMAGES FOR THE WEB AND MULTIMEDIA (30 pp) Differences in Creating for the Web and 8-bit Color, Optimizing Images for the Web & Multimedia, Creating Your Own Web Photo Gallery and Creating Slices / Animations / Rollovers in ImageReady.

It is by far the most comprehensive Photoshop book for touching up and manipulating photographs out in the market.

Normally, Photoshop is used for three purposes:
1. Photographers use it to touch up and manipulate photos.
2. Graphic Designer use it to make logos, etc.
3. Web designers use it to design web page layouts and web graphics.

If you belong to the first category, you simply will not be able to buy a better book than this.

Most how-to-books are filled with large illustrations and words in big fonts. Photoshop Artistry, on the other hand has tons of rather small full color photographs on every page with tiny texts. If the Photoshop 6 Artistry was layed out like the typical how-to-books, it will become a 3000-5000 page text book. It is that packed with useful information.

The book is well written and easy to understand by most beginners to the advanced photoshop user. I can see how some (not all) absolute photoshop beginner might be overwhelmed by the depth and the breadth of the information in the book. My recommendation to the beginner is to buy this book first. And if you have trouble understanding it, buy an intro book and read that first and come back to Photoshop Artistry. Your money will not be wasted by buying this book first because you will find yourself coming back to this book over and over again. (A good beginner book I recommend is Adobe Photoshop 6.0 Class in A Book by Adobe Press)

Again, if you are using Photoshop to manipulate photos there is no better book than this. Many photographers I met online consider this book as the Bible of digital imaging. Now I understand why. On the other hand if you are using Photoshop for web layouts, your needs may be better served by another book.

This is an excellent book. It is thorough and well-written. It's definitely for the photographer, rather than the graphics artist. It covers the underlying details you need to understand before you can be successful in making your photos into what you want them to be. I had the predecessor (PS 5 Artistry), and was happy to get the updated edition.
This is the kind of book that you'll read many of the sections over and over. Not because they're hard to understand, but because they are so thorough and complete. Photoshop is a complex tool, and as you learn more about one area, you'll realize you can go back and better understand other areas of the tool.
The information density is very high in this book. The print is small but easy to read. There are a lot of words (and information) on every page. The quality of the book is very high. It is in full color, and has scores of images and screen shots.
The book has two basic parts. An overview and theory part, and a step-by-step example part. The two sections are VERY complimentary. You'll get to the examples, and realize you are ready to go back and read more about the theory. All of the examples are provided on the supplied CD, including before, during and after versions of most so you can do the examples yourself, and then compare your work to Barry's. I have done most of the examples (there are many), and I was always able to understand what to do, and when I was done, I was ready to apply what I'd learned to my own photographs.
I have looked at many of the Photoshop titles in bookstores, but this is the only one so far that I own. I keep looking for a better or more thorough book but I haven't found it yet. Sometimes Barry tends to be a bit conversational, as other reviews have noted, but to me this simply makes the book more enjoyable. He not only shares his knowledge, but also his experiences. It's well written and interesting, not dry. It is not filled with endless descriptions of every detail of every tool. If you want PS manual, this isn't it. But it does thoroughly explain all of the tools that you'll use for manipulating photographs, they way Barry uses them (which he does well).
Barry is excited about the changes in PS 6, which at first I didn't fully appreciate, but now do after reading this book. This book is fully updated for PS 6, and includes some walkthroughs that weren't in his PS 5 Artistry book. I have been completely satisfied with PS 5 Artistry, and now with PS 6 Artistry.
Enjoy!

After three years of sifting through seemingly endless texts on Photoshop, I am able to competently make my way through the program and earn a full-time salary using it. I thought there was little that I could learn from yet another book until I was sent by my employer to Santa Fe Workshops for a class on print-making taught by Barry Haynes. I bought this book shortly before leaving and spent the flight out there flipping through it.

Shortest four-hour plane trip I ever took.

For those new to Photoshop, this is not the tool for you.... yet. For those who want to understand and use the remarkable new color management tools of the program, this is without a doubt the way to go. The detailed exercises will soon have you up to speed using new tools and techniques to save time in editing and money in print supplies. Barry seems to intuitively understand what it is that Photoshop veterans need to know and he answers those questions in this volume with panache. The section on Color Spaces, Color Management and Color Correction are alone worth the price of admission. Additionally, the companion cd, usually a waste of plastic in many books of this type, contains invaluable tools that will have you accessing it for months. I have finally met the master and his name is Barry.

By the way, the workshop in Santa Fe was great. Barry teaches the Photoshop gospel in New Mexico, West Palm Beach and at his home in Oregon. Check his website for details. I found his class on color correction and print making to be the best I've taken and for the professional in search of the finest in Photoshop training, I don't hesitate to recommend it. If you can't get to Oregon, buy the book. It's the next best thing to being there. (Have I heard that before?)

