review by
Tammi Lee, June 2005

All in all, I was very impressed with the book. It is very thorough, and I found it an engaging read. Often reviewing a how to manual, is a dull experience, because of the step-by-step dry nature of it. Deke McClelland kept the text light, and his distinctive personality certainly shone through. There is something here for everyone, of all levels, to learn. The novice will gain immense understanding of Photoshop, her new features and the power hidden behind the scenes of this immense program. Even professional Photoshop users and trainers will find tidbits of information here to make their workflow more efficient or enjoyable.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was the quiz at the end of each chapter, checking on your retention of the material presented. I found this a good way to see if I was absorbing the material or if I perhaps would need to go back over it.

He explains in the book why he prefers a particular method over others, but still shows you the other options. In some cases, he will even describe the reasoning (from a traditional photographic bent) behind the way a Photoshop feature functions.

I found chapter 12 particularly interesting with the explanations of RGB color vs. CMYK and how this affects printing and such. Also in this chapter was information on how to match your Photoshop environment to that of the print shop that you might use for printing a large run of your images.

I would have liked to see a little more on automating functions and watermarking of images, but perhaps this is beyond the scope of the book. Besides, a lot of that information can be found on the internet.

Since I have CS2, this book had a few things that did not seem to work as expected, of note especially here, was the installation of the deke preferences from the CD. Going to www.totaltraining.com, and downloading the updates and a pdf file on how to install the keyboard shortcuts and color customizations manually helped immensely, but still didn't resolve the preferences error. Of course, looking on O'Reilly's site, there is now a CS2 one on one book there, so no doubt the changes that adobe made to the program have been addressed in the new version.

Errata can be found at

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/adobephoto/errata/

A Sample video, like the ones found on the companion CD can be found here

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpt/PhotoshopCS_chap05/index.html

And a free chapter can be found here:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/adobephoto/chapter/lesson5.pdf