NOTE: Peachpit books direct sales are very competitive in price with Amazon and you get the big Peachpit Member discount just for signing up at no charge, and the price includes free FedEx ground shipping. www.peachpit.com It is far better that the publisher get the money to reinvest in books than it go to Amazon.

The new Adobe CS 2 (Creative Suite 2) programs do not come with printed manuals and many users will find it useful to have third party books as desktop top references.

People who are new to Photoshop will definitely want to get one of the basic books such as Daniel Giordan's How to Use Photoshop CS2.

People who are upgrading from an earlier version of Photoshop will find it very useful to read Photoshop CS / CS2 Wow! Book.

There are a number of excellent books for different programs in the Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium, which includes Photoshop CS2 with ImageReady CS2, InDesign CS2, , Acrobat Pro 7, Illustrator CS2, and GoLive CS2.

Below are books I recommend for users of Photoshop. This list will be continually updated as new books and new editions of previous books come out.

THE BEST PHOTOSHOP BOOK EVER

THE PHOTOSHOP CS / CS2 WOW! BOOK
Author: Linnea Dayton, Cristen Gillespie.
800 Pages, color illustrations, DVD ROM
$59.99 Peachpit Press 2006
ISBN-10: 0-321-21345-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-21345-7
http://www.peachpit.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321213459&rl=1

This is an absolutely marvelous book that will take Photoshop users to new heights. It begins with the new features in CS and CS2, then goes on to very clear and interesting demonstrations of the new facilities, plus many other useful things that can be done in Photoshop.

The new CS2 facilities that are explained and demonstrated include vanishing point geometry, image warp, smart objects, spot healing brush, one-click red-eye correction, enhanced noise reduction options, multiple layer control, multi-image Camera Raw file processing, 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) support, customizable workspaces and menus, and Adobe Bridge for image file management.

A long-time Photoshop user might not happen upon these useful new facilities and that is what makes this book so valuable.

The DVD-ROM has tutorial files, layer styles, patterns, actions, gradients, custom tools, etc.

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THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PHOTOSHOP BOOK- THE PERFECT GIFT

THE ART OF PHOTOSHOP FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Author: Daniel Giordan
Large format 288 pages, all color
$39.99 ISBN 0672327139 Sams 2006
www.samspublishing.com

I have been reviewing computer books for almost twenty years, and this is the most beautiful Photoshop book I have ever seen.

Daniel Giordan has always been my favorite Photoshop author for his clarity and organization, and with this book he brings together his Photoshop expertise, his skills as a digital photographer, his art school training in traditional media, and his love of the land of his ancestors, Italy. He traveled through Tuscany taking photos. He then created a book to instruct and inspire the digital photographer and he also shares with the reader the pleasures of traveling through Tuscany.

This book taught me new techniques to use in Photoshop and reminded me of things I had been neglecting that will optimize my digital photography, such as having my camera display histograms and using an off-camera shutter release when I am using a tripod to eliminate the camera movement from pressing a shutter button.

The design team is to be praised for creating a book design that is in itself an aesthetic pleasure. Daniel Giordan designed the cover and a David Giordan is listed as a designer of the interior.

This book makes the perfect gift for a photographer who uses Photoshop. A really great gift would include a holiday in Italy because after reading this book and looking at the marvelous variety of beautiful subjects, you will certainly want to take your own trip through Tuscany.

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BEST CLASSROOM BOOK

UNDERSTANDING ADOBE PHOTOSHOP: Digital Imaging Concepts and Techniques
Author: Richard Harrington
400 pages, color illustrations, DVD
$44.99 ISBN 0321368983 Peachpit 2006
Member price: $31.49 www.peachpit.com

This is the book I would choose as a school text because it organizes and presents the information in way that makes it easy for the teacher to interact with the students, but at the same time it can be used for self-teaching.

It teaches the concepts behind all digital imaging and shows how they are applied in Photoshop. The DVD contains the lesson files, plus, what is unusual for Photoshop books, 4 1/2 hours of training videos and flash-based quizzes.

