Customer Reviews

Photoshop 5 For Windows For Dummies

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

 

 

Photoshop is a very powerful and sometimes ovewhelming application to learn. This book is very helpful in learning the basics and refreshing you on what you know. There are very clear illustrations and directions to get you on the road to understanding the software. It is an excellent reference book for the novice Photoshop user and far better than any documentation provided by Adobe.

My biggest gripe with this book is that it tries so hard to be your friend and use humour (in the tradition of the Dummies series) that the frivolity often got in the way of getting to the point. This is one time I found the the humour to be simply distracting. Humor is good, but learing how to accomplish a task is the reason I buy a manual. If I want a comedy book, I'll look for Photoshop by Al Franken. Next edition I hope they assign an editor with a slightly more liberal use of the proofreading pen.

This complete from-the-ground-up guide to dealing with photos in Photoshop 5 is thorough. It provides good background about resolution, pixels, dimensions, colors, and many other things which give the reader the information needed to make intelligent decisions about their graphics for various uses, be they photo printing or web publishing. This is not surprising since the book is authored by Deke McClelland, the author of "The" Photoshop bible. But this book has one major drawback. It believes that because it is written for "dummies" it must therefore be terribly silly. If you can sit and watch a full hour of Bob Sagget talking his way through reruns of Funniest Home Videos, then you won't mind. Others have to wince through these passages to get to the next perls of wisdom. But the wait is always worth it. The book is perhaps a bit too detailed for the quick-how-do-I-do-this crowd and requires a bit of study, perhaps half an hour at a time.

As a newcomer to Adobe PhotoShop, I had high hopes for this book. It is of some limited usefulness but ufortunately it is a very uneven book.

As others have written, the overuse of grade-school level humor detracts somewhat from it. Far worse is the author's practice of glossing over some very basic concepts, such as how to resize an image without noticeable loss of resolution, how to begin work on a new photographic layer and how to "flatten" an image seamlessly. In these and other instances, explainations are sometimes convoluted but seldom clear. Some other techniques are explained well.

This seems to be a book which was written for people who already know quite a bit about PhotoShop, or perhaps was written by a person who is not an especially good teacher.

If there is no other book available, this one will offer some help with the program. But there are several other books on Adobe PhotoShop which offer the newcomer better and clearer instruction.

I didn't know anything about Photoshop before I bought this book. It is helping me to learn the basics, but I find the humor to be distracting. I'm also frustrated by the amount of information on shortcut keys early in the book. I'm sure I'll be grateful for the information some day, but not while I'm learning the product. It's too much.

9 months ago when I first paid my $19.99 for this book I was a novice photoshop user at best. I read this book cover to cover and followed along on the CD, and what I learned was irreplacable. It did not make me a photoshop genius, but it did give me a VERY solid base in photoshop which vaulted my learning curve considerably. This book doesn't teach you the tips and tricks that make the images that turn heads, but it does give you an understanding of the software that allows you to pick up those tricks with ease. I design webpages for a living, and since that time I have been promoted to senior webdesigner of my company. So thanks Deke, well done.

P.S. Not a book for advanced to expert photoshop users, but I still use it as a reference from time to time

i went through it with my term project images and got an A Simple to understand and basically just excellent. If your the kind who like to read through the entire manual first to get a rough idea of what photoshop is about, this is perfect. The humour was nice to have, but get slightly out of hand at times. But hey! it is a good book!

If the writer of this book concentrated more on providing helpful information rather than wasting my time attempting to be witty, this book might have been useful. I found this book to be a total waste of my time and money. It doesn't even warrant the 1 star rating minimum.

I think I'm a humorous person and enjoy a good laugh as much as the next guy. BUT I did'nt buy Photoshop for dummies to get a laugh. What I want in an instruction book is how to do it PERIOD. Maybe there is much information to be learned from this book and maybe I can learn it when I'm done wading through the low grade humor.

A very complete book that covers the basics of Photoshop. You will learn this program by reading this book.

This book shows you all the shortcut keys that help you get around the program. The full-color pages show you what kind of effects PhotoShop is capable of, and the well-organized pages surrounding the color show you how to accomplish it. This book uncovers all the hidden wonders PhotoShop is capable of. If you paid $600+ for PhotoShop 5 then you need to pay the extra money to get a copy of this book. No matter what the cost.