|
Photoshop CS4 Digital Classroom |  | Authors: Jennifer Smith, Aquent Creative Team, AGI Creative Team
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $44.99
Buy New: $24.34
as of 9/10/2010 20:43 MDT details
You Save: $20.65 (46%)
New (45) Used (16) from $23.00
Seller: -hungrybookworm
Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 10063
Media: Paperback
Edition: Pap/Dvdr
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0470410906
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.686
EAN: 9780470410905
ASIN: 0470410906
Publication Date: November 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780470410905 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Digital Classroom is like having a personal instructor guiding readers through each lesson, while they work at their own pace. This book includes 13 self-paced lessons that let readers discover essential skills and explore new features and capabilities of Adobe Photoshop. Every lesson is presented in full color with step-by-step instructions. Learning is reinforced with video tutorials and lesson files on a companion DVD that were developed by the same team of Adobe Certified Instructors and Flash experts who have created many of the official training titles for Adobe Systems. Each video tutorial is approximately five minutes long and demonstrates and explains the concepts and features covered in the lesson. Coverage includes information on Adobe Bridge, Camera RAW, masks and layers, painting and retouching, and selections and layers. Jam-packed with information, this book and DVD takes users from the basics through intermediate level topics and helps readers find the information they need in a clear, approachable manner. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
The best book for Photoshop CS4 August 27, 2010
sfDesigner
This is the best book I have ever owned for Adobe Photoshop. You need to know some of the beginner basics of Photoshop but in any case this is a book any Photoshop CS4 user should own. Just the CD alone that comes with the book is worth $100.00. Some learning websites charge $100.00 for the learning CD with no book. She does not get to complicated and explains well. I just wish she would do books on other Adobe software.
Great book for learning Photoshop! August 24, 2010
CWR (Atlanta GA)
I decided to try out this book for learning my way around Photoshop CS4 Extended before I spent a lot of money on an instructor led class. I'm very glad I did. I had only used Photoshop Elements prior to getting CS4 extended and so my level of knowledge was pretty low. This book has great exercises that you walk though to learn the basics of the software. All the shortcut keys for both Windows and Mac are listed as you work through the lessons. I found out after buying it that this book is used as the "textbook" for the Photoshop class at my local camera store.
 Slow pace and terrible flow. August 5, 2010
Brett (Michigan United States)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I guess I will be one of the reviewers that did not love this book. This will be, at least in part, because of the way I am. You can judge for yourself if this will be a problem for you. First let me say that I took a Digital Photography class about 12 years ago, and we learned Photoshop using the Adobe Classroom in a Book (not Digital Classroom) for Photoshop 5. Unfortunately, after the class was done I didn't do anything more with Photoshop. So other than understanding the basic concepts, I was starting fresh. There were some negative comments about the Adobe Press book, so I decided to get this one, which I am regretting.
This book is divided into "Lessons" (each chapter is one Lesson), and there will be multiple exercises in each lesson, usually just changing to a different tool. While this book has some very good information in it, it doesn't, in my opinion, present it very well. I mentioned "flow" in my title, and that is very important to me. I have trouble staying focused when the material is really boring, unfocused, or just uses a lot of words to get the simplest idea across. I dislike most of the "...for Dummies" books because of the latter, though some have been decent. I find too much hand holding more of a distraction than a help, especially when it's unrelated to the topic. Which leads to my first problem with the book, too much hand holding....in the wrong spots. The book seems to assume that you are not only new to Photoshop, but also new to computers in general. I know how to use a computer, I don't need to be constantly walked through steps on how to open files, save files, drag and drop, navigate between open files, etc...For instance, each time it asks you to save a file, it walks you through the steps, including what field to put the file name into. Every time. The same with opening a file. In my opinion, a Photoshop book should focus on Photoshop. If people don't understand how to do basic computer functions, they need to learn how to use their operating system first. A good deal of space is used to tell people how to do this basic stuff. Even worse, it is assumed that you are closing files, windows, or otherwise messing around with Photoshop between exercises, so a lot of the same basic stuff, like how to open up a panel (that you already have open) gets repeated to get you back to where you were, even though you likely didn't do anything, and are just waiting to get to the next step. Many very basic things are repeated over and over throughout the book, like fitting the image to your screen. Even after you have done it a hundred times it still walks you through the steps. And because the book is for both PC and MAC, you get both versions of the commands.
I was constantly losing focus, and even though I went into this with enthusiasm, I was dreading going back to the exercises. The pace was slow and plodding, and just when you think it's picking up, it puts on the brakes. There were a lot of things that kept annoying me, and the flow was constantly being broken up. I didn't remember having any problems with that old Classroom in a Book for Photoshop 5, so I dug up that 12 year old book to compare. One of the other major problems I was having with this book was that while there are numbers for the steps, they mix in a bunch of other stuff in with the steps so that you have to dig through a paragraph of text to figure out what the step is. Some of it is additional information/explanation, but there is also a bunch of hand holding fluff that I could care less about. This is really troublesome when you are trying to work though the lesson. It just bogged things way down. I ended up reading the chapters ahead of time so that I highlight the actual steps, so that when I was actually working on the steps I was able to work through better. Unfortunately, it meant having to go through the chapters twice, once to highlight and once to work on the lessons. When I looked at the lessons in Adobe's Classroom in a Book, I saw the difference immediately. The steps of each lesson were not only numbered, but that is all that was on the numbered lines. No paragraphs of superfluous text to have to weed through to actually see the step. All detailed explanations were at the beginning and end of each exercise, or in completely separate paragraphs from the exercise steps. There was no fluff on how to do basic computer functions. There was also something else that I eventually noticed. In the Adobe book, you worked with one image for the entire Lesson/chapter. You make a bunch of changes, and then at the end of the chapter you have a completed image that you can compare to the original and see all that you have accomplished. That is something that this book is really lacking. A sense of accomplishment. Many of the images you open do a couple of things then close them, usually not even worth saving. For the most part anyway. The old photograph restoration was fun and I felt some sense of accomplishment, but that was only part of that chapter, the rest of which was boring. Around chapter 7 I was getting so frustrated that I ordered the Adobe Press Classroom in a Book for CS4, and I'm happy that I did.