This book will not go out of date with the next version number change because it does not teach a specific version of Photoshop. For teachers that means not having to learn to use a new book every year and for students that is important because books are a big investment.. For teachers that means not having to learn to use a new book every year and for students that is important because books are a big investment.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP BOOK FOR EASY LEARNING

HOW TO USE PHOTOSHOP CS2: Visually in full color
Author: Daniel Giordan
Large format 320 pages, all color
$29.99 ISBN 0672327511 Sams 2006
www.samspublishing.com

This is an excellently organized, clearly written and well illustrated book that will take the Photoshop user through the functions of Photoshop one by one, using screen captures and example graphics. It is a perfect foundation upon which to build advanced skills. I have always found Giordan's books and articles to be superior in every way, and he gets my absolutely highest recommendation.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP COURSE

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 CLASSROOM IN A BOOK
482 pages, all color, CD with lesson files
$49.99 ISBN 0321321847 Peachpit 2005
Member price: $34.99 http://www.peachpit.com

This is the compreshensive course developed with Adobe that in 16 lessons, with review questions, will bring you to expert level in all the Photoshop essentials. The design of this new CS2 edition of the book has larger, all full color illustrations and a very attractive new page layout. If you want to learn Photoshop in depth, in a structured course, this is certainly the book for you.

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BEST COMPREHENSIVE BOOK ON PHOTOSHOP FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 BOOK FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Author: Scott Kelby
large format, 459 pages, all color
$39.99 ISBN: 0321330625 New Riders 2005
www.newriders.com

This must-have book provides step by step instructions for using Photoshop when working with digital photographs. It explains how to use the facilities in Photoshop and then how to apply them to solving the problems that you may encounter with digital photographs, such as the 'noise' (colored speckles) in photographs taken in low light, by using Lab color controls. There is excellent material on retouching and enhancing portraits.

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BEST IN-DEPTH VISUAL PRESENTATION OF PHOTOSHOP

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 ON DEMAND
Authors: Andy Anderson & Steve Johnson
large format, 544 pages, all color
$34.99 ISBN: 0789733900 QUE 2005
www.quepublishing.com

This is an excellent and comprehensive book of instructions for using Photoshop. Most Photoshop users are visually oriented and this book is an excellent way for them to learn. Each page presents a different Photoshop function- over 480 of them! The steps are numbered and illustrated in a handsome layout. Learn everything in this book and you are probably ready to take the Adobe Certified Expert exam.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP PREPRESS BOOK

REAL WORLD ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2
984 pages, all color
$54.99 ISBN 0321334116 Peachpit Press 2006
Member Preice $38.49 http://www.peachpit.com

This is a must have, must read, and must understand book for anyone involved in press printing. It is a very technical and comprehensive book that teaches the foundation science behind color and how it is reproduced in RGB on the monitor screen and with a press using inks on various kinds of paper. It tells how to optimize images for the press, and how to organize workflow.

I have often dealt with designers and even printers who do not understand the technology they are using. All designers and printers should understand what is in this book in order to save time and money, to get optimal results, and to avoid mistakes- which on a deadline can be a disaster. It is also a good for clients who have much designing and printing done to be knowledgeable about the things in this book.

This book covers many things that are essential for those preparing images for the commercial press that are not covered in the books for the artists and photographers who use desktop printers and photo printing services.

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INTERACTIVE LESSONS IN A BEAUTIFUL BOOK

THE ART OF PHOTOSHOP CS2 Edition
Daniel Giordan
305 pages, color illustrations, large format 10 x 10 inches, CD
$49.99 ISBN: 0672328100 Sams 2006
www.samspublishing.com

Daniel Giordan writes the clearest and best organized books on Photoshop, but he does much more than that in his books. Giordan's latest, The Art of Photoshop CS2 Edition, puts Photoshop books in a whole new category- instructional art books. The lessons are each built around one of his beautiful photographs that is introduced with a page devoted to the ethos behind it, along with literary quotes, and a discussion of the artistic goal of the work he is doing on the image in Photoshop. This is followed by the pages with the step by step instructions which one can follow interactively because the CD contains the files of all the images and steps in processing them.
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BEST IN-DEPTH BOOK ON PHOTOSHOP FOR THE WEB

