Adobe’s favourite son is often considered to be a powerful but daunting program yet many consider it to be an essential tool for photographers who take their efforts seriously.
Photoshop in a Weekend, based on CS3, attempts to open the application and to be seen as a companion to the original Adobe manual.
It begins with the lowdown on the companion programs — Photoshop Elements and Lightroom — and places them in the appropriate hierarchy. Successive pages deal with the key components, like Bridge, the role of Camera RAW and Image Ready.
A useful chapter explains the methods of calibrating your system, from camera to monitor, then onto the role of colour management. Ignore the latter at your peril!
Step by step author Mark Cleghorn explains the functions of Tool Bars, Palettes, Layers, Channels and how to interpret the histogram. These explanations are set out in such a fashion that you can delve into the book at any time and use it as a handbook on how to use each feature. Even such simple items as rules and guides are dealt with in detailed discussion – and you would be surprised at how many people get flummoxed by them.
Basic corrections such as exposure and contrast, colour adjustments, retouching, cropping and rotating images get the same close scrutiny.
Numerous illustrations are used to balance the texts in the tutorials; some may feel they are too small, but the overall text-to-picture balance I feel is about right.
Overall, an excellent manual to accompany the original manual.
Author: Mark Cleghorn.
Publisher: Photographer’s Institute Press.
Distributor: Capricorn Link.
Length: 174 pages.
ISBN 978 1 86108 557 3.
Grab a copy of Photoshop in a Weekend at Amazon for $15.56 (22% off).
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