The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book

Photoshop users of all levels know where to look for cutting-edge examples of Adobe Photoshop at work: The Photoshop Wow! Book. This award-winning Photoshop bestseller, fully updated for version 6, features stunning artwork and time-saving techniques of professional artists who work in Photoshop every day. The latest in the inspiring Wow! series, this guide offers basic information on how Photoshop's tools and functions work, as well as step-by-step instructions, helpful sidebars, useful Photoshop shortcuts, and galleries of inspiring Photoshop creations. The companion CD-ROM contains Layered Images, Layered Effects, dozens of ready-to run Photoshop Actions, and helpful "before" and "after" tutorial files for readers wanting to follow the examples shown in the book.

Effective 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.

Along with the staples--framing with masks, fixing problem photos, quick masking and blending, filters, and so on--you'll find gems like focusing attention with color, 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 color throughout make this an easy book to dip into as well as a good foundation for a structured course. --Ken McMahon, Amazon.co.uk