Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107352 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781933952420
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author

Customer Reviews

The Keys to the CS4 Kingdom for Beginners
What a great book. The book title doesn't do it justice. It not only covers CS4 but also Bridge and Lightroom 2. It is written by a very experienced CS4 user, who is also a gifted teacher. His years in classrooms and seminars show in this book, in the clarity of the explanations, the rationality of the suggested workflow, and the practical nature of the examples and their solutions.

The computer instructions are non discriminatory, they include key-specific instructions for both Macs and PCs. If you're browsing the book and are interested in only the sections that deal with Lightroom 2, the book pages are "tabbed" with "Lr" to indicate those sections. There are specific tabs for Photoshop, Bridge, and Adobe Camera Raw as well.

The book starts with very basic information, pixels, bytes, dots, resolution, file formats among others. It moves on to setting up your computer to do photo specific work, recommendations regarding CPU speed and required RAM, and monitor size and settings. An excellent description is given of the RAW image format and why most professional photographers prefer to use the RAW format for their image acquisition The author then goes on to recommend converting RAW images to the Adobe opensource DNG format, and details the rationale for that choice.

After introducing each software package, the author moves on to the workflow of image acquisition, editing, and output. If you follow the suggested workflow, you'll not only work economically, but you'll make occasionally overlooked steps such as image backup a standard part of the workflow. Screen shots are an important part of any computer book, these are a cut above in that they are annotated clarifying comments.

CS4 is a very powerful program, with many features and plugins that a 270 page book will overlook. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent introduction to 3 powerful programs that represent the state of the art in photo editing and output. Highly recommended

A Must for Beginners and Advanced Users
As a high school digital photography teacher, I have been keenly interested in books about Photoshop for about the last 10 years. The book by Steven Laskevitch is the best. Here's why. First, Laskevitch takes great care to explain things really well. The beginning of the book starts with a glossary of key terms and concepts. Throughout the book, Laskevitch, not only describes in detail how to do something in Photoshop, but he explains clearly what the software is actually doing to an image. Other authors tend to explain how to do something without telling you why. So you are left with getting descent results by using the magic settings set forth in their books without knowing why you choose those settings in the first place. In this book, you will have a better understanding of what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Everybody uses screen captures in books like these. Laskevitch does a better job. This is because he annotates his screen captures with additional notes and arrows to make various Photoshop settings easier to understand. Best of all is his strength as a writer. Laskevitch is concise, clear, and makes a point in a direct manner.

The second reason why I am so impressed with this book is organization. Laskevitch begins with the basics by defining important vocabulary terms and concepts, the ideal configuration for you computer, and the basics of navigating through the software. For the remainder of the book, you are taken through the steps of processing digital images from global adjustments to localized adjustments. For someone familiar with Photoshop, you can sail through the book picking up the new features of Photoshop CS4. For the beginner, you can work through a section at at time and likely have a lot of success as you apply new techniques to the processing of your photos.

The Photoshop product has evolved to become several products within a product. The Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW have radically changed how photographers process their images. Throw in Photoshop Lightroom and the mix can be daunting. Again, precise text and well explained screen captures allow Laskevitch to pull off this feat with impressive results.

If you are only buying one book to learn Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Photographer's Handbook by Stephen Laskevitch is the one to buy!

Photoshop CS4 Photographer's Handbook
Photoshop CS 4 is the 11th major release of this well-known software package. It is intended for professional photographers and graphics designers, and perhaps some amateurs with deep pockets. It is absolutely dominant in its field, although some observers maintain that the open-source GIMP is almost as good (it isn't).

To use the software to best advantage you will need "high-end" (expensive) equipment-- a camera which captures images in RAW format, a high-resolution scanner, and a computer with plenty of memory and processing power.

Author Stephen Laskevitch proceeds to describe how to work with the software, treating each major module in turn. The book is written in narrative style, and is not a typical handbook, which would likely be full of data. The author does not step you through the various features of image correction, but guides you in overview fashion. This makes for a smoothly flowing narrative and a highly readable style.

The book is printed in color throughout, and the illustrations are superb. Every page has the appropriate logo for the module under discussion printed in the margin, so you will never get lost. The book is up-to-the-minute on the very latest Photoshop CS4 software, particularly the Lightroom 2 module, which is a relatively new feature of the Photoshop software package.

The official release of Lightroom v2 was on July 29th 2008, along with the release of Adobe Camera Raw v4.5 and DNG Converter 4.5. (DNG stands for Digital Negative). Adobe has added DNG Camera Profiling to both releases. This technology allows custom camera color profiles to be created by the user and saved.

Personally, I do not have Photoshop CS4, but use an earlier version. Therefore I do not have some of the features discussed in the book--but most of the material in the book works for me.The book should be useful to anyone with the original CS version, through to the current CS4.This a beautiful book, written by an expert and a pleasure to read.