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A very good "A to Z" instructional guide. You don't have to be a computer expert to work with this book, but basic knowledge of CS3 helps, although not required.
The authors introduce you to their work flow, which I find works well. They guide you through the entire process, beginning at taking your picture, to setting up your preferences, to final print.
After purchasing three other books on CS3, this was the most applicable for someone that is primarily focused on nature and landscape photography. The lessons are easy to follow and understand.
It leaves room for your own personal settings without "directing" you to do it only their way. The authors not only explain the "how", but the "why." This was something I found lacking in the other books, even the official Adobe workbook.
If getting the most out of your landscape/nature images with CS3 is your goal, then this is your book. Highly recommended.
And these books tend to get read -- perhaps all the way to chapter 3 -- where I become entirely overwhelmed by the minutiae and lose complete interest, especially since the book is only introducing details and accomplishing nothing useful. As well, you then begin to build on these skills -- but never to the point where you become frustrated with the process. For several years I have attempted to gain at least a small degree of skill doing some basic image editing using Photoshop. The authors have wisely chosen not to attempt to document every single feature of this huge and complicated software tool. If you need to work with some of the advanced options that Photoshop offers then this may not be the right book for you. I was skeptical when I purchased this book, assuming it would lead to the same dead end. The book progresses very logically, providing you just what you need to do "the next thing." In practice, this means that you only need to learn a reasonable number of things in order to begin to see some success.
In hindsight, I believe that many of the earlier books that I worked with often required adherence to the author's proscribed ideas about how to do this or that. Each attempt was accompanied by the latest and greatest book claiming to be the source of everything needed to become quickly proficient with Photoshop. Finally, they provide options for you to consider and try, typically suggesting that you use the method most comfortable for you. I have been very pleasantly surprised, not to mention pleased with the progress I have made -- right through the final chapter.I think several things make this book stand out. Often they note, in passing, areas that they do not plan to cover -- and why (because the software was designed for a wide audience and nature photographers only need a sub-set of the available features). It was quite nice to discover, for example, that a "keyboard person" was not forced to use the mouse -- and vice versa.I can certainly recommend this to advanced beginner and intermediate photographers -- not JUST Nature Photographers. If you have tried many times to succeed with Photoshop I urge you to try again with this book -- you just may find that you will succeed this time.
It was extremely distracting however for nearly every photograph in the book to have the caption "Photo by Ellen Anon". This is a pretty good book filled with quite a few tips. The writing style was difficult for me to enjoy per se but the content is there. Over and over and over.Even multiple steps in a procedure apparently required a credit on each photo. Just a small gripe but it would have been easier to say at the beginning all photos by Ellen Anon unless otherwise noted.
Again, this isn't a flaw of the book, just the nature of the beast. I had been muddling through Photoshop for years, learning how to do things mostly on my own. First off, although being nature photographer-centered doesn't mean it is impractical for other subjects, the nature focus does preclude the types of portrait and architecture examples of other books that really don't help the nature-oriented photographer very much. This is especially the case with the recent upgrade of Camera Raw to version 4.1 (now available for free download from Adobe's website), which has tools (sharpening, notably) that could not be covered by this book because ACR 4.1 didn't exist at the time it was written. As such, some of that information is a bit dated. I find this to be a big strength.The book is fairly inclusive of most of the basic tools needed to produce quality photos, but some areas are a bit lacking, notably with respect to sharpening.
This leads to multiple options being presented to the reader. This book, however, was an eye-opener. Heck, I'm sure someone reading this review a year or so from now will be remarking how obsolete ACR 4.1 is, once ACR 4.2 comes out.I like the fact that there are two authors for the book because they each have ideas on how to best accomplish their goals. Specifically, there is no discussion of high-pass sharpening, nor of the multipass sharpening process (capture, creative, and output sharpening) that Adobe is now embracing. If you are interested in getting the best out of your photos, I strongly suggest googling these two subjects and learning more.This book, as do all books on the subject, also suffers from that fact that parts of it are partially obsolete almost from the time it was printed because of advances in plug-in technology. The sidebars by well-known photographers are also quite valuable, although it seems that they were written based on earlier versions of the book (i.e., once centered on CS2, and possibly CS).
Still, there is a lot of valuable information in there.I can't comment on the tutorial CD, because I haven't used it, but for those of you who prefer to learn by doing, I imagine it is a very valuable resource.All in all, I would definitely recommend this book to any newcomer to Photoshop who shoots primarily nature photos.
I can't emphasize strongly enough how helpful that approach is for someone who has some Photoshop chops or who has used the program for another end and who wants to get great results with nature photos. I've also worked on lots of photographs, both my own and those I've gotten from clients. I could probably spend a lot of time working out a good workflow and set of procedures through trial and error, but why not take advantage of the experience of those who have already taken the art of nature photography editing to a high place.Enter Photoshop CS3 for Nature Photographers. I wonder if more than three people in the world completely understand all of what can be done with Photoshop. Anon and Grey offer an excellent look over the shoulder of experts in both practice of nature photography and in the use of Photoshop as a digital darkroom. But Kelby's book is a recipe book both useful and well presented, but I want more.What I want to do now is take my own photography to another level. I've got a good understanding of the basic Photoshop tools, and have benefitted from Scott Kelby's Photoshop CS for Photographers.
Past a certain point, improving becomes less a matter of collecting tricks and recipes and more a matter of learning the entire workflow from experts. For that a basic how-to cookbook is no longer of much use to me. As a web designer I've been using Photoshop professionally for years. It's perfectly possible to be familiar with one tool or filter in one context and not realize that it can be used in combination with another tool to achieve a completely different result. I once read that when Einstein proposed his theory of relativity maybe three people in the world understood it. What I was looking for and found here is an expansion of my Photoshop horizons, a deeper exploration of the art and science of nature photography and photo editing. I recommend this book to anybody interested in nature photography who has at least some experience with Photoshop, though a dedicate beginner could work through the introductory phases with this volume. And placing editing in context with a specific photographic goal informs my picture taking too.
I don't need a how to book on layers, cropping and levels. Their workflow is time tested and produces excellent resultsAnd nature photograph editing benefits from following a slightly different approach from that of product photography, with which I have some experience, portraiture, photojournalism and so on. As one reviewer has stated, much of the introductory Photoshop material is covered in other books, but not in quite the same way. Photoshop has many tools, each of which has many settings and options. Again, I'm struck with how specific and helpful the presented workflow, and the mindset that using such a workflow creates is. For someone who has used Photoshop in another context and wants to expand into the nature photography realm this book is brilliant.
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