.
Now, despite all the hand holding with basic computer stuff in this book, there were times when the actual Photoshop stuff seems thin. It does walk you through step by step, but very little is actually covered in those steps, and anything outside of those steps you are expected to just play around with and figure out for yourself. The Adobe book builds on previous skills and adds them as steps in later work to reinforce the concepts, while this book gives you a quick walkthrough and then you won't see it again. It doesn't cover anything in depth. You get an intro and then move on. One of the most painfully boring chapters was the Selection Tools. It seemed like just about every tool used a different picture, instead of coming up with one picture that you could use them all on. Sometimes it would have you make selections and then just deselect it, instead of actually doing something with the selection. Near the end of the chapter it rushed in the Pen Tool, which is not actually a selection tool, it's a vector tool, but can be used to make selections. It's a complicated tool (one author claims that it the most complicated in Photoshop). In the lesson we are given a couple of very basic exercises to create straight lines and arcs using this tool. We are then given an exercise to use the pen tool to create a selection around an apple using the techniques we had just learned. However, what we had just learned was very basic, and vectors are not very flexible. Unfortunately, there were no explanations on how we should go about doing it. Apples are not really round, so the arc was useless. I then watched the video for that chapter hoping to learn something more from that, but she just whipped through it, and the only advice she had to give was not to fight the tool. What does that even mean? OK, Great! I don't want to fight it, tell me how to not fight it. No answer there, so I just watched. Unfortunately, she is very good with the tool, and very fast. It did seem like she was just using a bunch of very short straight lines, so I gave that a shot. I got a selection done, but it was far from perfect. I accidentally created an arc that I couldn't get rid of, and because it doesn't act like other selection tools, I couldn't get it cleaned up. I could have done that same selection much faster with just about any of the other selection tools, including the Magnetic Lasso tool and the Polygonal Lasso tool, neither of which are even mentioned in the book. In comparison, when I looked at the old Adobe book, the Pen Tool had it's own chapter, and in the new book it is in a separate chapter with the other vector tools. Adobe also covers both the Polygonal and Magnetic Lasso tools in the Selections chapter.
There are a lot of other annoyance that keep piling on. The constant reference to CMYK color/printing is another one. First it is brought up way too early in the book, and too often. I think it was mixed in with the retouching tools, for some reason. She even tells you to work in RGB until you are ready to print, then switch to CMYK, because a lot of the tools aren't available in CMYK. Why confuse new users by introducing printing stuff before they even know how to use the program? She brings it up many more times and makes several references to "...if you have a good relationship with your printer you can find out what values work best with their process...", as if the majority of the people using this book are working as designers for an advertising agency and sending out all your work to professional printers. All the CMYK and printing stuff should have been put into a separate chapter where people can find it when they need it, and those that don't, don't need to be burdened with it. I really don't think that they had a specific target audience and tried to cater to too many different types of people. The step by step process is definitely for beginners, but unfortunately also seems to assume computer illiteracy. On the other hand it occasionally says things like "if you are an advanced user, do 'this' instead". Believe me, advanced users will not be using this book, it would drive them crazy. Still the first chapter is for advanced users, telling new users to skip to chapter 2, which makes no sense to me. I see no point to putting it as the first chapter other than to trick more advanced users into thinking the book is more advanced than it is. I also question the placing of the Adobe Bridge chapter so early in the book (Chapt. 3). While it was an interesting chapter and the accompanying video was very good, new users will have very little use for it until they are further along in their training. It just delayed getting the Photoshop training started.
I think that people who are brand new to Photoshop and still fairly new to using their computers, and like a lot of hand holding fluff, will prefer this book. This book does contain a lot of good information, and the videos on the DVD are a nice addition. The videos are each about 5 minutes long, or so, and go over some of the exercises in the chapter, often with additional information, or done slightly different. I prefer the Adobe Press Classroom in a book over this one, due to its cleaner and more straight to the point nature. The steps are more clearly laid out, and they go into a lot more detail covering far more on each topic, but the flow isn't broken up like it is in this book. For me the exercises were far easier to get through, and you learn a lot more tips and tricks. You typically start with one photo and work on it till the end, so that there is a sense of accomplishment by the time you are done. Plus, in the book's intro it states that you are expected to have a working knowledge of your computer and operating system before you begin. I loved that. :-) Because of the layout of the book, and how clean the writing is, I could easily use the Adobe Press book for reference. This Digital Classroom book is too cluttered to be a good reference book. On the other hand, if learning new things makes you really nervous then this might be a better book for you to start with. People learn differently.
only gave five cuz there were no more!!!! July 29, 2010
design student
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
FABULOUS, FABULOUS, FABULOUS!!!
Let me just give you a little hint. DO THE BOOK TWICE!!
and, after each chapter take your own pictures and use the same techniques to practice.
After this book you can do any other advanced book in photoshop.
Great beginner book! July 11, 2010
strattan5
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I used this book to help me pass the Adobe Certified Associate exam. It is well written with excellent examples and video tutorials. I would recommend to anyone looking to begin working with Photoshop.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
|
|
|
Privacy and Legal CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
