Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Paperback)

by Bruce Fraser (Author), David Blatner (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Fooling around with Photoshop to create interesting composite artwork is all well and good. But if you rely on Photoshop to meet tough production challenges in a fast-paced professional environment, fooling around won't cut it! You need results, and you need them now: This book delivers! In this copiously illustrated volume, best-selling authors David Blatner and Bruce Fraser offer scads of hands-on production techniques as well as clear explanations of the concepts that drive them, so that you can get the best results possible on your own Photoshop CS2 projects. You'll learn about managing color, getting great scans, correcting tones and colors, and more. You also find complete coverage of all of Photoshop CS2's newest features: integration with Adobe Bridge; Vanishing Point; super-tight integration with the rest of Adobe's Creative Suite 2; and more. Throughout, the emphasis is on efficiency: the time-saving tips and professional shortcuts that will allow you to work faster, smarter, and more creatively with Photoshop CS2.

About the Author
David Blatner is an internationally known expert on Photoshop and QuarkXPress and is the author of numerous other books, including Real World QuarkXPress and Real World Adobe InDesign. David lectures on desktop publishing and multimedia at conferences and workshops around the world. Co-author, Bruce Fraser, is an internationally known authority on digital imaging and color reproduction. In addition to speaking and consulting on these topics, he is the author of Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop; the co-author of Real World Color Management, the definitive guide to color management systems; and a contributing editor for Macworld magazine and creativepro.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 984 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press (October 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321334116
• ISBN-13: 978-0321334114
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279,324 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book remains the Gold Standard for anyone serious about Photoshop, November 28, 2005

By	H. Domke (New Bloomfield, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've read over 30 Photoshop books over the last 15-years (including two previous editions of this book). Nothing compares with "Real World Photoshop." It is truly authoritative, clear and practical. Of all those 30 books if I had to just pick one, it would be this - truly the gold standard. If you are going to use Photoshop as a professional or a serious amateur, you owe it to yourself to read this book very carefully. Twice.

The book is lengthy (984 pages) but for such a rich program that much space is required. Scattered throughout the book are hundreds of "Tips" in bold letters. If you just did a speed-reading of these I bet your Photoshop skills would double. Rare for such a technical book is the clarity of the writing - it's actually a pleasure to read. They express complex ideas clearly without resorting to obscure language. In general, the illustrations are excellent and large enough to clearly demonstrate what they are supposed to.

What would make it better? I wish the discussion on Merge to HDR (High Dynamic Range) were more comprehensive and less dismissive. Likewise, the cursory mention of LAB color space as for "geeks only" seems short sighted in light of the revelations in Dan Margulis's new "LAB Color" book.

In a book this long you expect a few mistakes, such as the statement that "The Tint control lets you fine-tune the color balance along the axis that's perpendicular to the one controlled by the Temperature slider...". However in this case, they are not perpendicular, because there are three-color axes, not two. But these flaws are the rare exceptions.

A quick search here on Amazon.com for books on Photoshop turned up 1,497 titles.
Unless you are an absolute beginner, you can skip 1,496 of those books. Just buy this one and you will have all you need.

Henry F. Domke.
(...)

62 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The authority on PhotoShop CS2, November 21, 2005

By	Scott F. Lowry (Walnut Creek, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book was written by the author of Real World Camera Raw and Real World Color Management. I own the second of these books and found that it is the best book around for color management, so I gave this book a shot. There are Fourteen Chapters (Building a PS System, Tips & Tricks, Image Essentials, Color Essentials, Color Settings, Digital Darkroom, Making Selections, ... Multimedia and the Web) covering about 915 pages. A very thorough book - which is the reason for the high price tag.

From Chapter one, you can tell that the author isn't going to `gloss over' anything. He goes into depth about how to setup paging files, configure RAM, etc. This is not beginner stuff and is not aimed at someone who just bought CS2 and wants to use it. The book moves directly into "Tips and Tricks." Again, not a beginner chapter, but aimed at getting users who are familiar with PS to use it more efficiently. This one chapter covers about 50% (or more) of the tips in Scott Kelby's Tips and Tricks book - very good!

Chapter 3 (Image Essentials) begins with a very thorough explanation of pixels and paths. It explains bit depth, resolution, types of resampling, CMYK vs RGB, etc. Chapters 4 & 5 provide 125 pages of color - Color Essentials, Color Management, Color Settings. Remember, this guy wrote the book on Color Management, so the level of detail is intense, but the explanations are clear. Finally, on page 227, we break out of the theory and the last 700 or so pages are dedicated to hands-on PhotoShop.

If you are looking for a "step by step" How-to book on PhotoShop, this isn't it. Instead its a comprehensive guide on getting the most out of the best photo software product on the market. Its definitely slanted toward photographers (as opposed to graphical artists). I believe that I've read through most of the CS2 books out there - and purchased a few of them. For me, this provided the most useful information and the clearest explanations.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fraser/Blatner book compared to others, February 20, 2006

By	R. Matson "tonto" (LA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In my recent effort to educate myself in matters of Photoshop CS2 I read in detail three books - Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers by Martin Evening, Photoshop CS2 by Fraser & Blatner, and The Photoshop CS2 book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby. Of the three, I would rank the Evening and the Fraser & Blatner books as comprehensive books that, if the reader would fully understand all that was discussed, they would be considered a Photoshop Pro. The Kelby book I considered to be quite basic in that it covered only some of the principal topics and did so in an elementary fashion (it would take Kelby four pages with all his illustrations and stepwise instructions to cover what the other books might cover in one). I would recommend the Kelby book for a hobbyist that doesn't want to devote a lot of learning time and who wishes only a basic knowledge of Photoshop CS2 in order to occasionally turn out a nice image. I would recommend either of the other two books if one wants a mastery of what CS2 can really do. But, be warned that the subject is complex and will take a lot of time to learn. Of the two, Evening's book has the advantage in that it is a little less expensive, he includes a disk containing the images used in many of his tutorials so the reader can follow along with the same exercises, and because he is a fashion photographer many of his images are fashion shots of pretty women. The Fraser & Blatner book has the advantage of being somewhat larger and more complete and goes into deeper detail on some aspects of CS2. Both of these books have a high orientation to producing images for commercial press publication. I would recommend that if one wants to really learn CS2 they read both books, even though the same topics are covered in both, the subject is sufficiently complex it pays to learn it twice from perhaps somewhat different angles.