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 FOR THE WEB
Author: Tanya Staples
672 pages, all color
$49.99 ISBN: 0321331710 Peachpit 2005
Member price $34.99 http://www.peachpit.com

The Web has become a way of life and and having the best possible presentation on the Web is very important. This comprehensive book shows you all the things you can do in Photoshop to prepare graphics for the Web. This book is a must have for all Photoshop users who create for the Web.

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USEFUL BOOK ON IMAGE SHARPENING

IMAGE SHARPENING WITH ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2- Real World Series
Author: Bruce Fraser
288 pages, color illustrations
$39.99 ISBN-10: 0-321-44995-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-321-44995-5
Published by Peachpit Press. Series: Real World 2006.
http://www.peachpit.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321449959&rl=1

Image sharpening is one of the most debated aspects of image preparation, and when and how to use it involves a complex set of choices. Anyone using Photoshop professionally needs to understand image sharpening and this is a useful book for that.

This book would have benefited greatly from a CD containing the images because the 150 line screen illustrations printed in the book do not show as clearly as one might like the sharpening artifacts, noise, etc., or of course the discussed comparisons between sharpening as seen on the screen and as it appears in the printed version which is softened and to a degree that depends on the printing process.

REVIEW'S NOTES: Like the author, I turn off sharpening in my cameras and do any sharpening later in Photoshop. When I do not use RAW, I use the highest quality JPEG to reduce any JPEG artifacts. Unlike the author I restrict sharpening to situations and areas where detail must be brought out to make it visible. I dislike the artificial look of sharpening artifacts.

I never use the default Bicubic as a mode of interpolation, because when upsampling images, Bicubic creates sharpening artifacts, which Biliniar does not.

Rather than sharpening, I bring out details in images used for print by adjusting contrast to give them what is called 'pop'.

I also use a three layer method to bring out highlight and shadow details, with one upper layer as multiply and another as as screen, and where needed erasing the areas of those layers that are not useful. When I have gotten the best results I can, I duplicate all three layers and flatten one set which is then copied to another file for the publishers. I keep the work file separately.

To reduce color noise, I do a Gaussian blur until the noise is not visible, then go to Fade Gausian Blur under Edit leave it at 100% and select Color under Mode. Sharpness returns with the color noise blended.

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UNDERSTANDING PRINT PRODUCTION

PRINT PRODUCTION- Real World Series
Author: Claudia McCue
368 pages, grayscale illustrations
$44.99 ISBN-10: 0-321-41018-1; ISBN-13: 978-0-321-41018-4
Published by Peachpit Press. Series: Real World 2007.
http://www.peachpit.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321410181&rl=1

Many programs are part of print production and Photoshop is the one universally used for photographs. Almost anyone looking for work in publishing is expected to know the major publishing programs used by that organization and understand print production, and this includes photographers who work in Photoshop. This is an excellent book to learn how those programs are coordinated in the publishing process.

Many of the publications I provide work to have an editor who does much of the layout and my knowing how to prepare my text and images ready to be dropped into their layout program gets my work preferential treatment.
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UP TO SPEED WITH PHOTOSHOP CS2
Author: Bill Willmore
171 pages, color illustrations
$24.99 ISBN: 032133050-1 Peachpit 2006
Member Price: $24.49 http://www.peachpit.com

This book explains to knowledgeable Photoshop users of previous versions the changes they will find in CS2.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP RESTORATION AND RETOUCHING BOOK

PHOTOSHOP RESTORATION AND RETOUCHING, 3rd Edition
Authors: Katrin Eismann with Wayne Palmer
460 pages, color illustrations.
$49.99 ISBN 0-032131627-4 New Riders 2006
Member price: $34.99 www.newriders.com

This is an absolutely marvelous book and a must-have for everyone who does photo retouching or restoration in Photoshop.

