Customer Reviews

Real World Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) 7

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I purchased PS7, I knew that the standard manual was not going to cut it. I then began my search for a real guide to PS 7. After considering many different books, I settled on this one.

I consider myself to be an advanced amateur photographer and my equipment includes a digital SLR. This book is helping me to get the most out of my camera.

I have used a few different photo editing software packages but was new to PS7. Using tutorials that I found on the WEB, I was able to do some basic editing but wanted to know much more. Well, "Real World Adobe Photoshop 7" is a treasure trove of information.

The book is easy to read and the occasional humor makes the journey through the book even more enjoyable. The book is full of tips and "how-tos". Note that this book is NOT a step by step tutorial with a CD where you get to practice on someone else's photos. I wanted a how-to guide where I could immediately apply the technique to my own photos - and this book fulfills that need. I have no desire to waste time on someone else's images.

"Real World" includes chapters on color management, curves and levels, sharpening, printing, etc. The instructions on profiling using Adobe Gamma were the best I've seen. I thought I already knew something about USM and sharpening until I read that chapter. Do you convert from RGB to LAB and back again when you apply USM? Well, that may not be a good idea. Did you know that you can sharpen very effectively without USM by using Layers? There is so much more I could mention but hopefully this gives you a little flavor for the book. I also like that the book provides instructions for more than one way (sometimes many ways) of accomplishing a task. In this way, you can try them all and determine what's best for your workflow.

So, what about negatives? The authors wrote the book from a MAC perspective. This is clearly mentioned up front and occasionally elsewhere when there are functional differences. At other times however, you will find that their descriptions do not exactly match what you are seeing on your PC. I found this to be very minor but wanted to mention it here, just in case.

Also, I would not recommend this book for true PS beginners. The authors do assume a certain pre-level of knowledge.

If you want the get the most out of PS7 or want to learn alternative (better) ways of doing something, you won't regret this purchase. Thanks to this book, I'm able to give advice to others regarding PS7 questions and problems.

Real World Photoshop 7 is an ultimate digital dark room technique book for Photoshop 7 users. The largest part of the book is dedicated to dark room techniques, but a good part of the book covers such things as getting the best scans, creating effects, saving for the web, making half-tones, etc.

They cover lots of issues that help me understand WHY I might want to do something a certain way. Such as, the differences between RGB, CMYK and LAB color. When I bring a digital photo into Photoshop, I almost always feel a need to adjust it, fix the levels, etc. Fooling with the levels usually causes a color shift. To avoid that, they explain how to change the mode from RGB to LAB color, and then apply the levels command to the L (luminance) channel, leaving the color untouched. I can change the mode back to RGB afterwards, if I want.

In discussing color correction, they talk about fixing the neutrals so the rest will follow and explain that in Photoshop's RGB mode, it automatically calculates the amount of CMYK to produce neutrals, but in CMYK mode, you have to manually fill in the percentages. The section on color correction is incredible.

They discuss printing from Photoshop 7, the issue of different file formats and which to use when; the Rule of 16; which settings take precedence over others, and much more.

The book is well laid out, with an easy to follow structure. Several light bulbs spontaneously illuminated for me while reading this book. This book is useful to new Photoshop users and for seasoned photographers who have past experience with Photoshop but like to keep a reference of new features.

A wonderful and thorough job of covering topics such as tonal and color corrections, scans, color management, spot colors and duotones, prepress and the web. I found answers to topics such as spot colors in this book that I haven't found anywhere else. The authors are expert in their field and portray that information in an easy to understand format. They also throw in some humor here and there.

You'll get very comfortable using levels and curves by the time you complete this book, it is very thorough and in-depth. You'll learn how to judge what adjust needs to be made and the best way to do it. Like most full-featured programs these days, there is more than one way to achieve a task. These authors teach you the most expedient way to accomplish a wide range of tasks.

You'll learn how to calibrate your monitor, make tonal corrections, remove color casts and silhouette an image for catalog work and more. This book should be on the shelf of every serious photographer

I was looking for a good reference book to learn about Color Management and using it to print photos to an inkjet printer. This book's color and printing section is much more thorough than the book Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for Photographers. If you want all your questions answered about color management, this is the better book.

This book is recommended by the Adobe InDesign Development Team and I can see why. Kvern and Blatner cover all of the basics you would expect; page layout, text controls, type characteristics, drawing, transparency, importing, exporting, color, printing, etc.

But it's the depth at which they are able to cover each area that is astounding. Anyone who has used InDesign 2 knows it has a zillion palettes and tools. This book covers them all in great detail. I venture to say that you would be hard pressed to come up with a question about InDesign 2 that this book doesn't cover.

