PhotoShop CS2 For Windows & Mac

[Tami]

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PhotoShop CS2 For Windows & Mac by Elaine Weinman & Peter Lourekas

This is an incredibly complete manual for PhotoShop CS2. This book managed to keep me interested and learning for many hours, and contained information on settings I didn't even know I had. PhotoShop CS2 for Windows and Mac covers everything any level of user could possibly need to know, from colour management to camera raw. I was pleased to find a section on Adobe Bridge which I actually understood and could work my way through. There is an abundance of extra tooltips in sidebars, which would have stood out better with some added colour other than a grey box in a black and white book, but more on that later. It was nice to see the work of the PhotoShop gurus included in this book in the few colour photos-they serve as a reason to both keep learning and remembering those gurus had to start somewhere too.

In regards to the layout of the book, the flow from section to section is done in a logical manner; however, I would've like to have seen more use of colour in some of the screenshots showing project steps. While the screenshots and photos were clear and it was easy to follow what the authors were doing, some procedures would be easier to visualize and compare to your own "follow along work" if they had been in colour. I particular liked the extra effort taken in the book's table of contents to include checkmarks next to CS2's new features. Even though many of us PhotoShop fans knew what was new, marking the new features made it easy to skip right to those tutorials and really get into CS2's changed or new features. The detail in the table of contents is also the best I have seen in any PhotoShop manual, surpassed only by the completeness of this publication's comprehensive index. Between the table of contents and index, there is no reason for any reader to not find what they are looking for help on.

If I hadn't yet owned any CS2 manuals, I think that this would probably be the only I would buy-if it had more full colour illustrations, it would indeed be the only book that would be finding a permanent quick-reference spot on my desk. I highly recommend this book to all levels of users-we're never so good that we can't learn something new, and I'm sure that tucked somewhere in the tutorials and extra tips, you'll find something new, or a different approach to a tried and true method you may have used thousands of times. PhotoShop CS2 for Windows and Macintosh is definitely a five star volume.