Photoshop CS Bible [Paperback]

Deke McClelland (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0764541781 | ISBN-13: 978-0764541780 | Publication Date: February 16, 2004 | Edition: 1st

"I've learned more from Deke's Photoshop Bible than any Photoshop book, ever."
- Scott Kelby, President, National Association of Photoshop Professionals

"When someone asks me something I don't know about Photoshop, I tell them to go read the Photoshop Bible. It does something no other book does - it tells you everything."
- Russell Preston Brown, Senior Creative Director, Adobe Systems

World-renowned Photoshop expert and Hall of Famer Deke McClelland has earned more than 20 industry awards and written over 60 books on computer graphics and design with more than 3 million copies in print. Now, in this thoroughly updated edition of his international bestseller, McClelland shows you how to master every aspect of Photoshop CS - from image-editing basics to new techniques for working with the File Browser, layer comps, Lens Blur, Match Color, the color replacement tool, customizable keyboard shortcuts, camera raw images, and more.
* Get creative with text on a path
* Give bad color the slip with the Match Color command
* Give images a colorful new look with the color replacement tool
* Create depth-of-field effects with the Lens Blur filter

Editorial Reviews

Review

“…impressive…an ideal reference point for CS users…” (Advanced Photoshop, November 2005)

“…a good starter for those serious about getting in to Photoshop…a sound one-off investment…” (British Journal of Photography, July 2004)

From the Back Cover

"I’ve learned more from Deke’s Photoshop Bible than any Photoshop book, ever."
– Scott Kelby, President, National Association of Photoshop Professionals

"When someone asks me something I don’t know about Photoshop, I tell them to go read the Photoshop Bible. It does something no other book does – it tells you everything."
– Russell Preston Brown, Senior Creative Director, Adobe Systems

World-renowned Photoshop expert and Hall of Famer Deke McClelland has earned more than 20 industry awards and written over 60 books on computer graphics and design with more than 3 million copies in print. Now, in this thoroughly updated edition of his international bestseller, McClelland shows you how to master every aspect of Photoshop CS – from image-editing basics to new techniques for working with the File Browser, layer comps, Lens Blur, Match Color, the color replacement tool, customizable keyboard shortcuts, camera raw images, and more.

• Get creative with text on a path
• Give bad color the slip with the Match Color command
• Give images a colorful new look with the color replacement tool
• Create depth-of-field effects with the Lens Blur filter

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1056 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1st edition (February 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764541781
• ISBN-13: 978-0764541780
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 2.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,060,010 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deke McClelland is a popular lecturer on Adobe Photoshop and the larger realm of computer graphics and design. He has hosted the interactive "Video Workshop" CD that shipped with Photoshop Versions 7, CS, and CS2, as well as hundreds of hours of tutorial-style video training for industry leaders lynda.com and Total Training. In addition to his video work, Deke has written 84 books translated into 24 languages, with more than 4 million copies in print. One of the most award-winning writers in the technology market, Deke received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Computer Book in 1989. Since then, he has garnered more than 20 honors, including seven independent citations from the Computer Press Association. In 2002, he was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reasonable walkthrough, needs color and better examples, November 19, 2004

By 

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Photoshop CS Bible (Paperback)

This book has a very thorough walkthrough of all of the features of CS. But the majority of the book is in black and white, while competitive books are in full color and a lot shorter. There are two color inserts that show the color versions of what is explained in the rest of the book. The examples are not great either. In particular the filter examples seem to have been picked to show the most dramatic effect of the filter, as opposed to an optimal use of the filter to show it in it's best form. I recommend Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One instead.

43 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lives Up to Its Name, July 17, 2004

By 

David C. Veeneman (Southern California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Photoshop CS Bible (Paperback)

I have struggled with Photoshop for years. Now mind you, I'm not a graphics professional, but I need good raster graphics for software and video projects that I produce.

As anyone who has picked up Photoshop can tell you, it's anything but intuitive. Incredibly powerful, but hardly something one can pick up by groping around. I slogged through the Photoshop Classroom In A Book when I tried Photoshop 6, and it was adequate, but not comprehensive enough.

A month ago, I decided to give Photoshop one more try, so I upgraded to Photosohop CS and bought this book. I love both the program and the book. Photosohp is still as unintuitive as ever, but McClelland's book does a nice job of explaining the basics and then providing walk-throughs for most of the tasks one would normally perform in Photoshop.

I put the book to the test compositing a photograph with a dingy gray sky to a shot of a blue sky with white, puffy clouds. The original photograph has large areas of sky showing through trees, and I had never been able to re-sky a picture that complex. Using masking and color range selections, I got the task done in about fifteen minutes flat. Needless to say, I was impressed. I'm beginning to understand why people get hooked on Photoshop.

If you're a novice to intermediate user, or if you are looking for a ready reference for tasks you don't perform very often, then this book is well worth a look. It has earned a prominent place on my bookshelf.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive reference would benefit from work-along examples; one CD is worth a thousand pages!, July 3, 2005

By 

Rudy "pain-doc" (Columbia, SC USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Photoshop CS Bible (Paperback)

Wonderful exhaustive reference to Photoshop techniques, suffering only from lack of decent images to follow what the author is trying to tell you. The grayscale images on recycled paper convey far too little information for the amount of text covered. The color plates help some, but trying to locate them, in two far-apart locations yet, makes any connection between text and outcome all that more tedious.

Frankly, notwithstanding the disingenuous reasoning of why NOT to provide quality color images (whether on CD or online), it would have been cheaper in the end to include a CD with the book and dispense with the color plates altogether. The lack of see-for-yourself images is particularly troublesome in the promising section on layer blending modes. Deke keeps on talking and talking, but after a while you give up with a bad headache because even the original layer arrangement isn't all that clear. Too bad, really - this would have been one of the most outstanding parts of the book.

The Bible becomes even more confusing when you learn that there's a professional version with exactly the same title (librarians just love that!) -- sort of like an Old and a New Testament. Unfortunately, now that I own both versions, there are indeed some differences (mostly omissions) between the two. Even so, there are huge sections that are almost verbatim repetitions of the Old Testament, other than for the high-quality paper and the on-page color images (yet even here the section on layer blends remains unfulfilling for lack of a CD to learn how the author got there). Worse, the tantalizing in-depth treatment of Adobe's Camera RAW plugin doesn't show up till near the end and, truthfully, isn't that greatly changed from the original (even the tea kettle illustration remains unchanged, other than for the color).

In all truth, McClellands "All-in-One" text that includes a CD and video strips may be not as complete as the Bibles, but you'll learn a lot more, and retain it much better.

All told: the Bible(s) remains the definitive Photoshop reference work, presented in readable style with a nice touch of gentle humor. As it stands, this is a great resource for intermediate to advanced users, and a great buy pound-for-pound, well worth the top five stars. Substituting a CD for the color plates would turn this already bright star into one heck of a super-Nova.