Amazon.com Review
This clear, helpful guide to using Photoshop for producing Web images focuses on Photoshop 4, with reference to version 3, and targets users who already know Photoshop fairly well. There's lots of thorough discussion, large screen shots, and a full-color insert illustrating several examples in the book. You first learn how to set preferences that decrease file size and how to load a browser-safe palette. Next you clean up and resize photos destined for Web output, adjust contrast levels, and improve images that you've output from video files and digital cameras. In helping you turn your existing images into Web images, the author discusses GIF and JPEG file formats, indexing, dithering, and browser-safe colors. He teaches you how to create GIFs from scratch and work with transparencies to create special effects. He also teaches you how to create JPEG images, fine-tune compression settings, work with gray-scale images, and convert GIF images to JPEG. In subsequent chapters you learn how to create backgrounds; add interesting, readable type; design buttons and other navigational elements; convert raster images to vector images; and use Photoshop to perfect Web-page layouts. Appendices discuss the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file format and present information on third-party software programs that complement Photoshop and aid Web-image production.
--Kathleen Caster
About the Author
Mikkel Aaland is an award-winning photographer and the author of nine books, including Photoshop CS2 RAW (O'Reilly 2006), Shooting Digital (2nd edition, Sybex, 2006), Photoshop Elements 4 Solutions (4th edition Sybex/Wiley, 2006), Photoshop for the Web, 2nd edition (O'Reilly, 1999), Still Images in Multimedia (Hayden, 1996), and Digital Photography (Random House, 1992). Since 2001 Aaland has been a regular guest on G4's Call For Help TV Program with Leo Laporte. In 2003 he was a guest columnist for newsweek.com. In 2004, Shooting Digital was named the best "Digital Photography" book of the year by the Designer's Bookshelf.
Aaland's documentary photographs have been exhibited in major institutions around the world, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the former Lenin Museum in Prague. In 1981 he received the National Art Directors award for photography. He has contributed both text and/or photography to Wired, Outside, Digital Creativity, American Photo, The Washington Post, and Newsweek, as well as several European publications.
Aaland has been a pioneer in digital photography, an interest that dates back to a 1980 interview he conducted with Ansel Adams. When Aaland asked Adams what he would be pursuing if he were just starting out, Adams discussed at length his fascination with digital photographs of the planets. Aaland has pursued this new technology since its infancy. During the 1980s he reported on digital photography as west coast editor of the Swedish FOTO magazine, and wrote a column on the subject for American Photographer magazine. Aaland is one of the few orginal Adobe Lightroom's alpha and beta user, and he served as an unpaid advisor on the project for over a year.
