Adobe Photoshop CS 6 Classroom in a Book

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Classroom in a Book ★★★★
This book was used by me as an adjunct to upgrading from CS4 to CS6 and not having used Photoshop to much in the last year. I felt that this would be the quickest way to catch up on the latest and greatest of Photoshop, and indeed, the text is oriented toward giving a VERY brief survey of much that Photoshop has to offer. For the absolute novice, it is a 5-star text, in that it will labor over the minutest details of the way in which the complete CS6 system operates. It’s greatest deficit is that it is almost entirely a mechanical instruction book (“click this, slide that, push this, etc.”). Missing are the explanations as to why you are doing certain things to achieve your end. This book MUST be complimented with any of a number of standard photoshop texts for photographers that tell you where to go once you understand the mechanics of photoshop. There were several chapters which simply were inapplicable to me, since I have the basic photoshop and not the extended version. Discussions of 3-D effects (which I’d prefer to do in Illustrator anyway), editing video (much easier in many other programs like Premier), or editing for the web (please, I’ll use Dreamweaver if I need to write web stuff) betrays the fact that many of the Adobe programs are unnecessarily overlapping/redundant. The book served its purpose with me by re-familiarizing me with Photoshop, and thus the 4 stars. If you are at all familiar with Photoshop, don’t waste your time on this book.