Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One
by Deke McClelland
|
List Price: Our Price: $14.99 You Save: $35.00 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.65 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One
Book Review: Serious PS CS3
Summary: 5 Stars
This book provides excellent instruction in the use of Photoshop CS3 for those who've never used Photoshop before. The book includes a CD, with quick time movies, and images to use in conjunction with the lessons in the book.
The book's method is to introduce each chapter with a movie of about fifteen minutes. The author then provides tutorials on each subject, such as say, masking, that require the reader to upload one or more images into Adobe Photoshop CS3, and then to perform a series of steps to process that image, with emphasis on the use of the tools covered by that chapter. McClelland writes clearly and is easily understood, and the book is profusely illustrated, with screen saves that show almost every step along the way. To benefit the most, you must follow the tutorials from beginning to end, working at your computer. This is made even more important by the fact that Photoshop techniques that don't fall into a major category, like moving all or part of an image, are introduced in the chapters on the major categories, like creating and applying a mask.
One of the main problems of any Photoshop book is that that a single image will usually involve several different functions, like tone adjustment, color correction and sharpening to optimize. Yet the material must be presented one step at a time, so that it may take many hours of work before one understands how to process a single image. This is even more true in this book's case, where McClelland will discuss a single process in progressively more complex variations in a single chapter. The beginner who is anxious to show his work may find it difficult to labor through all of the exercises before he can present a picture.
A second problem is created by Photoshop itself, which is a tool for both photographers and graphic designers. The author often presents matters that are of little interest to the former, but of high concern to the latter.
Moreover there are certain tools that are of special interest to photographers that are not covered in great detail, like the use of Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe's front end to Photoshop.
If you are a photographer interested in quickly learning to get images processed, you might be more interested in one of the PS CS3 books aimed specifically at photographers, like Tim Grey's "Photoshop CS3 Workflow". If you are already an experienced Photoshop user who just wants to learn what's new in CS3, Ben Willmore's "Adobe Photoshop CS3: Up to Speed" is for you. What's clear is that you probably will need to read many books before you feel you are getting the most from Photoshop.
Finally this book does not cover the 4.1 update to Camera Raw.
If you want to learn PS CS3 in all its variations, this is an excellent book, providing one recognizes that it will require a commitment of time and effort. If that is your goal, this book will do a fine job.
Book Review: Great Resource Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One
by Deke McClelland
Published by O'Reilly
ISBN-13: 978-0596529758
Reviewed by Donna Sellers, member of the Eureka Photoshop Users Group, Nov 17, 2007
Topics covered:
Open and Organize
Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows
Correcting Color Balance
Making Selections
Crop, Straighten, and Size
Paint, Edit and Heal
Creating and Applying Masks
Focus and Filters
Building Layered compositions
Text and Shapes
Styles and Specialty Layers
Printing and Output
I can fully appreciate why this author was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame. Not only does he know his material backwards and forwards but he has the gift of writing in a way that is easy to understand. He includes many colored images that demonstrate what he is teaching. His book is appropriate for both the beginner and the more advanced user of Photoshop.
I loved how he organized the book, chapters and topics and made it so user friendly. Each chapter number and name is located on the bottom left side of each page and the specific topic is named on the bottom of the right-hand page. At the end of each section he has a review page of what the reader learned in that chapter and a way to test what concepts have been understood.
While I have been using Photoshop for a number of years, I found his review of Photoshop and all the additional improvements added with the latest CS3 version to be exciting and immediately applicable to increasing my work flow.
I found the examples the author provides on the CD, and the way he walks you through each exercise, easy to follow and helpful in translating what he is teaching to the practical level. His Chapter on Correcting Color Balance was my favorite and worth the price of the book. Within this section he gives the reader a great tutorial on using camera raw images, the most effective ways to colorize images, and explores the advantages of High Bit Depths (24 bits). He reviews how powerful and fast the Variations command (under adjustments) can be to correct color casts and shift saturation levels.
I find in my use of Photoshop that I have often used the same approaches over and over again and haven't always taken the time to discover newer, faster and more effective ways at getting to the results I am seeking. I fully appreciate having a great resource book available to quickly remind me of more effective and/or efficient ways of getting the results I want.
Book Review: A Great Book for Learning Photoshop
Summary: 5 Stars
Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on_One is intended for independent learning of Photoshop, for a student in a a classroom, or for use by a classroom instructor. It works for Windows as well as Macintosh computers. I recommend it highly for all three purposes.
At the beginning of each of the 12 lessons you watch a 10 to 17 minute video lesson showing the key concepts. They make more sense when first seen in action. Deke McClelland has prepared these videos with lynda.com so their quality is the highest. The DVD also contains the material for all the lessons.
First watch the video which explains major concepts, second do The lesson following step by step procedures, third review and test your knowledge. The projects are interesting. The step-by-step tutorials are easy to follow. And, the explanations oI important concepts are clear and easy to understand.
