Customer Reviews

Photoshop CS4 Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide

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

 

 

Photoshop CS4 Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide is one of the best Photoshop primers I've read. The author works through image adjustments in a very logical progression. He begins with very simple edits and works his way up to more complex fine-tuning. The instructions are both step-by-step and very clear. He also does an excellent job of explaining the "big picture" of why you want to make these adjustments and does not just turn you into a mouse clicker following steps by rote.

While no one book is going to tell you everything you could ever want to know about Photoshop, this is a fairly comprehensive tome. The entire workflow process is covered beginning with downloading files and sorting them in Bridge, all the way through printing. I would suggest using the "Look Inside" function to check the Table of Contents if you're interested in a complete list of the specific steps covered. The good news is that all the most common bases are covered, and covered well. If I could add one thing to this book, it would be a chapter or two on the basics of making adjustments in the LAB color space. For certain images, LAB will yield truly superior results, yet it receives no coverage in most Photoshop books. If you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace (though that book was written for CS2 and could now use an update).

For those who own the CS3 edition of this book, you should be aware that this edition offers a lot of the same material. Yes, there are additions, but you will want to flip through it in the bookstore before buying to make sure that there is enough new content here to warrant the purchase.

If this book has a weakness, it is that it doesn't really live up to its title. The book is not about workflow per se, but about all the steps that are part of a workflow. Only the first and the last chapters really focus on the aspect of trying to plan the workflow itself. This is no crime, I don't know if it's even possible to fill an entire book with workflow planning discussions without becoming ridiculously redundant and useless. But Tim Grey and his publishers chose to identify this as a workflow text and on that basis I think they have failed. Still, it's an excellent guide to editing photos and I recommend it to anyone looking to improve their skills in that area.

Let there be no mistake about it. Photoshop (PS) is not an easy program to use, with all those menus, tools and panels. Yet anyone who aspires to master digital photography had better learn how to use Photoshop. The problem is compounded by lots of goldilocks-like books that are either too simple or too complex for someone just beginning to learn the program. What's a photographer to do?

Tim Grey addresses this problem in this book. The author leads the reader in gentle steps through the most important parts of PS CS4. He starts with advice on how to use the separate programs that are incorporated in PS, Bridge and Camera Raw. He then covers basic adjustments for rotating and cropping, tone and color adjustment and image cleanup. He moves on to advanced tonal and color adjustments, selections and targeted adjustments, and creative adjustments. He finishes up by showing how to save files, automate workflow and print. After reading the introductory material, the section on basic adjustments and the methods of saving and outputting files, the beginner should be able to begin processing his images in PS. He can then return to the other sections as he goes along.

The book is not perfect. There are no images to download and no tutorials. Grey concentrates on using the buttons and sliders without ever explaining how to figure out what adjustments a person might want to make to an image to improve it. Many of the more advanced PS tools that a photographer might ultimately want to use are not discussed.

Add to that the fact that Grey clearly favors the use of the PS program itself to make most adjustments, rather then Camera Raw or PS's sister product Lightroom, while other advanced photographers use these two tools more heavily.

So long as the reader understands that post processing images can involve many steps before one can be called an expert, and that the serious photographer will probably read many more books to learn how to create a great digital image, this book will serve as a good introduction to the use of Photoshop. But it's not the end of the road.

I read this book from cover to cover and marked nearly a dozen pages so I could go back to them. Even though I am now using CS5, I still refer to this book. In fact, I have finally created my own workflow chart because there's so much to remember and it's all worth doing. I also subscribe to Tim's daily e-mail Q&A and his magazine. I'm a huge fan and intend to buy his CS5 videos when they are available.

I found this book very close to worthless for me. It was one of the first books on CS4 available after the release. I had found an earlier book by Tim Grey to be helpful so I ordered this one.
I was expecting a book that would help me move from CS3 to CS4, but this book never highlights the differences between the two most recent versions of Photoshop. This book provides very little about the new features of CS4. The book covers how to perform workflow steps in CS4 that you could do the same way in CS3.
Of the more than 100 books that I have purchased from Amazon, I have only returned one for insuffienct content. I should have taken that option for this book, but I waited too long.
If CS4 was your first exposure to Photoshop, perhaps this book would be helpful. If you are upgrading from CS3 to CS4 and you already have a workflow established, look for another reference book.

Just went through it. Great book when CS4 isn't part of your job description. This book makes it easy to get to the nuts and bolts. Just the basics thank you.

Now realize that I am a Tim Grey fan so this is a bit of a biased review. In short, this book on CS4 is another winner from the pen of Tim Grey. Unfortunately, in my opinion, CS4 is not a winner from Adobe. CS3 is soooo much better. To me CS4 is just a gathering of cosmetic changes. But, Time Grey does help you see your way through these changes and make some sense of them.

This an excellent book for anyone who gets boggled over all the changes in PS each time there's
a change (who doesn't?) That said, I'd encourage Amazon customers to ask the company to give
people a choice of shipping couriers when they order products. They seem only to offer different
days in transit and the costs, but some of us with poor postal service, are more concerned about
being able to choose a different courier, and Amazon has not addressed these requests at all.