Hacking Photoshop CS2 (Paperback)

by Shangara Singh (Author) "The hourglass in Windows and the watch and spinning beach ball in Mac OS are icons that most people would prefer not to see when..." (more)
Key Phrases: protractor mode, highlight end points, default color channels, Smart Object, Preset Manager, Adobe Photoshop (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"…newcomers could benefit from some of the tips." (Advanced Photoshop, October 2006)

Product Description
This is absolutely the ultimate guide to hacking Adobe’s wildly popular graphics software, written by an Adobe Certified professional photographer and designer.

This is serious, down and dirty, tweaking – blowing away the default settings, customizing appearance, optimizing performance, customizing tools and offering readers total control over Photoshop like never before.  With these 300+ hacks, readers will find their work with Photoshop faster and easier than ever.

Roll up your sleeves, and dive into these hacks including:

• Faster Photoshop startup
• Customizing the Photoshop interface
• Hacking Photoshop’s Tools
• Access hidden dialog buttons
• Hacks for Masks, Layers, Paths, Curves and Selections
• Camera Raw tricks

and so much more.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 454 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (October 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764597884
• ISBN-13: 978-0764597886
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #644,051 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Misleading, November 10, 2005

By	R.M. Fernandez - See all my reviews

With a title like "Hacking Photoshop" you'd expect the book to have all sorts of hidden, undocumented secrets to customizing Photoshop. Sadly, this isn't the case.

A more appropriate title might be "Using Photoshop" because I'm not sure where there is any sort of "hacking" involved.

This book focuses mostly on settings and using tools. For example, there is a whole chapter on making selections and using masks. The chapter is called "Hacking Masks" - but it doesn't break any ground or shed new light on masks.

There are some useful tips here and there, the most helpful chapter may be the very first one, which points out the preferences to adjust in order to make Photoshop perform better on your machine. While helpful, these settings are hardly unheard of or undocumented.

I'm not sure who this book is for. It doesn't offer any tips on creating images, so I can't see a beginner using it. The techniques are something any intermediate user already knows, so I can't see them using it either.

The full color printing is nice, I just think this book misses the mark by not being a complete reference guide.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wheat and Chaff, December 20, 2005

By	Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I like to think of Photoshop books as falling into three categories: process books, which take you through an entire process; cookbooks, that show you how to solve certain problems or achieve certain effects; and encyclopedias that discuss Photoshop tools and processes without reference to specific pictures. "Hacking Photoshop CS2" falls into the last category.

The book contains hundreds of tips, organized into chapters like "Optimizing Performance", "Hacking Layer Masks", and "Outputting to Print". While many of the tips are the kind that you would pick up in a process book, others are of the kind that most books miss. For example, like many other books, the author shows you how to apply ratings to images in Adobe Bridge. But he also provides a tip for quicker opening in Bridge of previews stored on a CD by exporting either the cache or sidecar files to the CD. Another new tip I encountered was a method for creating a new image with the same dimensions and color mode as an open image rather than the new image default.

The question a reader will have to ask himself is whether it's worth wading through a lot of tips that may not be relevant to the reader to get to the one tip that will help him. I suspect that heavy Photoshop users will find it more useful to do so. I also note that most of the tips are probably more applicable to graphic designers than photographers.

I was a little disappointed by some of the tips that weren't in the book. For example, in the discussion of optimizing performance, the author noted the importance of additional RAM to Photoshop but he didn't mention that if Windows users add more than two GB of RAM to their computers, Photoshop will only be able to access it if the 3 GB switch is set in the boot file.

The author has also been a little sloppy. For example, in providing the location of the Photoshop preferences file in Windows, he has omitted one of the subdirectories that you must go through to get to the file.

Still, for the serious user of Photoshop, there will probably be a few useful tips that will make this book worthwhile.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great At-Desk Reference, May 14, 2006

By	Derek A. Benner (Citrus Heights, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Okay. You're not going to find everything about everything in here. And it's not going to cover just one topic in exhaustive detail.

But I was able to find five different optimizations and hacks to increase my PS CS2 productivity within the first five minutes of opening this book! In the second chapter alone, in the day I've had this book, I've implemented eight of the tips to customize my work area. And I'm finding tips, tricks and hacks that allow me to do things I've wanted to learn and have searched for tutorials on through these last eight months.

This book is worth the money.