Adobe Photoshop CS3: Classroom in a Book
Book Review

Adobe Photoshop CS3: Classroom in a Book
By Andrew Faulkner and Judy Walthers von Alten
http://www.AdobePress.com
ISBN 13: 978-0-321-49202-9, 478 pages, soft cover
$54.99 US, $68.99 CN

If you’ve never had the pleasure of leafing through one of these Adobe Press “Classroom” books, you really should take a look at what they offer. Written with direct access to Adobe, these books are a great reference and training aid and are part of the Adobe official training series.

Adobe Photoshop CS3: Classroom in a Book contains fourteen lessons from: compositing images into artistic montages, to processing camera raw digital photographs, to producing web animations. Adobe Photoshop CS3: Classroom in a Book also covers everything that is new to Photoshop CS3. Each lesson provides step-by-step instructions for creating a specific project, and they all conclude with a review section and summation. This volume also includes a CD that contains the files for each lesson, tutorial movies in QuickTime, fonts, and stock photos.

I especially like the QT movies. It’s great to see a concept demonstrated as well as hear the authors talk about what they are doing step-by-step.

For example, working through Chapter Three, Retouching and Repairing, starts you off with a lesson overview, instructions on which samples to load, and how to find them using “Bridge.”

Then you work through a step-by-step repair using the clone tool. As you can see in the screen shots, I had to put grass in the lower left corner of the picture.

This section also walks you through the use of the healing brush tool, and even explains how to retouch on a separate layer. For this lesson you use the healing brush to remove the sprinkler heads in the picture.

Each chapter in this book is that thorough. There are too many chapters to mention here, but some of the major areas covered are: Layer Basics, Masks and Channels, Correcting and Enhancing Digital Photographs, Advanced Layering and Compositing, Preparing Files for the Web, and a chapter on printing.

I wish the CD included more QT tutorial movies. I am a visual learner and I find that style very helpful.

Overall, Adobe Photoshop CS3: Classroom in a Book is very good, and very easy to work with. I understand the amount of work involved in producing this series, but I wish these books were not so expensive.

MYMAC.COM rating: 4.0 out of 5