Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Classroom in a Book Book

Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Classroom in a Book features consistently well-written and conceived lessons, which are part of Adobe's official training and certification programme. They guarantee solid instruction, taking readers step by step through professional-level projects with top-notch artwork. Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Classroom in a Book assumes no prior knowledge, and beginners will benefit from the slow and deliberate pacing. However, more experienced Photoshop users won't find it difficult to speed ahead through familiar material, and there's a thorough index for troubleshooting specific problems. It will help to find new techniques to make workflow more efficient, and, perhaps, "unlearn" any bad habits (for example, getting a better grayscale conversion for a colour photo by using the Channel Mixer rather than clicking "Mode > Grayscale"). Chapters cover the fundamentals: the work environment and help resources; making selections (with the wand, lasso and marquee tools); using layers and masks; working with the pen tool and other vector graphics techniques; retouching and colour correcting; selected effects such as hand colouring; colour-management issues; and creating images for print or the Web. Areas new to version seven include working with the File Browser, using the new paint engine to create custom brushes and patterns and working with the healing brush and cloning stamp. All lesson project files and fonts are on the companion CD-ROM. Each lesson begins by outlining what will be learned and how long the project should take, and ends with review Q&A. The colour section not only shows finished artwork for several projects, but also includes some useful reference pages: a toolbox overview (with colour illustrations of what each tool does), a layer blending mode sampler and a set of images helpful in colour management. In addition to the above topics, the book also shows how to create slices and optimise images in both Photoshop and ImageReady, make rollovers and animations in ImageReady and use droplets for batch processing. You may not become a power user after these tutorials, but you'll certainly have a firm working knowledge of Photoshop upon which to build expert skills. --Angelynn Grant, Amazon.comRead More