And they put their money where their collective mouth is. They laid out the entire 650 page book using InDesign 2. One of them used a Titanium Powerbook running OS X and the other used Windows. A nice demo of its true cross-platform capabilities.

I was particularly impressed by how they showed the differences in results you get when performing a task (such as transforming the contents within a path), depending on which options are selected. This is the best reference book on InDesign I've seen. I like the Adobe Classroom in a Book, but wouldn't use it as my handy reference on how to do some little obscure thing.

I didn't realize how powerful the drawing tools in InDesign are until I read this book. And I didn't understand the difference between downsampling and subsampling (for exporting as a PDF), but they explain it well.

There is a nice section on managing long documents, their tables of contents and indices.

I've gradually been working my way up the Photoshop ladder for the last three years and finally got to Photoshop 7. It became obvious fairly early on that that there was much more to it than Adobe's manual described, so I started searching for a better book.

Blatner and Fraser's book is it. I still have a lot more to learn, but now I feel comfortable with using Photoshop 7. The book is oriented to photographers, not web designers, which is what I wanted and their description of the uses of levels and curves is great. Also, since I'm not a professional, my interest does not lie in preparing images for a commercial print shop, however,my guess is that the discussion of how to do such work would be extremely helpful to those who do.

Sydney Self

Having been into desktop publishing since it first appeared back in the early days of the original Apple Laserwriter and PageMaker 1.0, and having been into Adobe products in-depth using After Effects, Premiere, Illustrator, Acrobat and Photoshop -- InDesign was always that one program I wanted to learn ''someday.'' Finally getting a copy, I sat down with the manual and found that key areas of the program, such as XML integration, are completely missing from the manual. Not so in this book. It's covered between pages 431 to 454. It also appears in other places within the book, localized to the subject matter discussed as it relates to XML. This is a book that is obviously written by two guys whose experience is first-rate and whose appreciation of Adobe products, in general, and InDesign, specifically, is quite apparent. Having built one of the largest and most trafficked Adobe support sites on the Net at creativecow.net, I see many, many books and this is one well worth taking note of. Good work guys, very good work. If Amazon's rating system let you pick half stars, I'd have given it 4.5 stars. The only reason I'd hold back from 5 stars is that it didn't come with a CD-ROM or any project files. But don't get me wrong, I am not complaining. What's in the book itself, is still well worth the cost of admission.

Ron Lindeboom
...
Creative Communities of the World

This book is better than the Adobe Manual, but I have been very disappointed. For my purposes, it spends too much space belaboring things like meny choices and far too little time on how to use InDesign 2.0 effectively. For example, if I want to place footnotes at the bottoms of pages, what is the best way to accomplish that? Or, how about suggestions for effective use of the index range options instead of just listing what they are. I can find out what they are from the online help or from the Adobe manual. I buy extra books to get extra insight. I didn't get much from this one. I wanted a book like Deke McClellend's Photoshop Bible; I didn't get it.

Real World InDesign 2 is the book to to replace the InDesign 2 manual. The text is well written as was the previous edition, Real World InDesign 1.5. The authors use many examples from their own experience to make a point and demonstrate the power of InDesign 2. The examples are presented both in text and immediately repeated using screen shots. Great for those who learn from visual presentation.

Real World InDesign 2 covers all aspects of the software. From basic layouts to tables and formatting to printing your final document, Real World InDesign 2 will make you layout time more efficient. All of the new InDesign 2 features are covered in depth. A chapter on long documents, for example, covers Table of Content creation and Index creation.

Weather your a new InDesign user or upgrading from version 1.5, Real World InDesign 2 is a book that will become your reference for solving those "there has to be a better way" problems. I recommend Real World InDesign 2 to anyone who wants to use InDesign more effectively and efficiently.

This book does not come in lessons, and it does not really give you much to do with InDesign, it just tells you how to use the features, shows a bunch of shortcuts, and gives a bit of advice here and there. There is also the occasional attempt at levity, which unfortunately doesn't always succeeed.

Despite all that, I am very satisfied: as a reference for how InDesign works and how to use its tools, it is an excellent choice. If you are unfamiliar with Illustrator and/or Photoshop, then perhaps another, more lesson/project-oriented book might be a better choice; though it is not utterly mind-numbing, this book is not really a cover-to-cover read, and without the background in Illustrator or Photoshop, you might just come away wondering if you learned anything. However, if you DO have that background, then this is a great start. For me ... this book has earned it's place on the shelf.