Good concept, bad book

I liked the idea of this book, providing people with a background in conventional photography with a book to learn photoshop. The end result is really poor though. Some of my complaints with this book are:

Commands are listed in the wrong menus. The excercises are poorly explained. But the worst for me is that at the end of an excercise he will say things like "for my final image I combined this with another version in which I had edited it to..." with absolutely no details of how this would be done. In most cases these statements actually require editing that is more complicated than what has been presented, and use entirely different techniques. So, if you are a photoshop guru I suppose you could do this, but if you are trying to learn it is useless.

Also, the photos really aren't very good. There is an example in which he refers to "brightening a scene". Of course, he doesn't mean "brightening" he means changing the colour cast, by changing the hue and saturation. His end result that he says looks "much better" is horrible. He does make the sky look good, but he winds up with a purple lake.

There are much better books out there on photoshop, keep looking...

Other Reviews

• taught me more about photography than photoshop
• Good concept, bad book
• A catch all that didn't.