Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition) Review

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Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition) ReviewWell, it appears that Amazon has folded all the 4th edition reviews into this new edition's page. I'm not sure what to think of that. This book is 90% new material, it is almost a new book entirely. It has similar goals to the previous editions though. So, here's a hint, if the review was written before the fall of 2006 it is about the older editions which are very different from the current edition.
What NOT to expect:
- Learn how to use photoshop, you better know this already
- Step-by-step how-to algorithms for you to follow, you are taught concepts and generic techniques instead
- 100% clarity on a first reading
- Gobs on CMYK (you'd only expect this if you'd read older editions). Thankfully the book is far more balanced to modern workflows where we often don't need to go there anymore. Older editions were more CMYK based. That said, he includes all the relevant old material on the CD and this book still has way more CMYK than anything else out there. He is very balanced in his approach in my opinion, very refreshing.
- The same as the old editions. Source and output technology change. Dan learns new tricks. Dan changes his mind on somethings. So does the rest of the community. There is LOTS that is new in this edition.
What to expect:
- Extremely powerful techniques. Their power lies in their flexibility, the problem is knowing when to use them and only experience will help you there. The book does give you some hints though, when it can.
- A bit of contraversy. Dan has opinions. He states them clearly. He usually has good facts backing him up.
- Having to play with actual images yourself to enitrely comprehend the whole. I personally have had no problems understanding each and every chapter just by reading, but you'll really need to start using what you've learned on real images to get a feel for what is needed where and when.
- Occasionally obfuscated writing style. Dan seems to like to hide where he is going to make the result that much more exciting. It is not the best way to teach. To be fair, though, the start of each chapter says where we are going and the end says where we have been. Nonetheless you'll occasionally find yourself reading something twice - and at times I think this has more to do with the writing style than the concept really being that hard.
Overall, if you are a photographer or work with photographs and are a experienced photoshop user (i.e. you know what a layer, channel, curve, and blend mode are and the very basics of using them) you will find a wealth of knowledge here not really available in any other resource. You will probably need to read it, or at least parts of it more than once. You'll probably need to read or refer to parts again after having tried them for awhile.
People like to say this book is really hard. I don't think it is myself. I think instead the plethora of really poor Photoshop books out there that have a hand-holding, show every dang dialog box but not actually teach you anything approach have set the standards very very low. Photoshop is an extremely powerful program, much of what experts do with it is well beyond what the makers ever intended. Many photoshop books could just be replaced by a CD with photoshop actions on it since the books don't teach the reader anything other than by wrote algorithms. This book assumes you are willing to think a bit about what is going on under the hood and use that knowledge intelligently rather than copying out some steps.
If you are new to photoshop this is not the book for you. I highly recommend Real World Photoshop CS2 by Fraser and Blatner as a well written in depth introduction to photoshop focusing on what photographers need from it. That said, Dan's book doesn't actually use very many Photoshop tools to begin with so you certainly only need to understand a relatively small feature set. You do need to be very comfortable with that feature set though.
Final notes: The CD is excellent, containing lots of supplementary material and images from the text to work on yourself. It includes lots of material from previous editions which is still very useful to some people. The production quality of my copy was very impressive. Apparently Dan actually slept at the press while it was being run to make sure it all went well. There are many, many cases where arrays of images are suppose to show very subtle differences. These differences actually made it into print!!! Gobs of books like this refer to figure 1.1A and claim dramatic differences to figure 1.1B but when you look at them you can see no difference at all because the press work was so poor. Not so in this case! Wonderful production work.
In short, buy this book, it might be too much for you now but you'll eventually want it later.
FINAL NOTE: As of the date of this review the "Search Inside" feature shows the previous edition!!! Ignore it!Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition) OverviewThe commonsense, by-the-numbers approach of Professional Photoshop has shaped the workflows of a generation of Photoshop experts. This new edition, the first in nearly five years, is completely updated for the age of digital photography. It continues the book's tradition of introducing astoundingly effective, previously unknown methods of image enhancement. The original photographs found in the book come from a variety of professional sources, and all correction exercises are on the included CD. Professional Photoshop has changed radically from edition to edition, and this time is no exception—with almost 90 percent new content and completely overhauled coverage of curves, channel blending, and sharpening.Professional Photoshop offers a full explanation of:
How curves bring out detail in the most important areas of the imagen
A comprehensive strategy for blending channels to create deeper, stronger images
The strengths and weaknesses of CMYK, LAB, and RGB, and when to use each one
The first detailed look at the Shadow/Highlight command—and even more sophis-ticated ways to enhance contrast in the lightest and darkest parts of the imagen
Sharpening strategies, in three full chapters, including the innovative hiraloam method (High Radius, Low Amount). Plus, a fiendishly effective method of merging hiraloam and conventional unsharp masking
The realities—and the politics—of preparing files for commercial offset printing and how to deal with colors that are out of the press's gamut
What Camera Raw and similar acquisition modules can offer
Typical problems of digital captures that were not found in the age of film— and how to correct for them


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