[review] "The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers"by Scott Kelby
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From: Troy Piggins on 18 Nov 2009 22:47 After a little deliberation, reading reviews, trawling a few forums, I decided so splurge and buy a couple of books. I love reading novels, but for some reason for technical information I've always preferred online mailing lists, forums, and USENET newsgroups. Splashed out and bought CS4 Photoshop and Lightroom 2 recently, and figured they might be worth having some books to accompany them. Decided on "The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby and "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers" by Martin Evening. Man, Kelby has so many books out. I know he's "the PS go-to author", but you have to wonder if reputation precedes and if there's actually better PS books out there but they get drowned out by Kelby overload... Well, my fears have been realised. Books received quite promptly from Amazon. Good service, first time I've dealt with them. But... The Kelby book. Very disappointed. The layout of the pages themselves is quite appealing at first glance, plenty of images to display what he's talking about. But when I think about it, that's one thing that annoys me about it. Too many images. I mean, if he's giving a step by step on something, does he really need to give an image to show him clicking the menu button described in the text? Waste of space where he could add more text/info/tips. That brings me to my next annoyance. Every new chapter title takes up 2 full pages. One shows a photo, the other some text. The text is the chapter title, then the rest is the explanation of how he came up with his "clever" chapter title. He seems to have this thing where his chapter titles are songs or movies or whatever that have words or something relevant to what that chapter is really about. eg there's a chapter on Bridge so he calls it "London Bridge". That's fine, cute, whatever, but we don't need a page explaining why you called it that. We get it. Just put a paragraph about this little nuance in your intro or something and give us more meat in the content of the book. Next point. Give the man meat. I bought this book wanting to learn uber-tips from the Photoshop guru. But in reality, it looks to me like he's taken the easy road. Quite a few pages (like 10 or so) on the unsharp mask. Not really cool things like using the unsharp mask with edge masking or surface masking or anything, just 10 (or so) pages on different combinations of amount, radius, and threshold. Some of the cooler tips he's posted actually come from "friends" of his showing him the tip. I like that he's passed it on, and has acknowledged his mates, but I want to see more of his cool stuff. I don't reckon he's sharing it all. Can't be. The first third or so of the book talks only about Bridge and Camera Raw. Too much. Reckon you could split the book up, have another thinner book on those, or each of them, sell them cheaper. Gimme a book on CS4 Photoshop please, not the other stuff, that's why I got Lightroom. Summary - I reckon the title should contain the word "Beginners" in it. I'm not pro PS user, only had it for a couple of months. But I picked up much of what was in the book by playing with it and reading some online sites. I'll keep the book as a reference for some of the tips in there, but reckon if I tore out the pages that contained stuff that was either obvious or wasted space, I wouldn't be left with much inside the covers. I'm just starting the Lightroom book, but initial flick through looks like it goes into much more detail, which is what I want. -- Troy Piggins |