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Book Review: Choosing a Book about Photoshop | |
By: Carol Elkins
March 2002
I'm an independent technical communications consultant. I don't have time to take a course or go to a workshop, and my medium of choice is words, not pictures.This grumbling arises from my need to learn Adobe PhotoShop, forcing me to step out of the comfort of my text-based world into a realm of visual graphic design. Why? 1) I want do my own Web graphics; and 2) there is always the chance that a client will ask me to design a graphic-intensive project. So how does a right-brain, artistically challenged writer learn such a complex, powerful graphics program without taking a course or workshop?
Right, you buy a book. But which book to buy? There are over 25 books on Photoshop 6!
Over the years, I have developed a fairly good test to help me select computer software books. First, I identify a task that I want to accomplish using the selected software. Then I conduct a two-step test with each book (assuming that the books are at hand and not being purchased online):
I tested the following in my search for a useful PhotoShop book:
I wanted to crop a photo into an oval shape, give the oval fuzzy edges, and convert it to a sepia mono-color image, much like the "old fashioned" photos of our great-grandparents.
Step 1: Scanning the pictures in Weinmann's Visual QuickStart Guide, I found an oval picture with fuzzy edges and learned that it was called a "vignette" in the graphics world.
Step 2: I discovered while checking for buzz words that both Weinmann's Visual QuickStart Guide and Dayton's WOW! book had the term "vignette" in the index. I then checked for "sepia" and "monochrome" in the index to learn how to apply a monochromatic sepiatone to the picture. Impressively, both "sepia" and "monochrome" were indexed in Dayton's WOW! book , indicating that the book's index is more thorough than most. None of the other books contained either buzz word.
Thus, two books were immediately removed from the list, leaving the WOW! book and the Visual QuickStart Guide as contenders.
The WOW! book comes with a CD; the Visual QuickStart does not. That alone would almost make me toss the Visual QuickStart. However, scanning the text, I was more comfortable with the Visual QuickStart's clear numbered steps. It doesn't have the plethora of color graphics that one finds in the WOW! book, but it also is only half the price.
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CD |
Color |
Good |
Numbered |
Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Photoshop 6 WOW! Book |
X |
X |
X |
|
$49.99 |
|
Visual QuickStart Guide |
|
|
|
X |
$21.99 |
Although I ultimately purchased both books, had I to choose only one, it would be the WOW! book. The color pictures and the excellent index make it easy to quickly find what I'm looking for. However, the procedural information is harder to grasp because "steps" are merged together with colons and semicolons instead of being separated with numbers. For example,
"If your image consists of a single Background layer, you'll need to turn it into a layer with the capacity for transparency so that it can have a layer mask: Double-click the Background label in the Layers palette; in the New Layer dialog box, rename the layer if you'd like and click OK."
Although more difficult to read, the WOW! book is very task oriented. This makes it perfect for my "need-to-know" learning paradigm whereby I learn only enough to accomplish my immediate task. If, however, I have time to broaden the scope of my Photoshop learning experience, this book is very well organized to help me focus my area of study. Its chapters contain well-grouped tasks:
It is the last three chapters that draw my interest:
A quick scan of these chapters assures me that I can learn how to create a more eye-grabbing logo and button rollovers for my Web site. These are the skills that I want to master. I am a wordsmith, and being able to add visual interest to my words and to display those visually enhanced words on the Web will make my job more interesting and add another skill to my company's toolchest.
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