Photoshop CS / CS2 Wow Book, The, 1/e Review

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Photoshop CS / CS2 Wow Book, The, 1/e ReviewFriends, allow me to eat a little crow. Some of you may recognize me as one of the smart-alecks in the Amazon discussions forums below. Many of us were extremely annoyed that this book (which had been pre-purchased over a year ago), failed to materialize, even after several postponed publication dates by the publisher. Some of us grew so disgusted with the delays, we canceled our pre-orders. I was one of those people. But today, guess what the Book Fairy brought me? To make a long story short, I'd forgotten that months ago, in my zeal, I had pre-ordered this book from two different places to see which would ship it first, and I only remembered to cancel one of those orders. I'm actually very glad I did because in my opinion, this book was worth the wait. Should you buy it? Read on...
First of all, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a repeat customer. I've been a Photoshop user since version 4, and as such, I'm more than familiar with Adobe's aggravating tactic of providing sub-standard user manuals for their products. This, combined with the fact that Photoshop is one of the most complex, unwieldy, and irritatingly wonderful programs on the market makes it necessary for Adobe customers to buy expensive after-market books to learn how to use the software they just paid an arm and a leg for. (Sorry about that preposition; I've got a lot to say and little time.) Over the years, Peachpit books in general have always been among my favorites and the Wow! Series in particular. The folks at Peachpit seem to put a lot of care into their products: the paper is always bright, slick, and of good quality -- which you will really come to appreciate if your eyes are already tired from a long day or you have poor vision and don't need the added hassle of trying to wade through a 500 page tome written in blurry 6 pt Times New Roman like some other books. Peachpit's text is always wonderfully legible and the images are always clean and colorful and well-balanced. The Wow books have the fantastic ability of combining a ton of very dry, but useful information into a colorful, well-organized interface. The Photoshop CS/CS2 Wow book is no exception.
The chapters of this book are organized in such a way that you can start right at the beginning and methodically work your way through, or you can flip through the pages until you find a photo that inspires you and dive right in. Skill level does not matter here: beginners can follow the well-written step by step tutorials and more experienced users can get the gist of the subject just by glancing at the screenshots.
The book starts right off with a bang: What's new in CS/CS2 gives a nice rundown of the changes that were made in the various versions of Photoshop alongside colorful images which show you the features and tool palettes being discussed. The authors have also used a clever technique of separating the features of PSCS from PSCS2 by using a different colored font (typeface for you nit-pickers) throughout the book. You may think this would be distracting, but it actually works quite well - the flow of the text is still maintained and I imagine that it would be quite handy for people who are still on the fence about upgrading to CS2. Browsing through the book for specific examples of CS2 features is really easy because of the different colored text and may help one decide if the upgrade is worth it. Other useful features are the Troubleshooting Tips, which are scattered throughout the book, like the one of page 33 about the History Tool; these tips describe annoying dialogue errors that you may run across while using a particular tool in PS and ways to fix them.
Other excellent features are the "Exercising" and "Anatomy of ..." sections which are more in-depth tutorials that take you deep into the bowels of some of Photoshop's more intimidating tools like Smart Objects and Masks. My personal favorites are the sections titled "Secrets of the Universe Revealed" in which inspirational images from guest artists are dissected layer by layer so that you can see the techniques used and try them on your own images. Chapter 5 is particularly exceptional - if you have only a limited time to learn Photoshop, I'd advise you to work through this chapter first: it is chock full of yummy tutorial goodness. Among my favorites in this chapter are:
p. 320 - Ron Deutschmann demonstrates an invaluable technique for eliminating lens flare that's so simple, you'll kick yourself for not having thought of it yourself. When I think of all the hours I've wasted doing it the hard way...
p. 321 - "Bringing Out Detail" tackles digital noise, chromatic aberration, and the Shadow/Highlight command in one fell swoop.