This book is comprehensive, clearly written by a real expert, and very well illustrated with step by step examples of photos and screen shots of the Photoshop facilities. No matter how well you know Photoshop restoration and retouching you will learn many very useful things from this book.

The topics covered include: Removing dust, mars and other damage. Reconstructing torn and partial photos. Correcting, restoring and enhancing color. Hand tinting and sepia toning. Improving contrast and tonal values. Sharpening. Compositing. Improving and substituting backgrounds. Retouching faces for both portraits and glamour illustrations
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BEST PHOTOSHOP BOOK FOR COMPOSITING

PHOTOSHOP MASKING & COMPOSITING
Author: Katrin Eismann
460 pages, color illustrations.
$54.99 ISBN 0-73571279-4 New Riders 2006
Member price: $38.49 www.newriders.com

Anyone who wishes to do photo-digital illustration professionally must be very skilled at compositing. This is an excellent book on the subject by a marvelous author of Photoshop books. No matter how much you already know you will learn new and valuable things from this book.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP CAMERA RAW BOOK

REAL WORLD CAMERA RAW ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2
Bruce Fraser
314 pages, all color
$39.95 ISBN 0321334094 Peachpit Press 2005
Member price: $27.99 http://www.peachpit.com

All digital still cameras default to some level of jpeg to save their images. Pro-sumer level cameras usually also give you the option to save the original unprocessed Raw image. The Raw files are much larger than the jpegs, but with camera memory now so inexpensive, the cost of storage should no longer be a problem.

The most important thing for any photographer about a Raw image is that it does not have jpeg artifacts. Even at the highest quality, jpeg compression creates such things as banding where dark and light colors meet. (BTW- Never enlarge or reduce the size of an image using Photoshop's default Bicubic mode of interpolation because it uses a sharpening algorithm that also puts in those banding artifacts, which can made skin pores look like craters. Use Biliniar and then decide on sharpening on any sharpening you want later.)

Cameras that allow saving the Raw image come with a bare bones software facility for adjusting the raw image and converting it to a standard RGB format.

Photoshop's Camera Raw facility goes far beyond that and can do some things that are very, very useful. I particularly like the chromatic aberration facility to remove color fringing, and it also does a quick and easy color noise reduction and a luminance smoothing- but be careful of luminance smoothing because when you remove grayscale graininess you remove sharpness. Another facility helps you to lighten away vignetting. Camera Raw it is not good for selective adjustments within an image and it has a rather primitive sharpening facility.

The different models within camera brands use different algorithms for storing Raw images and that file must then be decoded before the image can be worked on. Alas Adobe is not fast to get out Photoshop plug-ins for new cameras, such as very popular the Rebel XT, and the new plug-ins are deliberately made to work only with the latest version of Photoshop. You cannot use the Rebel XT plug-in in Photoshop CS and I greatly object to Photoshop CS2 allowing only two installations. With drive failures, directory losses, and viruses, not to mention having to buy a new computer, one quickly uses up those two installs and then Adobe has told my readers that they have to repurchase the full version of the program!

Any serious photographer should be working with the raw images from the camera and using Photoshop's Camera Raw and this book provides a good introduction to that facility. The second half of the book deals with the new Adobe Bridge image management facility.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP LAB COLOR BOOK

PHOTOSHOP LAB COLOR
366 pages, color illustrations, CD with example illustrations
$54.99 ISBN 0321356780 Peachpit Press 2005
Member Price $38.49 http://www.peachpit.com

Dan Margulis is the guru of LAB color. LAB color is the third way Photoshop has to manipulate the RGB (red, green, and blue) that creates the color you see on your monitor.

Photoshop allows you to manipulate the native RGB, to manipulate a simulated CMYK for a better idea of what the image will look like when printed on paper with cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, and you can manipulate LAB color. LAB is an odd name- L stands for Lightness and the A and B just mean channel A and channel B .

