Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Deke McClelland has done such a great job with Adobe products, that he has his own Deke Press section, like Pogue has Pogue Press at O’Reilly!

This book under-promises and over-delivers with the “Read-awhile, play with Photoshop, sit-back-and-watch-the-DVD” approach to educating us about Photoshop CS3.

If you are into learning Photoshop (see Chris Marshall’s review last month), then you will want to get this well-organized, full-color book.

There are 12 chapters covering pretty much everything that Deke covers in his lynda.com training packages for Photoshop, only none of this information is regurgitated from his other excellent training experiences. This is pretty much all new stuff.

He sets us up with his configuration from lessons learned over time, before we can dig into Photoshop CS3. I recommend following his defaults, because he has “been there, done that”. An he doesn’t want us tripping over ourselves as we learn all the hidden features in the plethora of nooks and crannies that Photoshop has become over time.

So what’s inside? Quite a bit. Opening and organizing, highlights, midtones and shadows, correcting color balance, making selections, crop, straighten and size, paint, edit and heal, creating and applying masks, focus and filters, building layered compositions, text and shapes, styles and specialty layers and finally, printing and output.

The DVD departs from previous training approaches as Deke asks us to sit back and relax and – do nothing but listen and watch nearly 3 hours of show&tell. And Lynda.com has done a marvelous job with their video preparations The price for the book, if it were just the DVD, would be worth what it costs.

What I enjoyed is that the videos are not designed for TV interlacing, but for computers and pixel resolution is normally running at 880x660 instead of the usual 720x240. What we get is truly high-quality legible screen imaging and is superb! Way to go Lynda.com!!

Each chapter in the book is subtly color-coded and tabbed. The layouts are “perfect” in balance and form based on years of learning how to do presentations.

This book is definitely a coffee-table piece and will make any owner proud to show it off, if it isn’t bookmarked and dog-eared to death by the time you get done reading it.

If I were teaching a Photoshop course, this is the book and DVD I would use. It’s that good!