The Photoshop 5/5.5 Wow! Book (5th Edition)

When I first purchased Photoshop 5.5, I quickly became frusterated with the product. I knew it was the best graphics program around but as a new user I was finding it very difficult to learn. I bought this WOW book and went through it from cover to cover. I found that it did demand a lot of effort and determination on my part to understand the material. There is a lot of new terminology introduced which is completely foreign to those of us with no background in design arts. I did end up rereading each chapter several times to get the most out of it. I have to give the authors full credit for not what I consider an excellent book. They will not spoon feed you step by step instructions on every detail. They present techniques and sufficient theory to let you work on your own. If you can't handle reading anything semi-technical don't bother with this book. On the other hand if you possess even moderate intelligence you should be able to handle this book with a little bit of effort. It gives you all you need to know to do expert level design work with PhotoShop. The effort was worth it...I LOVE PHOTOSHOP!

My biggest regret is that I did not discover this book long before I did. The problem with many computer books is they are too simplistic OR assume too much of the reader. This would be right down the alley of either intermediate or advanced Photoshop users. Beginners might have to read through everything a dozen times, but it would be great for beginners, too. The accompanying CD is also very worthwhile. Too many CDs have the usual pap on them (how many versions of Hot Dog Pro do YOU own?) but not this one. Very useable examples, very useable plug-ins and demos make this very, very worthwhile.

This is a *fantastic* book (providing you don't own the previous versions of it). What some people are calling its main weakness is its greatest source of strength: it has been refined and iterated so many times that the material VERY well-written and usable. Things I appreciate most: The focus is on teaching techniques with Photoshop, not features... many other books show you individual features without the context of a real world problem. Here, they show you how to use combinations of features to reach a desirable, artistically tasteful outcome. They don't just tell you what all the features are, they tell AND SHOW you WHY you would want to use them all and how you need to think about them. (2) they cover all the major ways that one would use Photoshop... for compositing, for web work, for photo touch-up and so on. As such, it's a great reference and I've looked things up over and over in it in the 3 months that I've used it. (It's also in color which gives it a huge advantage over many other books.) Photoshop is an extremely hard program to learn without help, and this the first and only book to have vaulted me into competence and understanding of what is going on.

This book is full of techniques which go beyond simple basics. I almost did not buy it because of the negative reviews included here but now that I have it I am totally pleased and baffled by the negativity seen in some of the reviews. The photos, colors, illustrations, and text are excellent.

I agree with the readers, about the book's small changes. Though there haven't been drastic changes in the book, it isn't really fair to give it one star either. The authors managed to cover every new feature and tool, even giving them special coverage, plus the full color layout, makes the book a sheer haven to read. (And also because this book was written for Intermediate-Advanced users, the idiot who bought the book without noticing the fact first has got to be the stupidest person I know.) If the program didn't change, how big of a change do you expect from the book. The coverage from the Photoshop 4 Wow! Book was amazing, so there really isn't much to cover anymore in version 5, I'm sure. This book is great, the CD-ROM, is even better than any other CD-ROM which came with other books I've read, no CD-ROM managed to come up with such great actions and collage layers such as this one.(Due to distribution laws, I'm sure the authors loved to give you a fully functional copy of Alien Skin's Eye Candy and Kai's Power Tools, but couldn't)