Photoshop Cs2: Essential Skills [With CDROM]

Great book. Content is good, presentation is good and above all the examples are good. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about Photoshop. The book starts off a little slow, especially for those that already know a few things but it picks up about a third of the way in and gives you strong details and explanations of skills you'll soon master. Of all my Photoshop books this one is definitely a keeper.

Title: Photoshop CS2 - Essential Skills Author: Mark Galer and Philip Andrews Publisher: Focal Press (2004) ISBN: 0-240-51951-5 Pages: 340 pages Reviewer: Bruce Frank Rating: 5 out of 5 stars "Advice from Down Under" might be an appropriate subtitle for this book, since it was written by two seasoned Australian photographers - and both are, unsurprisingly, beta testers for the Adobe Photoshop product line. Their prose is peppered with non-U.S. spellings and phrases such as "colour, whilst, and realize," but this is not distracting in the least. After all, these people have used the English language a bit longer than Americans! This is a book that takes you from step 1, including which computer platform might work best for someone in the industry (Mac is the suggestion, since it provides the best compatibility with other members of the creative community, who largely work on Macs), all the way to sophisticated techniques for creating type effects and complex photomontages. Something I picked up from the introductory section is that when working on very large images (mine are typically in the 300-400MB range, with multiple layers), it's best to have a scratch disk that is physically separate from the drive on which the file and Photoshop application reside - something I suspected, but could never confirm until now. Divided into comprehensive sections designed to be followed in a linear fashion, this would make (and probably is used in this manner in Australia) an excellent textbook and study guide for any Photoshop class. There is also a website that provides additional information, downloadable work files, and reference links (photoshopessentialskills.com). The layout, printing, and even paper choice are superb - this is a high quality volume that is an excellent primer for the beginning user who aspires to learn the full capabilities of this flagship Adobe application, or the advanced user who would like to add a few new tricks to his Photoshop bag.

Not only is this book easy to read and follow, its an absolute wealth of information. Having Bridge and working with camera RAW explained saved me so much time, it's like being given extra hours in the day. Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills contains so many techniques that save time and improve your images in ways you wouldn't ever think of on your own. For me, there's really too many image editing options available in Photoshop CS2 for my brain to completly remember, and this book is a constant reference for me. I can remember enough to know there is a way to do something, and a quick look in the book fills in the gaps to quickly get me back on track and back to work in no time at all. Absolutly the best Photoshop book around.

Speaking as a professional, I've been using Photoshop daily for 5+ years, and this is one of the most concise, clearly written, well-illustrated books of it's type that I have ever seen. I picked it up as a gift for a friend who's interested in learning Photoshop, and only had 5 mins to skim it before I gave it to her. When I got a chance to really sit down with it, I was very impressed; this book has everything anyone looking to get started with digital photoediting could ever need. It covers everything from what a digital image is and how they work, through storage devices and hardware, through the basics of color management, and on into many, many chapters covering basic and advanced technique with photoshop CS2. One of the things I look for in a book like this is in-depth coverage of the tools available, and what they do, which this book provides, it is NOT one of those "Photoshop Tips + Tricks" or "101 Photoshop Tricks!" type books that teach you how to do specific small "tricks" or "effects" with the tools, but provide you with no broader knowledge of how to use those tools, leaving you with knowledge of how to do a very small assortment of things in predetermined steps. Instead, this book is a very solid primer, with both in-depth discussion of how the tools and concepts work within Photoshop AND well-illustrated step-by-step tutorials to familiarize you with their use. In addition, the book contains much information that is useful even to those advanced in the use of Photoshop. I was surprised to find information that was new to me in this book, even after the amount of experience I have. I was so impressed that I'm picking up a copy for myself, just to have around. This book covers both ends of the spectrum equally well - beginners will find everything they need to get them started and take them through highlevel editing, and experienced users will find it a useful refresher, and a fantastic reference book. Definately a useful addition to any Photoshop user's shelf, I can't reccommend it enough.

It is a shame that the only other reviewer of this book panned it because it was very similar to the previous version. Unfortunately, this is a very, very common method of constructing a book that has been written for previous versions of the same program. The amount of material that is new to a version is far outweighed by the amount of material that remains the same. That is why Ben Willmores Photoshop CS2 Up To Speed which contains only material that is new to CS2 is a very, very small book. If you go to his series, Photoshop X (pick the version) Studio Techniques, the books look like carbon copies of each other. Anyway, I would like to review this book as someone new to this series of Photoshop: Essential Skills. I Love it and I have a huge Photoshop library to compare this book to. The layout is very well thought out, the book is methodical. It is beautifully illustrated and covers everything you need to really get your teeth into CS2 and Photoshop in general. It is a very comfortable read and I find myself going back to this book all the time. The examples are very good and every image is included on the enclosed CD so the reader can work through the examples. Also on the CD are 4 hours of QuickTime video tutorials, camera raw files, free extra chapters and a lot of goodies (free layer styles, shapes, gradients, etc.) I think the CD by itself justifies the price of this book and as Photoshop books go this is not an expensive one. I feel that any buyer of this book gets a lot for their dollar. I would just advise the unhappy first reviewer that this is a common phenomenon in the Photoshop field- to recycle material from book to book so he may want to skip a few versions and not buy the same series back to back. Give it a few cycles to really change. As someone who has owned an awful lot of Photoshop books, before I purchase the "new version" of a book, I first browse through it to see just how much repitition there is. Recently, one book was such a carbon copy of the previous version that I had to struggle to find new sections or even new images. You could place the two versions side by side and they were identical. It turned into a challenge to find the difference. Anyone, as I said, I am new to this series and I find this book to be very worthful and a great investment but like all other Photoshop series, I won't automatically buy the next version without browsing it first. That's just good practice in Photoshop books that are series. Even Martin Evenings's new Photoshop book for his series is almost a ditto copy of the previous version. The covers are so similar that the bookstore and I both got them confused. I mean they didn't even go to the trouble to really change the cover much at all, so in general, beware but for first timers of this series- Photoshop:Essential Skills by Mark Galer, buy this book-it's a good one and the reviewer must have really liked the previous one to blindly buy this new version. That says something about th