The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book (Paperback)

~ Linnea Dayton (Author), Jack Davis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Effective whether you're a Photoshop pro or a demanding amateur, The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book contains the widest selection of useful projects, tips, tutorials, techniques, and examples of professionally produced work you're likely to find in one place.

What's remarkable about this book is that every page contains something worth knowing. While other Photoshop books have their strengths, be it Web production, photographic retouching and repro techniques, or illustration, The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book provides in-depth knowledge on just about every aspect of Photoshop 6.

Tutorials covering techniques you might already be familiar with often provide better ways of doing things or additional related information. Where they cover new ground, the results are so stunning you'll want to try them out and add them to your repertoire.

Along with the staples--framing with masks, fixing problem photos, quick masking and blending, filters, and so on--you'll find gems like focusing attention with color, blurring backgrounds while retaining grain, hand-tinting black and white photos, applying images to textured surfaces, and painting with the art history brush.

The book focuses strongly on new Photoshop 6 features such as layer styles, vector shapes, and fill layers as well as improved text handling. This makes it ideal for getting up to speed on the new features and interface enhancements in Photoshop 6, but anyone using older versions would do better with The Photoshop 5/5.5 Wow! Book or The Photoshop 4 Wow! Book by the same authors.

Screen shots, before and after examples, and galleries of professionally produced work in full color throughout make this an easy book to dip into as well as a good foundation for a structured course. --Ken McMahon, Amazon.co.uk

Product Description

Looking for state-of-the-art practical advice and inspiration? The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book stikes the perfect balance, giving you creative, timesaving tips and techniques for Web graphics, illustration, photo correction and compositing, and special effects. Packed with stunning new examples of Photoshop artistry, Photoshop 6 Wow! presents real-world, full-color artwork accompanied by clear, step-by-step instructions that you can use immediately to create your own projects. This updated edition shows you how to get the most from Photoshop 6's redesigned interface, new Shape tools, improved typesetting, and other vector-based features. You'll also get expert instruction on ImageReady's automated rollover states and one of the hottest new features--Layer Styles--for instant, elegant special effects.

The accompanying Wow! CD-ROM is invaluable, loaded with "before and after" tutorial files for the techniques in the book, with layers, adjustments, and Styles intact. You'll also find dozens of preset Wow! Layer Styles and improved Actions designed to automate Photoshop creativity and productivity, along with libraries of new Wow! Patterns, Custom Shapes, Gradients, Brushes, and bevel Contours. Educators can use the Instructor's Guide PDF to design a Photoshop class--whether a single seminar or a semester-long course--based on the book-and-CD package. Find out why the award-winning Photoshop Wow! is the best-selling Photoshop book of all time--and why this edition tops them all!

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; 1st edition (July 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201722089
• ISBN-13: 978-0201722086
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #135,247 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply the best for beginners, reference or advanced effects, September 5, 2001

By	Marque Pierre Sondergaard "World's Best Textu... (Liverpool, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For learning and mastering an impressive package like Photoshop 6 I usually say that you need 3 kinds of materials: 1. A beginners guide to show you the framework and teach you how the basics work; 2. A detailed reference volume for when you need to research the solution to a problem on your own; 3. A selection of impressive advanced effects to give you inspiration and solutions to common advanced problems. If you have access to these 3, all you need is sweat and time. Few books have it all, since many of these functions seems to contradict with each other. Another common flaw is that many books show you very impressive effects, and how to carry them out, but after doing so, when the initial "Wow! Look what I just made!" fades away, you have learned almost nothing and understand very little about how the effect was made.

Based on these criteria, I have to conclude that The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book has it all. This is definitely not my first book on Photoshop 6, but I wish it was. It would have saved me quite a few bucks, and taught me more in the same time.

My personal interest is creating illustrations, not so much applying effects to photos or making web graphics. But still the Wow! Book covers it all to a very satisfying degree, in fact with so much depth and detail, that this book doubles as my reference volume. Also it patiently takes its time to make sure beginners understand all the key concepts in Photoshop.

I am impressed. Very impressed. My verdict will have to be the old cliché about, "this is the only book you'll need". But it can easily be the only book you'll need for a loooooong time.

Feel free to mail me if you have questions.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bible of Photoshop: no more, no less..., July 11, 2001

By	Manny Hernandez "Author of Ning For Dummies" (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

When I first started using more seriously Adobe Photoshop, I went shopping for a book which I could have next to me when I had a challenge I could not find my way out of.

After a few hours browsing through the tons of options out there for books on the topic, I came to the conclusion that this book had it all: well laid out, comprehensive, self-explanatory, printed in color... you name it!

After I checked with some designers friend I have, they confirmed my choice: WOW! is the book of choice to cover all Photoshop stuff you can think of -web, print, etc.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW! Buy this book FIRST., September 29, 2001

By	C. Jones (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm an amateur photographer. Initially, all I wanted to do with Photoshop is crop a scanned picture and maybe change a bit of its background. After several weeks of searching three other books for what I wanted to achieve, it became patently clear that 1) Photoshop was an extremely deep and complex program, and 2) I would never be able to accomplish simple tasks unless I dedicated my life to the study of Adobe. Then one day, The Photoshop 6 WOW! book's colorful presentation caught my eye. One hour later, I had not only cropped my photo and given it an entirely different background, but I fully understood what I had done and learned some additional tricks along the way. This book's graphics are delicious and the accompanying text clearly explains each step required to reproduce them. You will be compelled to try everything.