The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book: Harnessing Photoshop's Most Powerful Tool, Covers Photoshop Cs3 [With CDROM]

I am please how easy this book is to follow. Layering is essentially the power behind non-destructive photo editing and this book covers the concept of layering in an easy to understand manner. I've had maybe 2 months of tinkering around with photoshop and by doing the excercises in this book, i was able to venture off on my own and create fantastic composites quickly.

This is a great book for Photoshop. I own several Photoshop books and this one is by far the best I have read so far. From the title you might think it is just for advanced users, since it seems to be rather specialized. Even the author seems to think only experienced users will read the book. That is all wrong. By the time you have finished a third of this 250 page book, you will not only know the layers palette (there is a great diagram on page 6), and the layers menu. He sets out his idea of the thirty essential tools, commands, palettes, and menus that you will use most often (with shortcuts) all in easy to refer to tables on pages 35-41. There are some more tables for easy reference back in chapter 1. If you do the exercises, in that same first third of the book you will have experimented with the creation, duplication, deletion, manipulation, and grouping of layers (of course), but also color correction, techniques for selecting objects; cutting, copying, pasting, and moving objects; color balance; and most importantly how all that can be organized with the use of layers. The rest of the book explores other aspects of Photoshop all in the context of layers. What makes this book worth five stars is that he very clearly explains not only what is being done, but also the logic of what is being done. He uses layers to organize his work and explains this workflow method in some detail. Someone just starting with Photoshop could use this book to keep from falling into some bad habits that come from poking around, which is what some of the Photoshop books with more general titles seem to do. The author does not take on too much, but enough to do anything you would normally want to do as a photographer. He also gives you the background from which you can explore beyond the book.

Already a fan of Richard's other books for Elements and his blog, I bought this one knowing it was for Photoshop anyway. Let me tell you, it isn't too difficult to adapt these techniques to Elements 6! Layers work just about the same way apparently, and with a few tweaks here or there everything works fine. This book showed me lots of things I never knew about layers -- what I knew mostly was that I was under-utilizing them, and the book made the claim they are the ultimate Photoshop tool. I am already better working with masking (that you CAN use in Elements 6), and have a much better understanding of using layers to improve my images every time. I shoot a lot of nature photos, and now they come alive. Partly from things I learned in Richard's other books. I've made changes in my process based on suggestions and techniques here and I see the difference. Thanks Richard!

Fascinating I first found out about Richard buying an old copy of his Photoshop 5 How-To (Adobe Photoshop 5 How-To) book at a garage sale. It was a fat thing, dog-eared and ravaged. It didn't seem particularly inviting but it was cheap. "Good book." the seller said, "A little esoteric." I didn't read it in order and jumped into the Scanning and Duotoning chapters as these were what interested be as I had a scanner and all these old photos I wanted to make digital. I didn't even have a digital camera yet. Admittedly not everything in the book was for me (I don't do anything with web graphics), but the detail and depth in the chapters I needed was curiously interesting and appealed to my darkroom beginnings. That was about 5 years ago. Since, I've bought a digital camera, taken about 20,000 digital photos, and bought several other books by Richard. They just keep getting better. By the time I got to this book I'd already had some experience with layers from Richard's other books but this one puts it all together for me. The book seems to culminate the teachings of Richard's by melding layers with the process of image editing so that layers drive and organize what you are doing. It might just be that I have experience with Richard's books, but this one seemed to cover the gamut, from introduction to layers, the palette and its functions, through masking, layering changes, organizing, and retaining layers for later changes. Though the information on scanning and duotoning is no longer in his books, the subjects almost don't belong and the books he writes seem to me to have kept up with the times, and continue to deliver depth on the subject of image editing and sense about digital images. I've read other books that flit through a change or technique as if the steps explain themselves. What is there ends up being just a set of steps, as if the authors had no idea why they were doing these things and couldn't explain it. Some books I've read are fluffed up with filler. Those books are disposable. As I get deeper into image editing, it is Richard's reasons for doing things that make sense, and I want to know how to edit my images and why, not just to waltz through a set of steps like completing them was learning. There are plenty of step-by-steps, but all of them seem to have a bigger purpose than just getting you through the steps and breathing a sign of relief when they go right. The way he works the subject just works for me. And he does more that I don't see other authors doing: he answers emails (usually), keeps an informative blog, and lets you know his email address. I've even taken one of his courses at betterphoto.com which was a great experience. I know why that Photoshop 5 book was dog-eared, and why eventually in my hands it fell apart: I could refer to parts over and over and learn more each time, as the owner from the garage sale had done before me. If you are serious about understanding Photoshop, you won't lose with this book.

The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book: Harnessing Photoshop's Most Powerful Tool, covers Photoshop CS3 I find this book very useful for working in PS CS3. It won't work with earlier programs since Layers have been updated in CS3.