Product Description

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques has been completely updated to cover the new features in CS4. In a friendly, easy-going style that's long on information and short on techno-babble, Photoshop Hall-of-Famer Ben Willmore and photographer Dan Ablan guide you through the concepts and features that will truly make a difference in how you use Photoshop every day. They'll take you from blindly following step-by-step instructions to an in-depth understanding of how Photoshop works, cutting through the fat to focus on what they consider to be Photoshop's essential features. This full-color book delivers the content in three easily digestible sections: Working Foundations, Production Essentials, and Creative Explorations. Streamlined for this new edition, the book will distill Photoshop's vast capabilities down to what you need to know for a full understanding of the program, while simultaneously focusing more directly on best practices for the photographer. Beginning with a quick "refresher course" on the working foundations of Photoshop, you'll move on to real-world production techniques. Finally, you'll get to fully explore Photoshop's creative potential by blending and enhancing images, creating collages, retouching photographs, colorizing, and working with filters and layer masks. By the time you finish this book, your creativity and efficiency levels will soar and you'll feel like you finally "get" Photoshop.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60344 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780321613103
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Considered to be one of the all-time great Photoshop gurus, Ben Willmore has personally taught over 50,000 Photoshop users on four continents. Famous for finding the simplicity that lies within Photoshop's most complex features, and for his signature teaching style of "not just how but why," Ben was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame in 2004. Dan Ablan is president of AGA Digital Studios, Inc., and author of twelve books on computer graphics and publishing. Dan is an accomplished photographer and 3D animator, working the arts for the past twenty years.

Customer Reviews

I finally understand!
I've been using photoshop professionally for a few years if you can call it that. Like a lot of people I would mess around with the curves not really knowing what they do to my images. Then I'd adjust the levels and eventually end up with what I thought was a decent edited photo. I like the other books out there for quick tips and recipes but it was clearly this studio techniques book that helped me finally understand what the hec i was doing.

This is not a step by step cookbook type of book but instead its a journey from the basic overview of CS4 to the complex curves, histograms, layers, sharpening and more. Do yourself a favor and get this book if you want to really learn photoshop, not just click the buttons and hope for the best. Congrats Ben and Dan on a terrific book.

Get This One Excellent Photoshop CS4 Book And Save Yourself Some Time And Tears
I would like to recommend a book for those, who are like me, learning Photoshop or switching to the CS4 version. It is the main text used in my current Photoshop class.

This book gives a fast overview of what's new and the basic tools, then dives into the deeper mechanics of just what makes Photoshop the most efficient image manipulation tool on the market today.

This was chosen for the students in my class, because the philosophy of this book meshes with my professor's own ideals of Photoshop use (and he is a stickler for efficient, lean and potent work).

It is a step-by-step tutorial/manual for gaining proficiency in Photoshop.
I am enjoying it very much and find it emphasizes what the pros use and do over the sometimes sloppy methods of flashy Photoshop pizazz books that sometimes appear.

Web graphics, electronic publishing, art, poster creation - whatever your creativity leads you to, this book will serve you in acheiving your goals. If you want to learn how to "do Photoshop right", then this is a great first step on the journey to not only eye-appealing image wizardry, but most importantly Photoshop elegance and professional mastery.

A scam - authorship is misleading
I have bought many books by Ben Willmore. I read them because I like the author. His books are clear to an extreme, and always easy and fun to read. This book is none of those.

I have the impression that Ben Willmore's name was used for this book because he wrote deservedly successful books for previous versions of Photoshop and may have had some contractual obligation - certainly his name will help sell this book to readers of his actual works. But how much of his life can we expect him to spend actually writing detailed instructional books on all aspects of new versions of Photoshop? Evidently he was burnt out or otherwise occupied, and the publisher found someone else to write this one.

Right away, I knew this was NOT a book written by Ben Willmore. The information is neither always clear nor always helpful, and it's never actually fun to read. I suggest you read one of Willmore's previous Photoshop books and then get his "Up to Speed" on Photoshop CS4, which discusses what's new in the CS4 iteration.

Dan Ablan, the purported "co-author," deserves his name alone on this one, for various reasons. It may possibly retain some material from one of Willmore's books, but not enough to justify listing him as the author.