Dan Margulis explains that some color adjustments are done best in LAB color and that there are other image manipulation functions you can only do in LAB color.

Scenics like deserts are ideal candidates for LAB color adjustment because with LAB color you can use curves to selectively intensify different areas of the spectrum that are quite close together, which we would generally categorize as the same 'color'. You cannot do this by using Saturation in RGB or CMYK. LAB color channels can be used to achieve other things which Margulis describes.
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THE BEST BOOK ON COLOR CORRECTION

PHOTOSHOP COLOR CORRECTION
Author: Michael Kieran
384 pages, color Illus., Mac/Windows CD
$49.99 ISBN 0321124014 Peachpit 2003
Member price: $34.99 http://www.peachpit.com

Photoshop Color Correction by Michael Kieran, from Peachpit, is by far the best book I have ever found on the subject of optimizing photographs and preparing them for the press. This book is clear, concise, comprehensive and ideally organized. It is very well illustrated and the CD has images on which the reader can practice the techniques presented in the book.

The author Michael Kieran is a deservedly renowned authority on optimizing photographs and preparing them for prepress and Photoshop Color Correction is excellent as both a text and a reference.

Color correction, sharpening, etc., are a subjective art. With this book, you can use the author’s methods to achieve whatever results you prefer or your client wants.

Michael Kieran’s Photoshop Color Correction from Peachpit is of inestimable value to every professional and all serious amateurs. I keep it right beside my computer.

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BEST COLOR MANAGEMENT BOOK

COLOR MANAGEMENT IN MAC OS X: Apple Pro Training Series
Author: Joshua Weisberg
380 pages, color illustrations, Mac CD
$44.99 ISBN 0-321-24576-8 Adobe Press 2004
Member price: $31.49 www.peachpit.com

Color management is an essential skill for people in production, but one that seems too daunting for many to even attempt to master.

This book is a course text with lesson files on the CD. After you have learned what is in it, you can take the ColorSync certification multiple-choice exam at an Apple Training center.
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FUN FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS IN PHOTOSHOP

PHOTOSHOP FINISHING TOUCHES
Author: Dave Cross
384 Pages, color illustrations
$39.99 Peachpit Press 2006
ISBN-10: 0-321-21345-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-21345-7
ISBN-10: 0-321-44166-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-44166-9
http://www.peachpit.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321441664&rl=1

This is a book for those who want to have fun being creative with their photographs in Photoshop. There are many examples of things you can do and the instructions include large step by step menu screen captures that are large enough to see clearly.

The tutorial chapters cover artistic effects, collaging, adding frames and borders, sharpening, frames and borders, presentations including storybooks, and printing.

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BEST AUTOMATING BOOK

PHOTOSHOP CS2 SPEED CLINIC: Automating Photoshop to Get Twice the Work Done in Half the Time
Author: Matt Kloskowski
256 pages, color illustrations
$34.99 ISBN 0321441656 Peachpit 2006
Member Price: $24.49 www.peachpit.com

One of the most useful and least understood things you can do in Photoshop is automate repetitive tasks. This excellent book takes you step by step with color screen captures through many of the automations you are most likely to need, including batch processing and actions recipes for common image corrections.

This book is a course text with lesson files on the CD. After you have learned what is in it, you can take the ColorSync certification multiple-choice exam at an Apple Training center.
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BEST PHOTOSHOP FOR WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS

PHOTOSHOP FOR WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS DVD
Author: Scott Kelby
DVD
$49.99 ISBN 0321348699 Peachpit 2005
Member price: $34.99 www.peachpit.com

This is a very useful DVD that will help wedding photographers create albums that really impress, including the popular storybooks.

The DVD begins by showing you the basic building blocks you will use in Photoshop including ghosting, colorizing, and/or desaturating around selected parts of the image, adding glows, spotlighting, using adjustment layers compositing layers .

You are then shown how to create design templates that you can use over and over again, for color cutaway, multi-photo stack, photo blends and storybook effects

There is also a handy chapter on how to created a slide show in Adobe Acrobat to show your client the proofs, from which the client cannot remove or print the photos.

