Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2: Image Editing for New Users and Professionals [Kindle Edition]

First I must disclose that I know Brad personally and we teach at the same non-profit organization. So this means 2 things -- one, you could consider my review biased because of personal familiarity; or two, becasue I know Brad, I know the quality of his teaching ability, his knowledge of subject matter, his enthusiasm for digital photography, and his ability to talk and write in plain English. I hope readers will consider #2 as the dominant reason for my writing this review.

I know close to nothing regarding digital photogrpahy and Photoshop in particular. I have been a film user for all my photographic life (since 1977), and I have always preferred the wet darkroom for black & white, and platinum/palladum printing. So when I decided to start learning Photoshop I bought several books, but they were all too advanced for me and they did not provide a foundation of knowledge and theory to help me understand how to begin. I came across Brad's book on Amazon and decided to purchase it because it seemed to be just what I needed. I was right. It is organized well and it is written in plain English. It flows logically from the Introduction to advanced techniques chapter. The book also gave me a good introduction to color management theory and practice -- something I never studied. I especially like the book's emphasis on developing a workflow in Chapter 3, and Brad is very generous in sharing his ideas and approach to a reliable image-editing workflow . The information in the chapter on workflow is provided in a clear step-by-step fashion. The Fourth chapter covers how to print images and it gives good information about color management and steps for printing a final image. The fifth chapter provides information about advanced techniques for blendiing layers, tonal adjustments, color correction, B&W image management, and filter effects. There are many photographs and images provided to illustrate the points emphasized in the book. This is a book you will want to return to when you are looking for answers to questions, are unsure of what you are doing, and trying to decide what to do next. This book was a pleasure for me to read and it gave me a solid foundation from which to begin my experimentation with Photoshop. Finally, the book is lightweight and a nice size for handheld reading and for keeping next to you while working on your computer. In all, this book is highly recommended!

Brad Hinkel is more than a photoshop jock; he's a real teacher. He isn't interested in producing another--even larger--photoshop manual. Instead, he distills the almost infinite number of choices and options photoshop embodies into a coherent body of knowledge that is both useful and expansive. Bewildered by the numerous ways to change brightness in photoshop? Brand Hinkel tells you which one is best and, most importantly, why. His ability to get below button-pushing for effect mode into easily understood explanations of principles and terms (of pixels, of how the grey point slider affects the entire histogram, of why 255 is the highest value in photoshop scale) is the great gift of this book. It allows the reader to understand not only the effect of buttons, but also the causal mechanisms rendering those effects. The concentration on effect at the expense of cause is the gaping hole in most photoshop manuals, which have evolved primarily from software demonstrations. It's easy to see that Hinkel's book derives from classroom experience, where the why's can't be overlooked. The result is a way of learning as well as of knowing, a book for students in the deepest sense of the word.

The only reason this book received four stars is the unusual number of typos. This is unfortunate, because the production quality of the the book (especially paper stock) is quite high (though some of the pallete illustrations are a bit small). Like many people my age, I learned much of what I know about photography from Focal Press publications. It's great to see them back in the forefront of instructional manuals, but that doesn't make skimping on proofreading acceptable. Focal Press could do better and has.

It is hard to believe that a book this concise will be of any use.

Surely it won't contain enough information?

Well it does! The book swiftly takes you through the basics of the tools, commands and filters using a wealth of illustrative material, all presented in an attractive easy to read manner.

For anyone wishing to have a quick but useful introduction to Photoshop I would recommend this as a good place to start.