Well, in the final analysis most of my Photoshop® work was fixing photographs, making the bad ones better, making the good ones great, and frequently making them do strange and wondrous things. These were the tasks that try men's souls, until I read Scott Kelby's The Photoshop® CS Book for Digital Photographers.

Scott Kelby is both the editor-in-chief of Photoshop® User magazine and Mac Design magazine. His somewhat irreverent and always humorous writing style makes reading what amounts to a technical tutorial both informative and interesting. In a section where Kelby repeats his mantra about backing up your digital negatives to a CD he writes, "There's no loss of quality, so burn as many copies as you need to feel secure (remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you)." The quality of the intelligence intending to be conveyed takes on less of a lecture like style and more of a conversation.

This is the book navigating you step by step, with excellent illustrations, through the maze of Photoshop® features to improve your photographs. It doesn't teach Photoshop® fundamentals, it hones in on using the new CS feature set to maximize results in digital imagery. While it speaks primarily to the quantum leap made by Photoshop® CS, it also provides solid guidance in result oriented use of existing features of Photoshop® 7 and its predecessors.

Why is the best feature for sharpening images called the unsharp mask? Kelby not only provides the genesis of the term in the darkroom, but also gives you a dozen specific settings for the three slider adjustments in differing kinds of photographs with before and after color photographs.

When my wife needed a 10 foot by 4 foot recreation of the tornado sweeping through Dorothy's Kansas for a party decoration, I spent hours scanning and testing and trying and finally ended up with a single Photoshop® file of 525 megabytes nearly filling an entire CD. Kelby's book explains how to accomplish the same task using a simple action which he hands the reader, converting my labors over days into a twenty minute project. Kelby's solutions are serial steps and not theoretical possibilities.

The book itself is a testament to InDesign® 2 and the notion people will pay for a quality product. The glossy stock, excellent graphics, and visually easy reading come at a price; the book retails for $39.99. The publisher New Riders sells it at a $4.00 discount from their web store, and a favorite bookstore, fabled for its appreciation of larger women, may even have it for a farthing or two less.

On the bookshelves in my office I have six Photoshop® books, but on the desk next to the computer I have just this one. I once asked a dear friend who retired after 30 years as an elementary school physical education teacher how he graded the tots on such esoteric activities as dodge ball. His response was "I give them all A's and let the world judge them later." Since this is my first book review I have decided Mr. Kelby's effort worth 5 Apples and invite you to read the book and decide if I should give up the day job and send a resum� to the Times. — Mark Corchin MLMUG Reviewer

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© 2004 by Mark Corchin & MLMUG
Posted 03/04/04
Updated 09/15/04