Adobe Photoshop 5.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

~ Adobe Creative Team (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book is an excellent tool for learning how to use Adobe Photoshop 5 for Macintosh and Windows. The writers--actually a team from Adobe--guide you through the basic and advanced tasks of using the image editor and paint program to create and enhance a wide variety of photographs and images.

You don't need to know the previous versions of the program to get right to work. You use the practice files on the included hybrid CD-ROM as you follow the lessons throughout the book. There are step-by-step instructions, explanations of features, and plenty of illustrations to help you as you work, and each chapter has review questions and answers.

First you learn the basics of the interface as you tour the options for selecting, using layers and filters, painting, retouching, and saving files. Next, you learn the essentials of opening files, navigating the interface, getting help, and creating layers and selections. After that the chapters get much more specific, teaching you how to use the paint, editing, and pen tools; work with selections, masks, channels, and layers; and apply photo-retouching techniques and special effects. You also learn how to combine graphics from Adobe Illustrator with those from Photoshop, prepare images for the Web, manage two-color print jobs, and fine-tune color preferences for ideal output. The projects involve both fine art and commercial art---everything from composite images to color-corrected photographs. Finally, you work with Adobe ImageReady 1.0, the new package for creating images and animations for the Web and other multimedia projects.

A full-color section shows you the finished artwork from the various chapters, color models, and, in a few cases, the various versions of an image as you apply changes to it. This section also shows you how to use all the Toolbox tools, including the selection, paint, stamp, sharpen, sponge, pen, type, gradient, eyedropper, zoom, and measure tools. This section is particularly helpful for users who are trying to get up to speed with Photoshop's many features. This tutorial will take you well past basic interface issues and have you creating some pretty amazing images.

From Library Journal

Both of these Adobe books are excellent self-paced training guides; they would also make excellent in-class texts for anyone teaching these tools. Less well-known than Photoshop, Premier allows the manipulation and editing of multimedia, including video, animation, and static graphics. The CD-ROMs include all examples and lesson files, but you will need your own copies of the programs actually to use the lessons. The Photoshop book includes coverage of Adobe's new product for web graphics, ImageReady, and given Photoshop's broad popularity, it belongs in most collections. Premier is for larger collections.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: MacMillan Computer Publishing USA; The Official Training Workbook developed by the staff of Adobe edition (June 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568304668
• ISBN-13: 978-1568304663
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #257,491 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book To Buy For Premiere (Rated By Presky), November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Adobe Premiere 5.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

I am 14 years old and am doing the video yearbook at Maroa-Forsyth High School. It is a new idea that I brought up last year. Now we are starting up and are going to use Premiere to do the DV editing w/a Sony DCR-TRV 110 D8 Handycam. The book not only is helpful on how to use this complex program, but helps me some with my settings that I need to configure the DV in/out on the Sony VAIO laptop we use. It has great descriptions, pictures, and is for sure well written (I can understand it quite well.). The CD-ROM enclosed also contains the project files for the example productions. It is not only easy to use and learn, but fun as well. I STRONGLY reccommend it to anyone wishing to use Premiere 5.x.

59 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great hands-on tutorial, April 29, 2000

By	+++ (CA, United States) - See all my reviews

Adobe Photoshop "Classroom in a Book" belongs to the series of "hands-on software training workbooks", published by Adobe. This book is written by people who know Photoshop better than anyone else, and is apparently intended to be an exercise book additional to the Photoshop manual. Indeed, it even uses some of the images which appear in the Photoshop manual. However, it can as well be used as an independent tutorial. The book is amazingly well written. Each chapter briefly explains the function of the tools discussed below, and then offers a practical lesson using images from the enclosed CD. The language of the book is very concise and easy to understand, which makes it suitable for people with every background, from middle-school students to professionals. The balance between the complexity of the tasks and the amount of information to learn is very well maintained. Description of the steps to follow is very accurate. I found only few minor mistakes in the text, which did not cause any significant misunderstandings.

Despite all these advantages, two issues should be emphasized to avoid disappointment. First, this book does not contain much more than can be found in the Photoshop Manual or online help. Therefore, this book can be recommended primarily for the beginners, maybe for some people on the intermediate level, who are learning the basic techniques of Photoshop. It does not go into details of how photoshop can be used to make those amazing tricks with photographs which can be done by photoshop experts. Secondly, this book IS a workbook, a practical tutorial, but not more than that. This means that you read it from the beginning to the end, do the tutorials, hopefully learn a lot, but most likely will never use this book again. This book is not a good reference, and it makes little sense to repeat the lessons more than once or twice. Therefore this book frequently appears on Amazon auctions, sold by people who used it and do not need it anymore. But it is still a great book!

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book truly enables anyone to use Premiere with ease., July 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Adobe Premiere 5.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

Adobe Premiere Classroom in a Book is by far one of the most useful software guides I have ever purchased. The interactive style allows the user to get the "hands-on learning" needed to truly become proficient using Adobe Premiere. For anyone who uses video software to create quality videos, this is a must have for anyone who uses Premiere.