The demonstrations in Photoshop are very clear and easy to understand and do yourself. The one aesthetic problem with this DVD is the very poor quality of the sound recording which has breath pops all the way through.
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BEST PHOTOSHOP BOOK COMPILED BY EXPERTS

THE PHOTOSHOPWORLD DREAM TEAM BOOK, Volume 1
By Scott Kelby and others
Large format, 304 pages, all color
$29.99 ISBN: 0735714215 New Riders 2004
This book is a compilation of examples of the skills demonstrated by presenters at PhotoshopWorld. There are a variety of subjects with something to interest every Photoshop use.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP BOOKS FOR CREATIVE ARTISTS

MAGGIE TAYLOR'S LANDSCAPE OF DREAMS- Adobe Photoshop Master Class
Author: Amy Standen
168 pages, color illustrations
$40. ISBN: 0321306147 Peachpit 2005
Member price: $20. http://peachpit.com

Maggie Taylor does surrealistic photo collages that bring this genre into the digital age. In this book you learn what inspires her images and how she creates them. You will also read discussions of her work by other artists.
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SPECIAL CHOICE FOR ARTISTS

(digital) TEXTURING AND PAINTING
Author: Owen Demers
334 pages, color Illus., Mac/Win CD
$55 ISBN 0-7357-0918-1 New Riders
www.newriders.com

This is one of the best art instruction books I have ever read. The first half of this book is of great value to artists in all media, and the second half is of special value to artists who create textures to be used on 3D computer graphic images. The title of the book has 'digital' in small letters and brackets because this is a book for artists in all media.

Demers uses his personal passion for textures to teach you how to use your eyes as an artist should. He takes examples from everything from old wood to Old Masters, to show you how to see, appreciate, create and apply textures.

The lessons directly related to 3D are not about a specific program, but are about the creative process that goes into selecting and applying textures in any 3D project. The Mac/Win CD with this book is genuinely very valuable because it is filled with examples and projects, and includes the full files with all their Photoshop layers.

Owen Demers is an art director in New York who is very involved in creating textures for 3D projects. He is a born teacher, though he has never been a teacher by profession. Let us hope he will do more books like this to instruct and inspire artists in all media.

I would urge that the first half of this book be issued as a separate volume because it would be an enduring classic.

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FOUNDATON TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

PHOTOSHOP CS2 STUDIO TECHNIQUES
Author: Ben Willmore
572 pages, color illustrations, Mac/WindowsCD
$50 ISBN 0-321-32189-8 Adobe Press 2006
Member price: $35 www.peachpit.com

This book covers the Photoshop fundamentals that professionals need to know, including an explanation of the new stand alone program Adobe Bridge for organizing images across Adobe programs. It also covers Camera Raw for handling 48 bit images direct from the digital camera.

This would not be my first choice for a how-to-use Photoshop book because the screen captures are very small and in some instances you are not told how to get into the function window that is shown in the book.

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BEST PHOTOSHOP TYPE EFFECTS BOOK

PHOTOSHOP TYPE EFFECTS
Author: Roger Pring
large format, 190 pages, color illustrations, Mac/WinCD
$45 ISBN: 073571264-6 New Riders 2002
Member price$31.50 www.newriders.com

Graphic design often requires skill and imagination in type design and this visual encyclopedia and how to book for Photoshop users will help you with both.

