|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 55 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
134 of 134 found the following review helpful:
 Superlative Content for the Serious Beginner Jun 27, 2007
By Brett Merkey
§
It has been a long while since I have been as enthusiastic about a book as this one. Deke McClelland has targeted my demographic with a practiced eye: people who use Photoshop and who want to use it more -- but who are completely intimidated and lost in the bowels of that "vast and ungainly behemoth." It helps that the author, who clearly loves this tool, maintains a refreshing irreverence toward it.
The book is organized in a "Read - Watch - Do" way. The "watch" part comes from the 3 hours of instructional video that is included with the book DVD. The DVD also contains example files and other material that McClelland shows how to use to set up your copy of Photoshop in the most useful manner.
The instructional videos blew me away with their information density. There is incredible content here. So far going through the book, I found it valuable to watch each more than once. The video material does not repeat the written instruction -- it complements it.
The book itself is beautiful and well-organized. It has a wide format that lies flat to make following along while at the mouse or keyboard easier. It is 500 pages long but is not overwhelming, like a reference. All the material is encompassed in 12 lessons. These 12 lessons teach the basic skills needed to use the tool effectively whether your focus is the Web or print.
A note of interest to those who have not upgraded to CS3 yet: I noticed in sharing this book that people with CS2 will be quite comfortable following along. The author clears away whatever obstacles may come up for you.
One last note: I know the editorial review above says there are only 2 hours of video with the book, not 3 as I stated. I have no idea why they rounded off 2 hours and 54 minutes that way. I guess they figured, as I do, that the features of this book could be understated and still be worthy of superlatives.
§
110 of 114 found the following review helpful:
 Lavish Intro to Photoshop CS3 Jul 12, 2007
By John A. Suda
"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.
63 of 64 found the following review helpful:
Serious PS CS3 Jul 24, 2007
By Conrad J. Obregon
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.
31 of 31 found the following review helpful:
 Generally a satisfactory introduction to Photoshop Nov 12, 2007
By R. M. Barge
*Overview*
I had zero experience with Photoshop when I opened this book. However, I had used restricted aspects of PaintShop Pro, so some of the concepts were no doubt a bit easier for me. In general, though, I approached this text as a total beginner.
Calling this a book is a misnomer. It is an integrated teaching system, including images stored on your computer, settings loaded and saved into Photoshop, and videos. In the Preface, you set up and learn how to use the non-book elements. Especially critical are the included image files; the lessons require that you be able to open the included images into Photoshop. If you skip or skim the Preface, "you'll be sorrr-ry..."
The teaching is linear. You can't skip around, and in fact (if you are a newbie) you can't skip a sentence or even a word without risking total disorientation.
After the Preface/setup phase, there are 12 chapters called "lessons", although they would more accurately be termed chapters or sections, as there are a number of discrete (and sometimes only tenuously connected) lessons in each one.
*Summary Rating*
I rate the book 4 stars, "very good", as an introductory text. I feel quite satisfied to have used it as my introduction to Photoshop and it was worth the price I paid for it and the time I invested in it. I have completed the entire book (although I just skimmed the last chapter, on printing, because I don't currently need to print graphics to paper).
I hope you'll keep the four-star rating in mind when reading the criticisms, so that you can put them into an overall context.
*Approach*
Deke (Deke McClelland, the author) is very personal in tone. The lessons begin by loading one or more images (copied from the DVD). Deke then leads you through a series of steps to accomplish a result, such as a) selecting part of one image and moving it into another, then cleaning up the composite to make it look more realistic, or b) creating adjustment layers or layer masks to change the appearance.
This basic approach takes up about 80% of the book. There are a considerable number of sidebars or bordered paragraphs to explain tangential points, some of them comprising several distinct pages.
There are also an abundance of illustrations of both the image you are manipulating, and the Photoshop controls you are supposed to be using, to make sure you are up to speed at any given point. If the book errs, it is on the side of too many rather than too few illustrations, probably a good thing for beginners. Photoshop is huge and complex, and on the rare occasions when you get disoriented, you can just go back a few paragraphs, study the text and illustrations, and get back on track.
The 12 chapters at least touch on all the basic concepts and actions in Photoshop. In all, it gives you a good springboard for advanced learning.
*Criticisms*
1. My biggest gripe about the book is that it too often leads you through the steps too fast, learning "how" to accomplish a very specific task without a sufficient explanation of "why". For example, one of the blend modes you are supposed to use repeatedly is "Multiply". Information about how Multiply works and what it accomplishes are scattered rather randomly among the instances when it is used. The book would benefit from a single explanation of how it works, with perhaps a simple example and a comparison to the closely-related "Darken" mode.
Similarly, the various sections where masks are made (which are mostly quite good) would benefit from a page of introductory "why", rather than scattered bits and pieces of information. I spent at least five minutes wondering "why in the h____ is the thumbnail for this vector mask gray".
2. At the worst, I was unable to accomplish a couple of lessons. There are one or two lessons that are just not very good, especially "Using the Vanishing Point Filter". Following the steps does not get you to the result. I really would have just thrown up my hands in despair, except that there is an excellent sidebar -- really a separate lesson -- called "Enhanced vanishing Point 2.0".
A related, less serious criticism, is that often the lessons bite off too much in one segment.
3. The O'Reilly website has an "errata" section that is completely empty. There is no forum that I have found. In short, support for users of the book is severely deficient. There aren't a lot of errata that I found, compared to some other programming books I have read, but there are some.
4. A lot of space is wasted by fully repeating utterly simple procedures. How to rename a layer is fully explained a dozen times, and the difference between Mac and MS keyboard commands (such as Ctrl for MS versus the cloverleaf key on a Mac) is repeated, in full, at least a hundred times. Other basic procedures that are much more likely to cause confusion are sometimes not explained or repeated adequately, especially the baffling world of dragging, clicking, and double clicking with various ctrl/alt/shift combinations.
5. The tests are good, but often involve concepts too difficult to extract by normal straight-through study: e.g. terms mentioned once in a sidebar or comprehensive definitions never really fleshed out in the text.
*Plusses*
Besides the basic four-star rating, there are some extras. You get a free 7-day promo trial to Deke's video course site. And the book is full of his delightful grade-school-wacky humor.
I did not find the videos included on the DVD to be particularly helpful, although they were interesting enough. They just don't actually teach you anything.
*Summary*
I have to say, the sheer amount of work that went into this book is mind-boggling. Writing a comprehensive introduction to Photoshop is unbelievably difficult. I think it's a good job overall; I'm glad I bought it and followed it from first page to last; and I would recommend the book to a beginner with decent underlying computer skills.
13 of 13 found the following review helpful:
Photoshop CS3 One-on-One Jul 25, 2007
By Edward Laskowski
Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One
This book is a great way to learn Photoshop CS3. The book has twelve lessons, which are essentially the like the chapters of most books. A DVD comes with the book. It contains all the sample images used in the lessons, and 13 tutorial videos, which are more than a replay of the info contained in the book. They have a lot of information packed into them, and you will need to pay close attention. They are of great value in showing you how to call up various commands in the Photoshop window.
The book is printed in color throughout, on quality paper, so you really can see those subtle differences described in the text. but the book is more than just a series of lessons-there are extensive explanations of many important aspects of digital photography and image manipulation. I especially appreciated the discussion of color.
To learn the program effectively, you will need to work through the lessons. You can also spend many leisurely evenings just browsing the book, and also viewing the video tutorials. If you are serious about your image work, yet want to avoid the tedium of endless study, get this book, written by Photoshop expert Deke McClelland.
See all 55 customer reviews on Amazon.com
|
| | |