p. 338 - Shows you one of the better ways to hand tint a photo. (Alternately, you could buy a program like Recolored which does most of the work for you, but hand-tinting using the method described in this book gives superior results, in my opinion).
p. 344 - A wonderful tutorial by co-author Cristen Gillespie on how to change a daytime image into night, complete with dramatically glowing light from windows.
p. 348 - Katrin Eismann contributes two beautifully evocative images and shares her techniques on how they were crafted.
p. 349 - Alexis Deutschmann, a young girl, aptly demonstrates her skills as a photographer and Photoshop user by transforming a pretty, but boring image into a dramatic, gorgeous, and frame-worthy picture. If the sight of a young photographer like Alexis producing quality work like this using just her camera, imagination, and Photoshop doesn't inspire you, then I don't know what will.
p. 352 Loren Haury shows how to combine three separate images utilizing the HDR technique.
p. 354 Christine Zalewski contributes a lovely "botanical portrait" that brings to mind the gorgeous, moody orchid photos in the film 'Adaptation'.
p. 359 Begins a section on painting in Photoshop; nothing much new if you own previous PS Wow books, but very enlightening if you don't, or thought you could only achieve these types of apinterly effects and brush strokes in Corel Painter. I've seen many of these images before in previous versions of the Wow series (which is a shame, since, in my opinion, painting and animation are two of Photoshop's hidden treasures), but the images that are new are top-notch.
With few exceptions, Chapter 7 which covers type and vector graphics, is disappointing. Many of the "F/X" look particularly outdated and old to me. Maybe back in 1998 those neon, metallic, and jellybean-colored text effects looked cool for about five minutes, but nowadays there are so many fresh styles being used, it's hard to keep up with them. If you were hoping for fresh text and logo ideas, look elsewhere. Instead, I recommend you keep a scrap book (or dvd collection) of your favorite, most awe-inspiring stuff. You can grab short clips from movie titling (you know the credits that run at the beginning of the film) or from tv, magazine ads, cd covers, snapshots of cool building signs, etc. Still, if you are new to Photoshop or never really explorer the text and vector features, then this chapter will give you plenty to chew on.
Similarly, Chapters 8, 9, and 10 don't have much to offer advanced users or previous owners of a Photoshop Wow book. If you're big into web design, prepare for disappointment. Website building and animation are given short shrift in this book, which is a shame since, like Photoshop's painting tools, these areas are the unmined gems of Photoshop and not given anywhere near the attention they deserve in most books. Especially now that Adobe own's Flash and Dreamweaver! You'd think at least one chapter would pay homage to the amazing, cutting edge websites that are being produced with these programs and Photoshop. Unfortunately, most of the example webpages look flat, old, and uninteresting - nothing like the dazzling array of sites you'll run across in your average day of surfing - and, strangely enough, there's not a single mention of the word "blog", nor any tutorials on how to compose items for one. This really is a giant oversight on the part of the authors, one that I hope will be amended in future editions. There's a lot going on with the web right now and people are very interested in how to make their own photoblogs, or banners, sigs/avatars for forums or chat clients, podcasts and downloadable content for musicians, etc. What a wasted opportunity. In all fairness, this might be beyond the scope of this book; it is after all, nearly 800 pages of densely packed information. Nonetheless, a few mini-tutorials addressing these subjects would have made for a more complete book.
Pros:
Exceedingly well written: manages to explain complex subjects without resorting to tired attempts at humor nor condescending to the reader.
Well-organized with clear text and sharp images.
Chock-full of both bite-sized and full-sized tutorials.

Outstanding photographic contributions from a wide variety of sources that will both inspire you and teach you how to achieve these fascinating results on your own images.
Huge! Covers nearly every conceivable situation the beginner and intermediate Photoshop user will likely need to tackle at some point.
Companion dvd is loaded with excellent practice images from the lessons, brushes, styles, tools, patterns, gradients and actions.

Cons:
Chapters covering Type and the Web leave a lot to be desired.
Many advanced subjects like scripting, animation, masking, photo retouching and lighting are given short shrift.
Readers hoping for more in-depth information should look elsewhere.
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