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CREATIVE THINKING IN PHOTOSHOP: A New Approach to Digital Art
Author: Sharon Steuer
224 pages, color illustrations
$45 ISBN: 073571122-4 New Riders 2003
www.newriders.com

This is a book to inspire representational fine artists with the possibilities of the digital medium using Photoshop.
The book presents various styles of representational art and explains how to create them in Photoshop.
The beginning chapters cover creative techniques step by step. There are some screen captures, principally showing the use of Layers.
The concluding chapters tell how to output and present your artwork.
This is a book specifically for representational fine artists who wish to explore the uses of digital technology as a medium for their art.
Sharon Steuer has won awards for her art and for her books for artist.
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PHOTOSHOP 7 MAGIC
Authors: Rhoda Grossman and Sherry London with ten contributors
289 pages, color illus., Mac/WinCD
$45 ISBN: 073571264-6 New Riders
www.newriders.com

This is a very well designed instructional book that presents sixteen interesting projects using the facilities built into Photoshop.
The a wide variety of projects achieve impressive results without the artistic training and skills necessary to create similar results using conventional media.
In the process of doing these sixteen step by step projects one learns to use many of the facilities within Photoshop, with screen captures of the Photoshop controls that are large enough to be seen clearly.
The CD contains the files to do each of the projects, plus demo versions of the programs referenced in the book.

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ALL IN ONE BOOKS

Sams Teach Yourself Creating Web Pages All in One
& Preston Gralla & Matt Brown
672 pages, grayscale illustrations
$34.99 ISBN 0672326906 Sams 2005
www.samspublishing.com

This book covers Web site creation with the programs that come with the browsers Netscape and Geocities. It explains what HTML is and shows how to build pages and assembling them into sites. It shows how to prepare images for the Web in Printshop and Photoshop Elements, how to add sound, and Flash and gif animations, how to use forms and autoresonders. The book then goes on to discuss e-Bay auctions at length and also covers blogs. The material is well layed out in numbered steps to aid comprehension. If you are using either of these browsers for your web page and site creation, this book will be very useful.
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Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite 2 All in One
by Mordy Golding
768 pages, grayscale illustrations
$34.99 ISBN 067232752X Sams 2005
www.samspublishing.com

I do not find any of the all-in-one books satisfactory. This book has blocks of plain text and the grayscale screen captures are too small to see easily. This book would not be my choice for a desktop reference because the material is not organized for that and the sections on each program are too small to be comprehensive.
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Special Edition Using Mac OS X Tiger
by Brad Miser
1200 pages, grayscale illustrations
$34.99 ISBN 0789733919 Que 2006
www.quepublishing.com

This is the ultimate desktop reference book. What few people realize is how much of what they do is now built into the system or comes as related programs from Apple, so this book covers QuickTime, Safari Web browser, e-mail, iCalc, iSync, iChat, burning CDs and DVDs, networks, etc., as well as the iLife programs iTunes with iPod, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garage Band. The section on Widgets is necessarily rudimentary because that is expanding so fast. The book does not go into the Apple programs that do not come bundled, iWork's Keynote and Pages.

It does not tell about how to turn off Spotlight, the search facility, which is the first thing, with a great deal of difficulty, I found out how to do, and for a number of reasons beginning with security- a hacker or snooper can type in just the generic part of a credit card number or bank code and Spotlight will almost instantly deliver the rest of your personal number and a link to where anything else related to it can be found on your hard drives. It also indexes meta data, including the things you think are gone when you delete them in MS Word, but are retained in the file. For the very complicated steps required to turn off Spotlight and a more full discussion go to: http://www.dlynnwaldron.com/TurningOffSpotlight.html
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Adobe Illustrator CS2 Classroom in a Book
by Adobe Creative Team
472 pages, color illustrations, CD MacWin
$49.99 ISBN: 0321321839 Adobe Press 2005
Member price: 34.99 www.peachpit.com

This is Adobe's book of lessons for learning Illustrator, the principal vector program in the graphics profession. Many employers make it a job requirement that their graphics people be able to use both Illustrator and Photoshop (and also often Quark Express if they are publishers).

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Aperture: Apple Pro Training Series
Authors: Ben Long & Orlando Luna
528 pages. Color illustrations. DVD with lesson files.
$49.99 ISBN:0321422767 Peachpit Press 2006.
www.peachpit.com

Aperture is Apple's new application for managing, editing and archiving digital photographs. I have not used the program so I cannot knowledgeably review the book, but like all the Apple Pro Training Series, it seems to cover the essentials in an effective way.

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