Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book (Paperback) Review


Adobe has released the new upgrade for Photoshop CS3 and a new version called Photoshop CS3 Extended. Whether you get Photoshop as a single product or as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3, this book by the Adobe Creative Team is the latest edition of the official training series for Adobe software and covers both versions of Photoshop. As in previous editions, this book contains lessons that will help both the novice and advanced user get up to speed with the new upgrade. For the novice, the authors cover the basics of Photoshop and the advanced users will want to check out the lessons for the new features. Each lesson has step-by-step instructions and accompanying image files that give you hands on practice. At the end of each chapter is a Q & A review. Within the chapters are tips and techniques from Photoshop professionals Julieanne Kost and Russell Brown. Some of the new features and tools covered in the book include Smart Filters and the Quick Selection tool. Other lessons teach you how to take advantage of the improvements to your favorite tools such as Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge. As you would expect, the authors begin by discussing the workspace's new layout which has several improvements to help you streamline your work. The next few chapters cover the basics of photo correction, retouch and repair. You will also learn how to create a PDF presentation and how to use the Adobe Lightroom. Next, the authors move on to discuss the many ways to make selections. They discuss some of your old favorite selection tools and new additions such as the Quick Selection tool. I especially enjoyed the sample projects that were more interesting than usual in a book such as this. In one chapter the authors used an example scrapbook page to show how to use layers to organize the objects on the page and how to work with layer comps and blend modes. The next project was a book cover which the authors used to teach masks and channels. You will learn how to create temporary Quick Masks, store a mask as an alpha channel and how to use filters, effects and blend modes with masks. Working with type in Photoshop is one of my favorite tasks and the authors use a poster as a sample project for this chapter. They cover the Type palette, paths, shapes and Smart Objects. I especially liked the lesson about applying text to a complex path. If you have never tried your hand at the Photoshop vector drawing tools, you will enjoy the chapter which covers drawing paths with the Pen tool, layer shapes and more. Advanced layers is next and the authors show you how to use adjustment layers and the Vanishing Point grid to achieve a 3D effect for product package design. Next, you will create a four image montage and learn about advanced compositing. In this chapter, you will also learn about automating a series of steps to speed up your workflow. Photoshop is still the best when it comes to creating and optimizing images for the web. You will learn several tasks including slicing an image, adding HTML linkage to image slices, rollover buttons and optimizing GIF, JPEG and GIF animations. You will like how easy it is to create an animation with the Tween feature. The authors included a chapter that touches on some of the features in Photoshop Extended. You will learn about the Measurement tool, Measurement Log palette and more. The last chapter covers color printing, four color separation and preparing for PostScript CMYK printing. The members of the Adobe Creative Team for this book were Andrew Faulkner and Judy Walthers von Alten. The CD includes files for the lessons, fonts, stock photos and training videos from [...] and Total Training.



Price:
$34.64


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