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More Photoshop
Yet another Photoshop ‘how-to’ book. It doesn’t say a lot for Adobe’s user manuals that the market can support so many third-party publications on how to use the software! And, unlike Tom Ang’s book reviewed in Ag32, this one is not really aimed at photographers – despite what the title says. There is a chapter, however, dealing with the correction of common defects of digital images, although you don’t need to be a photographer to create those. The author is a computer professional rather than a photographer, so although his book is a thorough-going guide to the tools Photoshop provides the photographer, he doesn’t think like a photographer and so the creative possibilities of what is a very complex piece of software remain undisturbed. At £30.99 the book isn’t cheap, but it does run to 350+ pages. The book takes the familiar step-by-step approach to its subject and although there is no accompanying image CD to allow the reader to try out the examples themselves, they are mostly available for download at the author’s website. Mind you, at the price there should really be such a CD packed with the book. The book assumes the reader is new to the software and so much of the ground covered is quite basic; the less basic sections are headed ‘Advanced Techniques – For Pros Only’ which some will find very irritating. Chapters cover the following: the file browser; cropping & resizing; digital camera image problems; colour correction; masking; retouching portraits; body sculpting; special effects; converting to greyscale; sharpening; and display and watermarking. So clearly there is a lot in this book and it is all explained clearly and with keyboard shortcuts for both Macintosh and Windows. What it lacks is the creative insight that a photographer experienced in extracting the most from the software could provide. For anyone coming new to Photoshop this is a good primer and there are some good tricks of the trade buried in there – including a way of increasing a digital file to poster size with little loss of visible quality by successive resamplings at 110%! Those of you in the market for a book like this might be advised to shop around – there are dozens of titles to choose from and only you know exactly what you are after.
The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby, published by New Riders Publishing, £30.99, ISBN 0 735712 36 0.
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