Photoshop 5.5 for Windows & Macintosh, Second Edition (Visual QuickStart Guide) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Elaine Weinmann, Peter Lourekas
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $19.98 (100%)
New (13) Used (106) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 1211372
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 0.8
ISBN: 0201699575
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.6869
UPC: 785342699579
EAN: 9780201699579
ASIN: 0201699575
Publication Date: September 21, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read -> Recycle -> Reuse!
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Adobe Photoshop is the application of choice for digital image manipulation, but its complexity can be daunting for beginners. Photoshop 5.5 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide is an accessible, how-to guide to basic photo editing, manipulation, and correction techniques that will have you up and running in no time. In addition to the basics, you'll find full coverage of the latest features in this newly Web-enhanced version of Photoshop, which includes ImageReady 2.0. With this guide, you don't have to wander through menus or wade through text. Concise, step-by-step instructions walk you through each task, and the numerous pictures and captions reassure you that you're in the correct dialog box, pop-up menu, or entry field. The book is full of updated material on using Photoshop effectively for Web images, and also covers the higher-end changes in Photoshop 5.5: improved color management, editable PostScript type layers, the new History palette and brush, 16-bit channel support, and other new palettes, actions, and tools.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Not a good book for Beginners at ALL or Maybe Anyone February 9, 2003
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I took this book out at the library and was surprised after reading other quickstart guides - what a disorganized mess it is! The headings don't even stand out (they are barely larger than the type) and there is so much information packed into the book with very little white space, quite frankly, it's overwhelming. The authors clearly know a lot but the way the information is presented really needs work! Each chapter begins with a paragraph telling you what you will learn in this chapter, similar to a training guide. Whereas other visual quickstart guides followed more of a reference style where you could decide the task you wanted to do and look up the procedure in the book, this book isn't sure whether it's a training guide or a reference guide, as it tries to be both and fails miserably. Although it pretends to be a training guide by its introduction "In this chapter, you will learn..." everything that follows is not training guide material - it kind of drops you in the middle of all this text from the next page onward and leaves you sitting there wondering what happened and where the guide went! So basically, it is a reference, guide, albeit a poor one. The biggest problem is, each section is not clearly delineated within the text so if you don't want to read every page(how many people do want to read every page of a reference book? but you want to learn how to place an image into photoshop for example (one of the things you will learn in chapter 3) - you really have to DIG around the chapter to find it. In this book, all the information is buried within other information. Very poor organization and too confusing for me. I am a tech writer and I am so glad I didn't buy this book!!
Too Obscure May 5, 2001
I am a comparative beginner at graphics. I had previously purchased Elizabeth Castro's book in this series, on HTML4. This was very good introduction for a beginner in HTML, and I expected the same would be true of the Photoshop edition. Unfortunately, it is not an appropriate book for me, as the approach and examples were not clear enough for self study. It is not clear if this is due to the complexity of Photoshop, or the approach adopted by the authors. I am now looking (warily) for an alternative.
 Terrible introduction to Photoshop April 24, 2001
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have used three other VQS guides (Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Golive 4) and been very happy with them (writing in Brisbin's Golive 4 not very stylish, but useful enough introduction). This book is the exception to the rule. It is dull, badly written, poorly illustrated and uninspiring. Version 6 and version 5 had more indicative reviews of the contents of this dud.Stay away. Peachpit Press should be embarassed to print such a poor guide to the graphics flagship.
 Great Book January 26, 2001
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This a great book for people to learn the ins and outs of PhotoShop 5.5.
Another Time & Bacon Saver from Peachpit Press. January 23, 2001
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Don't you just love the Peachpit books? From "The Little..." series through the QuickStart Guides, they all seem to be written right at you, not above you and not below you. That's a difficult thing to achieve. Robin Williams' books are spot-on. Alfred Glossbrenner, another Peachpit author, and Mike Banks and Molly Holschlag do a good job, too. And so do Weinmann and Lourekas. It takes a real talent to present a humongous program like Photoshop in bite-sized chunks that feed the need without being overwhelming. Weinmann and Lourekas have pulled it off. You can bring a problem to this book, check the index and look up the answer. You can study a whole area like "Layers" and get your brain around it and then move on to the next thing. But I like to just pick it up from time to time and discover some little tidbit that I didn't know I could do with Photoshop. Lavishly illustrated, and with many color illustrations, if you read this book from cover to cover and practice the techniques on your own, you'll soon be creating those bogus Me-And-Marilyn-Monroe-At-Prom pictures from the old Gateway computer commercials, restoring old family treasures and making great graphics for the web.
|
|
|
