Adobe InDesign Styles, by Michael Murphy ????

I got to know Michael Murphy on the Podcast called “The InDesigner” and appreciated his insights and comments on InDesign. InDesign is the typographer’s dream, giving the typographer undreamed of control over the page and how type appears on the page. In this short book (as well as the two supplemental chapters downloaded from the internet), one learns the proper use of character, paragraph, and object styles, as well as styles used for tables. Murphy also gives a cursory review of GREP, and touches briefly on styles in the interface between word processors such as Microsoft Word and XHTML/CSS. The book was a slow read, but very helpful in learning more about some of the power of InDesign. The biggest weakness of the book was the failure to use enough examples, especially in the area of object styles, which was too cursory. This is a worthy read for the person who wishes to move beyond InDesign basics to increased power use of the program.

I’ve been a bit remiss on writing on my blogsite. Every once in a while I feel like I need to offer a personal reflection on what’s going on, but that may be a while from now. There are some trips being planned soon, which I’ll detail when I get back.

It is a bit unusual perhaps seeing a book on InDesign from me. Oddly, typography has a particular attraction for me. I remember the days when I was a typographical apprentice, mostly using hot type. It was at that time, in the early 1970′s, when cold type first arrived. I remember the clunky and always problematic Alphatype machine, which seemed to be broken more often than not. But, it was the forerunner of our current typesetting technology. I suspected back in 1973 that computers would eventually take over the typesetting business, and I was correct. The only use I had for my Journeyman’s card was to work my way through medical school. My former union (International Typographical Union) doesn’t even exist anymore. It was in the early 1980′s that the first real typesetting program came out, called Aldus PageMaker. I purchased it and started playing with it. It was unreal how closely PageMaker simulated how a typographer would approach type. Aldus was since bought out by Adobe, who later morphed PageMaker into InDesign, constantly adding new functionality. This book takes one on a whirlwind tour of InDesign CS4. It is quite amazing all the power that one now has in the program, compared to the first version of PageMaker. McClelland adeptly demonstrates many of the subtle functions of InDesign CS4. His instructions are quite easy to follow, compared to many how-to-do computer books. Each chapter is accompanied by a short video that highlights a particular segment of the upcoming chapter. My only complain about the book is the preoccupation with certain distractions, such as how  to draw figures, that are nice to be able to do in InDesign, but best performed in Illustrator. I would be quite amazed if somebody owned InDesign and did NOT own both Illustrator and Photoshop. Many typesetting topics were glossed over. He could have spent more time on the use of styles, which is one of the strongest utilities in InDesign. His examples included portions of past books that he wrote, or a silly frog article called Professor Shenbop. I would have appreciated a fuller spectrum of types of publications. Deke did have a keen eye for typographical details, and I wished he would have mentioned his thinking more often regarding adjustments of type spacing, etc. In the 1970′s, everything had to be -10% between-letter spacing, so that letters ran on top of each other—thankfully, that is bygone. In summary, Deke does a most capable job of giving one a great summary of what InDesign CS4, and what it can do. For somebody familiar with InDesign, it was still helpful to read, and I felt like I picked up many new tips to make InDesign more useful to me.

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.

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.

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.

Having worked through the similar textbook on Dreamweaver and liking it, I decided to run through this text, hoping to improve my Photoshop skills. I certainly learned a few things from the book, in that no instruction book could be completely comprehensive, unless it was a meter thick. This text had a companion DVD which provided the images for the projects in the book, as well as videos by J Smith explaining portions of the text. The book was simply too simple for me, and my only benefit was to learn some functionality, like 3D rendering, which is usually not included in regular photographer’s texts on Photoshop, since they are interested in the image, and not in the fact that you can paste your beautiful scene from Yosemite on a pop can. All the same, the text is simple, easy to follow, so I could not downgrade the stars for the book’s simplicity. It is not as comprehensive as Photoshop Classroom in a Book, and the presentation is a little sloppier, but it has a very easy style to it, making it a reasonable first textbook for the total novice on Photoshop.

This is probably one of the best skills textbooks that I’ve read so far on Photoshop, covering a broad range of topics from photo touch-up, montages, landscape photography, portrait photography, panoramas, and the works. There were some topics not covered, such as 3D work, but the text did not intend to be a comprehensive coverage of all that photoshop offers. The book is arranged to be read with an accompanying DVD, containing many movie files, as well and sample photographs that will be used in projects in the book. Typically, a set of movies would first be watched, and then the projects shown in the movies worked through in the accompanying textbook. The authors assume that the reader is learning, and thus make short cut descriptions of how to do things, as you get deeper into the text. The example projects provided are very sensible images that any amateur photographer would usually be working with. Through the use of repetition and ever expanding skills, you cover most of the standard functionality of photoshop. The text is very good at showing how something may be done in a number of ways, and also explaining the various choices that Photoshop offers. This is not a beginners book, but a very good transition for someone who has read a beginning book on Photoshop, or at least is familiar with the functionality and various uses of layers and channels, etc. I would compare this to the text Photoshop Classroom in a Book, which is produced by Adobe, and is excellent for taking a raw beginner through all the things that Photoshop can do. Unfortunately, it will not teach one how to use Photoshop, as you spend your time following detailed instructions, but rarely ever told why you are doing it. This book is highly recommended as a “next-step” text for the Photoshop photographer.

