PHOTOSHOP CS3 BOOKS

AT
Posted By
Andrew_Turek
Jul 20, 2008
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432
Replies
12
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Closed
About to make the Great Leap Forward from PE6 to CS3. Advice, on one book to buy – particularly one which covers what CD3 has and Elements has not. Ideally available on Amazon.com but then what isn’t?
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JJ
John Joslin
Jul 20, 2008
That’s a question that’s impossible to answer.

There are so many books and different authors tend to cater for different types of user. When I switched to InDesign I bought "Classroom in a Book" and followed that up with some video tutorials at Lynda.com.

There are samples of the latter on DVD 2 of the CS3 package.
AT
Andrew_Turek
Jul 20, 2008
I am a serious amateur who wants to improve his photos "by all means possible".
BL
Bob Levine
Jul 20, 2008
www.lynda.com/idsecrets with give you a free week of Lynda.com.

Bob
JW
John_Waller
Jul 20, 2008
I am a serious amateur who wants to improve his photos "by all means possible".

That’s great but it’s still not possible to recommend one single book to achieve your aim.

What’s your learning style? Step-by-step tutorials to achieve specific goals with a given image or A-Z Photoshop describing all the tools?

Which authors’ writing style do you get the most out of?

Do you like lots of explanation or "point-here-and-click to get x effect" cookbooks?

Do you like humor in tutorials to lighten the mood now and again or straight shooting to the point explanations all the way?

Do you like understanding the theory behind what’s happening or prefer a practical hands-on approach without worrying about behind the scenes?

Or all of the above?

—
Regards

John Waller
I
ID._Awe
Jul 20, 2008
There are lots of free tuts online, including on Adobe.com, find one that is interesting and experiment, then another and then….. then when you feel confident with PS, chose books that are for advanced users.
DM
dave_milbut
Jul 21, 2008
Advice

advice 1: wait a couple months. as soon as cs4 is announced, buy cs3 through adobe and get the cs4 upgrade for free. 🙂

advice 2: hang out here. i learned everything i know about ps from the pros who hang out here. (i’m a serious amateur myself. usually i’m only half serious, seriously. :))
J
jcates
Jul 21, 2008
I’m gonna ditto Dave (mostly) on this. I’ve been using PS for over 10 years at work and beyond basic and plain photo editing, I didn’t really start to explore what PS could do until about 2 years ago.

I’ve managed to pull off some (what I would consider based on my experience) pretty cool stuff. However, I’ve barely scratched the surface on what it can do.

I subscribed to the Illustrator forum some time ago because I used that more than any other program at the time and wanted to learn more. I have and actually managed to help a few people along the way. As I started using PS more, I subscribed to this forum as well.

I also check out the Exchange here every once in a few weeks. Some cool stuff there and some really great tutorials on specific tools and procedures. Some actions posted there have actually helped me figure out how to do things I now consider simple.

Book? Dude, there is no magic bullet. I bought two books to help me figure out After Effects, but even I don’t expect them to make me a genius with the software. I need a launching pad with AE and that is all I expect those to do for me.

When someone wants to learn Illy, I tell them to learn the pen tool first as everything else is much easier once the pen tool is mastered. With someone wants to learn PS, I ask them to pick one specific thing they’d like to do and learn how to do that first. My experience is PS is more of a ‘jump in and play’ piece of software. There is far too much it can do for any one or several books to cover.
AT
Andrew_Turek
Jul 21, 2008
Folks: you’re right. I’m going to cheat the publishing business of a sale and teach myself for the time being at least.
O
OldBob
Jul 21, 2008
Theres any number of excellent tutorial sites out there. Just google Photoshop+tutorial.
C
Curvemeister
Jul 22, 2008
Get Dan Margulis’s books on Lab, and Professional Photoshop.
JJ
John Joslin
Jul 22, 2008
…. or don’t!
RP
Rick_Popham
Jul 23, 2008
Get Dan Margulis’s books on Lab, and Professional Photoshop.

Yikes!

Good luck with the quest for ONE book. I’ve spent more on Photoshop BOOKS than I have on buying Version 5.5 and all of the upgrades since then (except CS).

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