Photoshop 7 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide (Visual QuickStart Guides) Book

Where would graphics professionals be without Visual QuickStart Guides like Photoshop 7 for Windows & Macintosh? Economically priced, they offer a lot of bang for your buck--hundreds of screen shots, all precisely annotated, step-by-step instructions for virtually every feature and menu, numerous insightful tips and sidebars, reference pages filled with keyboard shortcuts, a thorough index for pinpointing just the right problem area, and much more.

This latest entry is one of the best. The authors have the ability to clearly articulate what each tool and feature does, why you might want to use it, and how it works, all in a concise form--usually in eight steps or less. However, perhaps due to the multitool versatility of Photoshop, this QuickStart Guide may not the best starting point for all beginners. These are not tutorials that take you from simple ingredients to complex outcomes. Instead, the authors put the tools in your hands and help you discover what you can do with them on your own images. An analogy would be that this book is like a great car manual, but not necessarily the driving lessons. You have a problem in a project, look up the appropriate keywords in the index, and apply the steps to work out a solution.

For the experienced user, this is a fabulous reference to have on hand. (Especially those Mac users who've upgraded, since most screen shots are from OS X.) It takes readers through all the many parts of Photoshop: color management; resolution; making selections; compositing (moving, copying, sharpening and blurring, cloning, and more); using layers; the history palette (including using snapshots and the history brush); adjustment layers; working with color (including levels and curves and the spot color channel); painting; blending; masks; paths; type; filters; actions; preparing images for print or for exporting to other applications; optimizing for the Web; and making slices, rollovers, and animations. And new features have a "7.0!" call-out--for example, the new File Browser or the Healing Brush and the Patch tool, to quickly bring you up to speed with version 7.0. --Angelynn Grant