» Adobe Photoshop CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques (How-Tos)

Adobe Photoshop CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques (How-Tos) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Refreshing
Comment: This was a refreshing read after trying so many other irrelavant photoshop books. Chris Orwig is concise and engaging. This book gave me valuable tools and skills without the fluff that you don't really need. If you are an intermediate to relatively new photoshop user, I highly recommend this book to take you to the next level.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: 100 Essential Tips--A Good "Go-To" Book
Comment: Let's cut straight to heart of this review: Do I recommend Chris Orwig's Book: Adobe Photoshop CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques (How-Tos)? Yes I do, but please read the rest of this review for a better idea of why, and to whom I recommend it.
100 Essential Techniques offers just that, 100 ideas on how to use Photoshop CS3 to accomplish a wide variety of tasks: things like, setting up your preferences and workspace(s) to meet your unique needs; color tweaking; Photoshop's integration with Bridge and innumerable other tips on the tools and techniques most users are likely to use. The emphasis here, however, is on the word "tips." Chris covers a wide and diverse range of ways to do things in Photoshop CS3 (and there's always more than one way to do anything in Photoshop). This is both the pro and con of his book.
The pro is that, using 100 Essential Techniques as a reference book, readers can find a pointer to pretty much anything they want to do: blend layers, create masks, sharpen (or blur) images, apply filters, etc. The con--and it is an intentional one--is that once Chris introduces a topic and gives the necessary basics, he leaves it up to the reader to decide whether or not to pursue more in-depth information on that subject (either within his book or elsewhere).
So, who do I recommend 100 Essential Techniques for? Two groups of readers: 1) newbies who want a getting started overview of what Photoshop CS3 can do and 2) more experienced users who want an excellent "keep it by my computer quick reference (or reminder)" of the tools and techniques available in this complex program. I've been a Photoshop user since version 5, and I still find Chris' book a great time saver when I need that memory jog for an infrequently used technique.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Everything you need to know and more in on little package
Comment: This is an excellent series of books. I started out with Photoshop and went on to study Illustrator and Dreamweaver. Is less then a quarter of the size of all the other instructional books out ther but packs ten times of easy to read and understand knowledge. I highly recommend it!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not exactly what I expected...
Comment: I am new to photoshop and need it mainly to manipulate pics from my labs and retouch some of the old pics. Unfortunately, for me, the book did not deliver the goods.
It has many explanations of how to accomplish a task, BUT it never really tells you how to get to that particular toolbar in order to perform the manipulation. It just has a picture of how the toolbar is supposed to look like which really USELESS. A nice and simple "Image->Rotate Canvas->Arbitrary..." would be of incredible help, but this book LACKS it.
It is probably a good book for a person who knows how to get around photoshop, but if you already know how to do it you would not need this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Beginners Only
Comment: This is a good book IF you're brand new to Photoshop. It covers the bare basics only. If you've been using Photoshop for any time at all you probably won't benefit much from this one.

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