Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One by Deke McClelland
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Book Reviews of Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One
Book Review: Great Resource Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One
by Deke McClelland
Published by O'Reilly
ISBN-13: 978-0596529758
Reviewed by Donna Sellers, member of the Eureka Photoshop Users Group, Nov 17, 2007
Topics covered:
Open and Organize
Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows
Correcting Color Balance
Making Selections
Crop, Straighten, and Size
Paint, Edit and Heal
Creating and Applying Masks
Focus and Filters
Building Layered compositions
Text and Shapes
Styles and Specialty Layers
Printing and Output
I can fully appreciate why this author was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame. Not only does he know his material backwards and forwards but he has the gift of writing in a way that is easy to understand. He includes many colored images that demonstrate what he is teaching. His book is appropriate for both the beginner and the more advanced user of Photoshop.
I loved how he organized the book, chapters and topics and made it so user friendly. Each chapter number and name is located on the bottom left side of each page and the specific topic is named on the bottom of the right-hand page. At the end of each section he has a review page of what the reader learned in that chapter and a way to test what concepts have been understood.
While I have been using Photoshop for a number of years, I found his review of Photoshop and all the additional improvements added with the latest CS3 version to be exciting and immediately applicable to increasing my work flow.
I found the examples the author provides on the CD, and the way he walks you through each exercise, easy to follow and helpful in translating what he is teaching to the practical level. His Chapter on Correcting Color Balance was my favorite and worth the price of the book. Within this section he gives the reader a great tutorial on using camera raw images, the most effective ways to colorize images, and explores the advantages of High Bit Depths (24 bits). He reviews how powerful and fast the Variations command (under adjustments) can be to correct color casts and shift saturation levels.
I find in my use of Photoshop that I have often used the same approaches over and over again and haven't always taken the time to discover newer, faster and more effective ways at getting to the results I am seeking. I fully appreciate having a great resource book available to quickly remind me of more effective and/or efficient ways of getting the results I want.
Book Review: A Great Book for Learning Photoshop
Summary: 5 Stars
Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on_One is intended for independent learning of Photoshop, for a student in a a classroom, or for use by a classroom instructor. It works for Windows as well as Macintosh computers. I recommend it highly for all three purposes.
At the beginning of each of the 12 lessons you watch a 10 to 17 minute video lesson showing the key concepts. They make more sense when first seen in action. Deke McClelland has prepared these videos with lynda.com so their quality is the highest. The DVD also contains the material for all the lessons.
First watch the video which explains major concepts, second do The lesson following step by step procedures, third review and test your knowledge. The projects are interesting. The step-by-step tutorials are easy to follow. And, the explanations oI important concepts are clear and easy to understand.
The instructions for the new Bridge are, like the rest of the book, excellent. Following them, I created a new workspace that I use daily. Did you know that if you reorganize your thumbnails, Bridge automatically saves this sort? If you then do a sort, say by filename, you can use View > Sort > Manually to return to your custom sort.
The newest CS3 things are included in this edition, such as the ability to convert Shadow and Highlight Adjustment to a smart filter and use in nondestructively in a layer as if it were a layer adjustment.
When I first reviewed Photoshop CS One-on-One for our NVMUG user group, I used Photoshop Elements for the review. As soon as I was able to upgrade to Photoshop CS I bought my own copy. It was a great way to learn, and is one of my most prized books.
I should not have been so eager to start the next tutorial when I was studying the book, and shoould have stopped to explore using each lesson on a project of my own.
I did find a couple of what I believe are very minor errors. Page 13 says to" select Automatically Export Caches to Folders When Possible under Advanced" - I found it under Cache. And, some of the Navigation techniques talked about in the video were not accompanied by screen shots.
This book is intended for someone who wants to learn Photoshop, not just to upgrade from earlier versions, so it does not distinguish between what is new in CS3 and what was in earlier versions.
This is a great book to study if you want to learn Photoshop CS3.
Book Review: Excellent Way to Learn Photoshop CS3
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought this book was fantastic and worth every dollar. The book is a "you-do-it-yourself" tutorial book covering navigation and Bridge, adjusting contrast and color balance, making selections and masks, cropping and sizing, filters, how to paint and heal, using text and shapes, along with chapters dealing with layers and layer adjustments and effects. And that's just some of the topics. It doesn't cover every tool and feature in CS3 - just the most useful - and thank goodness or it would be a massive undertaking to get through!
I spent well over 80 hours watching the 3+ hours worth of high quality video, reading the text and explanations, and following through all the detailed exercises. A DVD accompanies the book and includes the videos and all photographs that are used in the exercises. The DVD worked for me with no problems. The full color book includes photos of what your work should look like during various stages of the exercises so it's easy to get positive reinforcement that you're doing it correctly. All my exercises were successful in the end.
I probably loved this book so much because it was just what I was looking for: a hands-on method for a Photoshop beginner to learn about the tools and features in Photoshop CS3 as a whole. Those who are interested in looking for a step-by-step workflow to, say, touch up digital photos will probably want to look for a different book. This book definately covers some of those techniques, and you'll know how to do it in the end (plus a lot more), but it's goal is to cover the entire gamut of Photoshop software features.
The full color book is well organized and easy to follow. I went in order from Chapter 1 through Chapter 12, starting with how to navigate through Photoshop and finishing with how to print your images. At the end of each chapter is a written test to see how much you learned. Also throughout the book are many keyboard shortcuts which really speed things up. In the dozens of hours of exercises and detailed explanations, I found only 2 or 3 typos/errors and these were in the keyboard shortcut commands and I easily figured out the correct ones.
I highly recommend this book for anyone that has taken a quick look at Photoshop and doesn't know how to start learning it.
Book Review: Highly Detailed, Quality Training
Summary: 5 Stars
Deke McClelland accomplishes the very difficult task of teaching the core functionality and features of Photoshop. With every new version, Photoshop brings new abilities to the digital graphics and photo professional; and with those abilities come added complexity. For someone getting started today, the idea of learning this unparalleled program is daunting.
PS CS3 One-On-One itself is someone daunting if you simply pick up the book and flip the pages. The book is long at just over 500 pages, primarily because each task taught is presented in painstaking detail, step-by-step. With plenty of visuals, the book does an outstanding job of walking through advanced techniques with enough detail and description so as to not lose the reader.
There is absolutely no way a Photoshop user can learn a feature or technique simply by digesting a few pages of a book and calling it good. With that in mind, PS CS3 One-On-One is presented in a quality lesson format with all the necessary elements for students to succeed. Visual learners will be jazzed to view the well designed pages with plenty of screen shots and cropped examples. Visual and auditory types both will find the included DVD of complimentary training videos from the famed Lynda.com site invaluable.
At times the detail included with each lesson does drag on a bit, but in reality that is representative of what it takes to accomplish desired effects in Photoshop; not everything is a quick filter and done. In fact, most quality effects Deke teaches require multiple steps and a combination of tools to create an impressive final output.
PS CS3 One-On-One is an interesting combination of a medium to advanced users manual for Photoshop melded in with some great recipe-esque how to like guides for effects. Typically these two approaches are seen disparately in various books.
As you utilize this guide in your learn of Photoshop, you will feel like you have a personal tutorial and reference guide wrapped into one. Whether you are learning to improve images or create from scratch, you have it covered. If you are looking to master the essence of Photoshop as working professional, make this book part of your required reading.
Book Review: Superlative Content for the Serious Beginner
Summary: 5 Stars
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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.
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