I am a photographer and web designer, so I use photoshop on a regular basis. I have more than 10 photoshop books, and this one is by far the best. Most of the books deal with one side of the photoshop and not the other. This one takes you step by step, from setting up your preferences (I have yet to see a book, besides this one, which does this) to teaching you everything that you have to know about this great application. This is a must have for a photographer, and anybody who is interested in learning advanced Photoshop 6.0

Photoshop 6 Artistry, Mastering the Digital Image AUTHOR: Barry Haynes and Wendy Crumpler PUBLISHER: New Riders REVIEWED BY: Barbara Rhoades

BOOK REVIEW: Photoshop 6 Artistry comes with a CD-ROM to help you learn all the techniques in this 465-page book. It is very detail and doesn't leave out any of Photoshop's uses. The book contains color photos and in-depth explanations about every menu in Photoshop 6. An 11-page Table of Content and a 23-page index gives the read some idea of how much detail the authors go into.

This is a book that will take many hours to work through and is reminiscent of the texts for many college courses with its smaller print. Photoshop 6 would be the perfect book to have if you want to learn every aspect of this program. Just remember, it will not be a one-night learning session.

This well-written, easy to follow instructional book allows even novice Photoshop users to edit and manipulate their photographs. Written more for the photographer than the graphic artist, the book walks you step by step through such steps as duotones, perspective adjustment, color and contrast adjustment, and spotting. An excellent book for the photographer moving from the darkroom to the computer.

I'm not a professional Photoshop user, but I play one around the office, and consider myself an intermediate-to-advanced Photoshopper, having "developed" tens of thousands of digital photographs thereby. I have a total of four Photoshop 6 books; Photoshop 6 Artistry is far and away the worst of the four. To wit:

- The many misspellings, grammatical and technical errors, and mismatched and incorrectly labeled diagrams make this book a chore to follow and a pronounced displeasure to read. The first spelling error ("persue") appears less than 100 words into the book, followed by glaring errors at what seem like every turn of the page. The diagram illustrating the Channel Palette icons (Chapter 2, page 8) is confusingly incorrect for the uninitiated, showing the same icon four times with different functions listed below each. Literally dozens of the hundreds of diagrams in this book contain similar inconsistencies. Technical inaccuracies include the explanation of feathering; several different explanations all state that a feathering value of "x" equates to a total feather-effect width of 2 times x, when in fact the total effect width is much greater.

- The entire book is geared towards Mac users, making almost no concession for Windows' command modifiers (Control vs. Command, Alt vs. Option) other than two paragraphs in the early chapters.

- The many "Hands-On Session" chapters, while very thorough in listing the steps used to achieve a certain effect, seem contrived for the images shown and don't transfer easily to general techniques. The author spends far too much time giving specific instructions that mirror his image-enhancement techniques without explaining the "why" behind the work, a la giving someone a fish instead of teaching him how to fish.

- The techniques themselves are lacking in many key areas -- too much emphasis is placed on using the conventional selection tools, the Curves tool isn't used to anywhere near its potential, and sharpening techniques are glossed over and not explained in detail. ("You will have to run some tests to determine the type and amount of sharpening that works best for your different categories of images and output devices." And how!)

- The images printed in the book lack sharpness, depth, and most importantly, detail. Many of the Before/After images look almost exactly the same, and do not illustrate the point being made in the text. The houses on page 101, for example, are supposed to illustrate varying degrees of .JPG compression, and fail to do so.

As you can tell, I'm very disappointed that I purchased this book. I highly recommend the Photoshop 6 Shop Manual (by Donnie O'Quinn) as the ultimate resource for every action/menu item/option within Photoshop, and Professional Photoshop 6 (by Dan Margulis) as the ultimate guide to color-correction techniques within Photoshop. Photoshop 6 Artistry: Mastering the Digital Image may be suitable for beginners (although Adobe's included-with-the-software guide is much more practical) and learn-by-rote students, but it's not for me.

Photoshop 6 Artistry contains very detailed and descriptive information on Photoshop 6 which is not found in the Photoshop 6 manual. It gives the reader the ability to become proficient in the use of most every aspect of Photoshop. While this book contains lots of useful and very detailed information, it is very hard to follow because it is written in a conversational style. Because of this it contains information which can be confusing. It addresses many topics which are not directly related to the main subject. It also contains circular references. For example many paragraphs or sections make reference to other chapters, web sites, and apparently pertinent information to be found elsewhere. It also has not been tightly edited as evidenced by numerous typographical errors. This also makes it hard to read.

Excellent book. In short this book is for:

1. photographers more then artists. Most of the examples are about photo's

2. in full color with loads of pictures that explain the steps and menu's. I counted on average 2 or 3 color pictures per page with a few lines of text about what is done. This is where this books shines and distinquish itself from other books.

3. it's obvious that the author(s) has a lot of experience with Photoshop, the book tells you best practice of how to do things. Good examples that are meaningful and useful.

4. it's not an easy book, there is a lot to read in a small font with the initial and finished examples on the cd. A book to learn, not a quick reference book.

5. A lot of depth, a lot of things are discussed in depth in 448 pages.

4. note that there's a version Photoshop v7 out now if you own 7.