The instructions for the new Bridge are, like the rest of the book, excellent. Following them, I created a new workspace that I use daily. Did you know that if you reorganize your thumbnails, Bridge automatically saves this sort? If you then do a sort, say by filename, you can use View > Sort > Manually to return to your custom sort.
The newest CS3 things are included in this edition, such as the ability to convert Shadow and Highlight Adjustment to a smart filter and use in nondestructively in a layer as if it were a layer adjustment.
When I first reviewed Photoshop CS One-on-One for our NVMUG user group, I used Photoshop Elements for the review. As soon as I was able to upgrade to Photoshop CS I bought my own copy. It was a great way to learn, and is one of my most prized books.
I should not have been so eager to start the next tutorial when I was studying the book, and shoould have stopped to explore using each lesson on a project of my own.
I did find a couple of what I believe are very minor errors. Page 13 says to" select Automatically Export Caches to Folders When Possible under Advanced" - I found it under Cache. And, some of the Navigation techniques talked about in the video were not accompanied by screen shots.
This book is intended for someone who wants to learn Photoshop, not just to upgrade from earlier versions, so it does not distinguish between what is new in CS3 and what was in earlier versions.
This is a great book to study if you want to learn Photoshop CS3.
Book Review: Excellent Way to Learn Photoshop CS3
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought this book was fantastic and worth every dollar. The book is a "you-do-it-yourself" tutorial book covering navigation and Bridge, adjusting contrast and color balance, making selections and masks, cropping and sizing, filters, how to paint and heal, using text and shapes, along with chapters dealing with layers and layer adjustments and effects. And that's just some of the topics. It doesn't cover every tool and feature in CS3 - just the most useful - and thank goodness or it would be a massive undertaking to get through!
I spent well over 80 hours watching the 3+ hours worth of high quality video, reading the text and explanations, and following through all the detailed exercises. A DVD accompanies the book and includes the videos and all photographs that are used in the exercises. The DVD worked for me with no problems. The full color book includes photos of what your work should look like during various stages of the exercises so it's easy to get positive reinforcement that you're doing it correctly. All my exercises were successful in the end.
I probably loved this book so much because it was just what I was looking for: a hands-on method for a Photoshop beginner to learn about the tools and features in Photoshop CS3 as a whole. Those who are interested in looking for a step-by-step workflow to, say, touch up digital photos will probably want to look for a different book. This book definately covers some of those techniques, and you'll know how to do it in the end (plus a lot more), but it's goal is to cover the entire gamut of Photoshop software features.
The full color book is well organized and easy to follow. I went in order from Chapter 1 through Chapter 12, starting with how to navigate through Photoshop and finishing with how to print your images. At the end of each chapter is a written test to see how much you learned. Also throughout the book are many keyboard shortcuts which really speed things up. In the dozens of hours of exercises and detailed explanations, I found only 2 or 3 typos/errors and these were in the keyboard shortcut commands and I easily figured out the correct ones.
I highly recommend this book for anyone that has taken a quick look at Photoshop and doesn't know how to start learning it.
Book Review: Lavish Intro to Photoshop CS3
Summary: 3 Stars
"Adobe Photoshop CS 3: One on One," is a lavishly-produced book providing an introduction to the main features and tools of Photoshop CS 3. It is part of a series of "One-on-One" books published by Deke Press/O'Reilly and is geared towards the beginner-intermediate user and is designed to mimic hands-on instruction from computer graphics master, Deke McClelland, and it is as close to a personal set of lessons from an accomplished professional as can be imagined. Each tutorial sets out step by step instructions and explanations using simple comparison images, program screenshots, and clearly-expressed text. The text is enhanced by a companion DVD correlated with the step-by-step process of the tutorials.
A dozen lessons cover the major elements of Photoshop, from manipulating luminosity, making color corrections, selections, masking, layered compositions, text and shapes, and more. The book contains hundreds of full color photographs and screenshots. Every step of each tutorial is expressed in clear, concise prose, punctuated with professional insights and the author's mostly self-deprecating humor. McClelland is candid in his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Photoshop tools used in the tutorials.
The tutorials are complemented by "Pearls of Wisdom" spread throughout which are topical tips on how professionals like McClelland use Photoshop tools in the real world. There are sidebar "Extra Credits" providing bits of advanced instruction, or reference to Web sources were extra material can be found. Many of the tutorials include separate, but related, sections emphasizing concepts and theory like color channels and the math and logic behind various Photoshop tools. There are simple "tests" at the end of each chapter designed to help reinforce the lessons in the tutorials for the introductory user.
The author acknowledges that Photoshop is a complicated program, difficult to learn, and can be intimidating, nevertheless, he does a fine job motivating the reader to continue through the instruction (even though a particular process may have up to 23 steps to complete!) I think this book is a standout among the many Photoshop guides available. Certainly, it's production values equal or exceed those of any competitor.