Adobe Photoshop CS2 One-Click Wow! [With CDROM]

Jack Davis is incredibly talented, creative, and funny, and he has a desire to share his knowledge with his readers and classes. He has been providing his audiences both the shorter ways and the longer ways (read: deeper explanations) to do amazing things in PS. "Photoshop CS2 One-Click Wow" provides you the short ways to do impressive things in Photoshop whether you're up against a deadline, a PS newbie, or just a little lazy like me. If you desire to understand PS in some depth, there are more appropriate books and video training (Mr. Davis has some incredibly useful and entertaining videos available at Software Cinema. And take one of his classes if you can. The knowledge he shares will inspire you to greater heights in PS.) Other books I recommend are "Photoshop CS2 Studio Techniques" by Ben Wilmore of any of Katrin Eismann's books on PS including "Masking and Compositing in Photoshop". Both of these provide all the sordid details for the detective in you. For the audience "One-Click Wow" is aimed at, it is a great and consistently useful tool. That audience will find it an indispensable book, you'll refer to it often as is gives those that need it or want it quick ways of doing some very fancy things in PS almost effortlessly.

Jack Davis not only delivers incredibly useful and creative ideas for us, but translates the moves into steps easy enough for a newbie to follow and acheive great results, but witty and interesting enough for us old pros out here to stay interested and intrigued. He delivers the most useful set of actions, styles and patterns I've seen to date on the CD. Buy the book. You'll be doing yourself a favor.

If you haven't added one of Jack Davis' WOW! books to your digital art library, you should consider the latest One-Click-WOW! for Photoshop CS2. It's packed with preset styles and effects for every task you might have. What is a preset? Basically, it is a special effect or group of effects (style), such as a drop shadow, that already has the options set for you. After you install the presets from the CD, they will appear with the other presets in the Styles Palette. All you need to do is apply these ready-made presets to your image. In his WOW-Styles Tutorial which is included in the book, Davis gives you all the information you need to apply and customize the 900+ presets in Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady. He explains the mystery of using layers and clipping masks, changing the resolution, brush size and scale of the presets as well as how to customize the WOW! presets and save the changes as a new style to your own Styles Library. To help you decide which preset is best for your needs, the book contains a full-color gallery of the presets applied to various types of images from photos to text. On the CD, there are over 300+ layer styles and custom shapes such as frames and panels that you can apply to your photographs or digital art. For your webpages, there are 150 button styles for creating static web buttons in Photoshop. In ImageReady, you can choose from 50+ rollover styles, with accompanying JavaScript, to create that popular rollover button effect. You can even preview the rollover effect in your web browser. Also included are gradients and seamless tiles for your backgrounds, many natural media brushes, pattern stamps, crop and marquee selection presets, and tools to help you fix your photographs. The one thing I found disappointing was that some of the presets are repeated from previous versions of Davis' WOW! books. Jack Davis is a well known digital designer, photographer and author. He is also part of the NAPP Dream Team.

Jack Davis' ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 ONE-CLICK WOW! is based on a cd-rom which packs in over 900 of the time-saving enhancement solutions contained in the workbook ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 ONE-CLICK WOW! From working with the shapes gallery and tinting photos to WOW custom overlays for framing and their differences, ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 users will find the WOW manual packed with important tools for quick, pro results.

If you have Photoshop, this book and CD are excellent value for your money. The CD with the Styles, Actions, Presets will make you productive right away. The book guides you on using all the tools on the CD. Excellent, lots of Wow factor.