FeuchtBlog

Layers, by Matt Kloskowski ★★★★★

I thought at first that I would be disappointed with this book, but first impressions proved to be wrong. It is a further book on Photoshop technique, intermediate level. I does not come with a CD of practice material, but you are able to download the images off of the web, which helps keep the cost of the book down. Matt has a slightly different style from other Photoshop instructors, in that he tends toward a more casual approach, encouraging you to play and try out your own techniques. His tendency is toward simplicity rather than complexity. He doesn’t waste much time insisting that you label every layer, or create 50 layers for a single image. His teaching technique makes each step quite easy to remember. His projects are interesting enough that one could imagine using the Photoshop tricks for personal photos. All in all, an excellent text for the intermediate Photoshopper.

Photoshop CS4 Channels and Masks One-on-one, by Deke McClelland ★★★★

This is just another Photoshop book that I’ve read in the last 6-12 months. I have one or two more to go. This text taught me a number of things, including functionality and routines in Photoshop that I had absolutely no clue about in the past, like the “calculations” instruction for merging several channels to make a better mask. There are movies that accompany each lesson, but they only somewhat approximate the actual lesson. Deke is very careful to be exact in his instructions, but doesn’t always elaborate why you are doing a certain function in a manner that makes perfect clarity for when you need to do such functions independent of the instruction book. A number of things became quite clear on this reading. 1) Photoshop is far more complicated than I originally thought, and it will take years to master exactly what it could do for you. 2) Experience will eventually be the best teacher, and one needs to play with the program to glean all the possibilities of what you could do to alter or improve a photo. 3) There is always more than one way to accomplish a given task, and every book details a completely different style of accomplishing the same thing. Ultimately, one needs to develop their own style. 4) Many routines are discovered by chance and then shared. One should not imagine that any given photo alteration is intuitive. Rather, one needs to keep a number of “reference” books around when learning photoshop and use those books to walk through techniques. 5) Videos are nice, but the text ultimately teaches you how to do things. It would be nice to note a end product, attempt it first yourself, and then walk through how the teacher reaches the end-product. Unfortunately, most photoshop instruction books are not written that way. All in all, this is not the best photoshop book that I’ve read, but still is a book worth having on the shelves.

The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Layers Book, by Richard Lynch ★★★★

This is an excellent though advanced text on Photoshopping. I remain with the continued quest to produce a perfect photograph. Unfortunately, not only must one have the right tools, they also need the skills. Regardless of one’s skill with Photoshop, obtaining a properly taken photo in the field remains the most important, and requires the most practice. Unfortunately, one often wishes to obtain a photograph at a given setting, when the light isn’t right, and it simply isn’t possible to remedy the photographic technique to make a classy photograph. Unfortunately, it is those situations where Photoshop isn’t able make up for field problems in order to help one get a prize-winning photo. Yet, the quest remains. Lynch takes Photoshop to another level. Having now read several intermediate to advanced technique books on Photoshop, I’m realizing the multiplicity of techniques to obtain a quality product. Lynch’s system uses multiple baby-steps, each step forming another layer in the photo-editing process. This can become quite cumbersome, but allows a person to safely retreat when the outcome seems to be going the wrong direction. Sometimes, the steps are quite numerous in order to achieve a given effect, yet he repeats the technique enough times that one figures out what he is doing, and is able to duplicate his process. This is not an easy book, and would be best read more than once to grasp the techniques he is pointing out. Sometimes, he carries editing a little too far, in that much of his portrait works ends up slightly artificial, yet, it is probably the technique of most magazines. I had wishes for more landscape and other forms of photography in the book. All in all, this is a valuable book to grasp. My last few Photoshop books will be a Channels and Masks book, and then yet one more Layers text. Hopefully, my photographic output will improve through all this effort.