Adobe Photoshop CS3 Studio Techniques came to be when the author, while looking at all the Photoshop books at the local chain bookstore, realized that there were fundamentally two types of Photoshop books. First there are the "cookbooks" that taught you Photoshop in a step-by-step manner. These, which while showing how to do something, never seem to explain why you should do these steps in enough detail to make you feel you understood. Secondly, there are the technical books that are so technical that, unless you knew Photoshop, they were too hard to understand and left you frustrated.
Enter Adobe Photoshop CS3 Studio Techniques. The goal here is to explain, in everyday language, how to use Photoshop, taking everything from the simplest feature to the most advanced technique an distilling it down so that you can understand it. As an instructor, the author has used this approach for many years and hundreds of seminars and workshops. His goal with this book is to take you from "going through the motions" to "at last, I really understand." The book is 592 pages long and divided into 16 chapters (there are five bonus chapters on the CD which required no update for CS3 and so I will concentrate on the 16 printed chapters and list the bonus material below). It is also divided into three basic areas.
Working Foundations
Chapter 1, "Tools and Palette Primer," is all about effectively managing your workspace and finding your way around all of the features that has made Photoshop the industry standard that it is. Here you will learn about the palettes, tools, and panels that you will be working with in this book.
Chapter 2, "Selection Primer," will take you through what many consider to be one of the most central techniques to Photoshop success: the ability to make selections. This is because when you want to be able to edit a portion of an image you must first select it. Here you will work with the marquee tools, lasso tools, crop tools, selection tools, magic wand tool, and others.
Chapter 3, "Layers Primer," examines what is another fundamental Photoshop device – Layers. The Layers palette is what helps you keep everything organized. While on the surface it may appear to be complex, it really is very simple to learn. Throughout this chapter the author shows you how to use Layers while teaching you all sorts of tricks that will prove invaluable later in the book.
Production Essentials
Chapter 4, "Optimizing Grayscale," explains that when working with grayscale, your adjustments and corrections are tonal in nature and therefore you only have to deal with the brightness and contrast of the image. Here you will learn about all of Photoshop's tools for working with these tonal adjustments which will be of use as well later when you get into working with color.
Chapter 5, "Understanding Curves," will show you the power of Curves and how they are like the Swiss Army Knife of the Photoshop world. This is another really great chapter in that the author, by way of explanation, shows you how the curves dialog box works before you realize that you really do understand it.
Chapter 6, "Color Management," is another one of those areas that seems too complex to grasp, but by dissecting it down into non-technical jargon, it can be made much easier to understand. Here you will learn how color works, the problems with color, and how you can implement color management to make colors consistent among devices.
Chapter 7, "Color Correction," now shows you how to control the colors in your images. Here you will learn how to get rid of the color casts in your image by using gray to fix your colors. Don't worry, you will use color as well, it just won't be of a hit-or-miss nature.
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