This is one of the better books I’ve read recently on software utilization. Dreamweaver is a quite powerful program, that allows one to make webpages, built in are multiple functions that would allow one to make a fairly professional appearing page. This book offers a cursory review of the functionality of DW CS4, while allowing one to practice with sample web pages provided on the accompanying CD. Each chapter covers different aspects of the program, such as the possibility of making forms, Spry widgets, set up of page design, etc. Osborn goes beyond simply telling you to click here, click there to get something done, but explains what the options are, and what clicking here or there would accomplish. I’ll probably not be an accomplished web designer now, but I’ll have enough information on DW utilization to make a webpage if I needed to. Maybe someday soon, I’ll need to. DW leaves open direct coding, such a formally writing HTML code, writing AJAX or JavaScript, so is quite accommodating to different levels of expertise. I’m not sure where I’m going from here, as I don’t think it would be an efficient use of my time to start learning programming in JavaScript or any other language. Been there, done that, don’t need to repeat. This book is highly recommended to those of most levels who wish a solid summary of Dreamweaver, and is quite useful for the raw beginner.

This is one of the better HTML webpage books that I’ve encountered, and a very excellent introduction for the cold novice. It takes the reader slowly through basic HTML, XHTML, and CSS, finally talking a bit about JavaScript and using other technologies such as php and DOM to write webpages. It is very basic, and once more complex topics such as JavaScript were breeched, only the most superficial routines were displayed. All in all, this was a good read for starting out in HTML, and left the reader knowledgeable about where to go at the finish of the book to further expand ones’ ability to create a webpage. The authors were wise enough to recommend one not risk writing complex script, but gave suggestions as to where already written script could be obtained in order to create webpage functionality. The book gave me a deeper love for Dreamweaver, since I can now jump between the actual page visualization and the html script, and have an understanding as to the meaning of the html script. I’ll be exploring css in more depth after this book, as well as Javascript.

Now that I’m doing my own webpages, with a lot of help from son-in-law Andrew, I’ve decided that I need to grasp some of the nuances of WordPress. Interestingly, many webpages are made by WordPress, as it possesses the best easy blog maker using SQL and php protocols. This book is a good introduction to WordPress. Its weakness is that it is both too easy and too hard. Most of the time in the book is spent taking you through all the things you can click on in WordPress which you could generally figure out for yourself. The rest of the book are technical aspects that are not well introduced, and thus not useable. An instance of the is the teaching of modification of css formats, which is nice to know, though one is not going to be messing with css until they’ve mastered the css language. All in all the book is a good but limited introduction to WordPress.

Dreamweaver CS3 On Demand ??

I needed to quickly learn Dreamweaver, since iWeb has become a severe disappointment to me. I decided to simply write my own webpage, and thus have control over everything. This book was no help. The book has its strengths. It is beautifully illustrated, and shows in very clear steps how to make certain functions happen. What it doesn’t tell you, is how to use those functions to write a webpage. I presume that the authors assume that you know how to compose a webpage, and are simply switching from another program to Dreamweaver. For a beginner, this book is essentially worthless.

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Classroom in a Book, by the staff of Adobe Systems ????

I had worked through the same book for Adobe Illustrator CS, and found the book to be poorly written, often confusing, and rarely ever instructive as to the full usage of Illustrator. Rather, it simply gave you a set of instructions on how to make a certain piece of art, never telling you why you were doing what it was telling you, and never explaining all the other options on the menu. This edition has corrected most of those mistakes, and was actually informative, leaving me a feel that I had mastered the basics of Illustrator. It provides ample opportunity to experiment with the system, and encourages one to play, since the full use of Illustrator takes time and much practice. It left me feeling that I would be better served with a Wacom tablet, which I’ll probably get soon. Perhaps it was the second exposure, but I now feel much more comfortable with the use of Illustrator. All the same, there were a number of times when I could not make Illustrator do as the instructions were telling me, and sometimes could figure out what was wrong, other times not. Perhaps new editions should also include more side bars to the text detailing where one might get into trouble, or not end up with the same result—this is especially true when working with layers and masks, which was one great deficit of both the Illustrator and Photoshop Classroom texts.