The Photoshop 6 WOW! Book: Amazon.co.uk: Linnea Dayton, Jack Davis: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Whether you're a Photoshop pro or a demanding amateur, The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book contains the widest selection of useful projects, tips, tutorials, techniques and examples of professionally produced work you're likely to find in one place.

What's remarkable about this book is that every page contains something worth knowing. While other Photoshop books have their strengths, be it web production, photographic retouching and repro-techniques or illustration, The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book provides in-depth knowledge on just about every aspect of Photoshop 6.

Tutorials covering techniques you might already be familiar with often provide better ways of doing things or additional related information. Where they cover new ground the results are so stunning you'll want to try them out and add them to your repertoire.

As well as the staples--framing with masks, fixing problem photos, quick masking and blending, filters and so on--you'll find gems such as focusing attention with colour, blurring backgrounds while retaining grain, hand tinting black and white photos, applying images to textured surfaces and painting with the art-history brush.

The book focuses strongly on new Photoshop 6 features such as layer styles, vector shapes and fill layers as well as improved text handling. This makes it ideal for getting up to speed on the new features and interface enhancements in Photoshop 6, but anyone using older versions would do better with The Photoshop 5/5.5 Wow! Book or The Photoshop 4 Wow! Book by the same authors.

Screen shots, before and after examples and galleries of professionally produced work in full colour throughout make this an easy book to dip into as well as a good basis for a structured course. --Ken McMahon

Product Description

Looking for state-of-the-art practical advice and inspiration? The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book stikes the perfect balance, giving you creative, timesaving tips and techniques for Web graphics, illustration, photo correction and compositing, and special effects. Packed with stunning new examples of Photoshop artistry, Photoshop 6 Wow! presents real-world, full-color artwork accompanied by clear, step-by-step instructions that you can use immediately to create your own projects. This updated edition shows you how to get the most from Photoshop 6's redesigned interface, new Shape tools, improved typesetting, and other vector-based features. You'll also get expert instruction on ImageReady's automated rollover states and one of the hottest new features--Layer Styles--for instant, elegant special effects.

The accompanying Wow! CD-ROM is invaluable, loaded with "before and after" tutorial files for the techniques in the book, with layers, adjustments, and Styles intact. You'll also find dozens of preset Wow! Layer Styles and improved Actions designed to automate Photoshop creativity and productivity, along with libraries of new Wow! Patterns, Custom Shapes, Gradients, Brushes, and bevel Contours. Educators can use the Instructor's Guide PDF to design a Photoshop class--whether a single seminar or a semester-long course--based on the book-and-CD package. Find out why the award-winning Photoshop Wow! is the best-selling Photoshop book of all time--and why this edition tops them all!

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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful

Simply the best for beginners, reference or advanced effects 5 Sep 2001

By Marque Pierre Sondergaard

Format:Paperback

For learning and mastering an impressive package like Photoshop 6 I usually say that you need 3 kinds of materials: 1. A beginners guide to show you the framework and teach you how the basics work; 2. A detailed reference volume for when you need to research the solution to a problem on your own; 3. A selection of impressive advanced effects to give you inspiration and solutions to common advanced problems. If you have access to these 3, all you need is sweat and time. Few books have it all, since many of these functions seems to contradict with each other. Another common flaw is that many books show you very impressive effects, and how to carry them out, but after doing so, when the initial "Wow! Look what I just made!" fades away, you have learned almost nothing and understand very little about how the effect was made.

Based on these criteria, I have to conclude that The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book has it all. This is definitely not my first book on Photoshop 6, but I wish it was. It would have saved me quite a few bucks, and taught me more in the same time.

My personal interest is creating illustrations, not so much applying effects to photos or making web graphics. But still the Wow! Book covers it all to a very satisfying degree, in fact with so much depth and detail, that this book doubles as my reference volume. Also it patiently takes its time to make sure beginners understand all the key concepts in Photoshop.

I am impressed. Very impressed. My verdict will have to be the old cliché about, "this is the only book you'll need". But it can easily be the only book you'll need for a loooooong time.

Feel free to mail me if you have questions.

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

A must have for those with basic photoshop knowledge 20 Aug 2001

By A Customer

The WOW series of books has continued to improve throughout the range. The Photoshop 6 WOW book is no exception.

Although the book does include introductory material for those completely new to Photoshop I wouldn't recommend it as a great introduction for the complete novice (rather, have a look at something like the 'classroom in a book' series that take you step by step through exercises designed to give you the grounding you need to get going). The WOW book is better appreciated if you have some knowledge of the program. Given that, this is excellent. There are many examples to follow, with necessary files included on the CD and good instructions. There are also many 'gallery' type examples of what can be achieved when you have a good grasp of Photoshop (and more than a little artistic flare).

The exercises (if that's the right word) take you through just about any type of work you could want to do in Photoshop, including the ubiquitous web graphics using ImageReady (although I prefer Macromedia Fireworks).

The best thing I can say about this book is that it is great fun to work through. Once you get started you'll find your time flying by as you work through it. Plus, it will be a great resource to keep coming back to for inspiration.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

Best book on Photoshop 31 Dec 2001

This is my fourth Photoshop book and definitely the best. There's a lot in version 6 that not obvious if you've been using earlier versions and the tutorials cover this very well. There's always more to them than a first glance suggests.

Excellent illustrations throughout provide inspiration as well as tuition and the CD comes with various things, the preset styles being useful in themselves as well as a learning devise.

If you get just one photoshop book get this one