Comments about oreilly The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers:

I got this book to complement Deke McClelland's excellent One-On-One volume (ISBN 978-0596521899) and am glad I did. The books are definitely complementary.

The Companion for Photographers is well thought-out. Mr. Story presents a totally Adobe-based workflow that starts with importing images using Photo Downloader in Adobe Bridge, adds metadata, then does quite a bit of editing using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR), and finally uses Photoshop CS4 for final adjustments when needed.

The book doesn't attempt to make you a Photoshop CS4 expert. I found it to be an excellent introductory guide for digital photographers who want to know enough about Photoshop CS4 to use the program well without getting inundated in too many details. It succeeds well at that level.

No sample/demo disc is included. Instead, Story invites the reader to follow along and try the techniques on their own images. This works fine for me, although some may prefer to use something provided with the book.

The workflow is logical and presented with sufficient detail and delightful prose. However, my workflow is based on Apple's Aperture, and I didn't know quite what to do with the Bridge description. What did interest me, and will likely cause me to try importing with Bridge in the future, was the automatic metadata addition/embedding during import, which I didn't know about until reading this book.

I found the Adobe Camera RAW presentation excellent. ACR received a lot of enhancements in CS4 and Story covered them very well, succinctly and interestingly. He really shows how much you can do in ACR, much of which required Photoshop in earlier versions. His descriptions are simple, direct and understandable.

Layers, whose capabilities and accessibility were greatly improved in CS4, are covered very well in the book. You won't become an expert in using layers after a casual reading, but you should definitely feel like exploring them if you haven't already. And if you've been using Photoshop for a while, the discussion on new layer capabilities will serve as a good introduction to their capabilities.

There's a very valuable "Recipes" chapter that covers many of the most common adjustments/edits photographers are likely to need for their images. Story presents them with impressive clarity.

Big plusses for me in this book: very approachable introduction to CS4; delightful prose (almost conversational, as opposed to academic); copious use of photos and screen captures; useful recipes for the most common photographic corrections; and the physical size of the book (makes it very easy to carry with you if desired). I'm highly recommending this volume to my digital photographer friends.

Comments about oreilly The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers:

The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers is smaller and weighs less than you laptop computer. It contains the CS4 information that photographers use, and not the features and details in CS4 that photographers seldom if ever use. The information is presented in the sequence of a photographer's work flow from importing the pictures through to the final print. The writing is clear and friendly.

Reviewing this book made me want to upgrade to CS4 and to own this book.

In The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers you learn what to do when you import photos and sort, rate, and keyword them in Bridge and use the new Smart Collections and Specialized Search Folders.

You learn how to do basic camera editing of JPEG and RAW images in Adobe Camera Raw. ACR saves your original image and saves the metadata changes as you use the latest advanced editing tools. With the new nondestructive editing tools you can safely start with cropping your images. You learn to use sliders to adjust over all exposure and highest, midterm, and shadows, and to adjust color, clarity, vibrance, saturation, and contrast. You can compare the original image, and the previous image to the one with your latest settings.

You use Advanced Camera RAW to help make your good shots great. You learn to do batch correct spot removal, and to do localized correction with the adjustment brush and graduated filters.

Photoshop is used only to make your great pictures perfect using such tools as the clone tool, levels, layer masks, and nondestructive sharpening with smart objects and smart sharpening.

The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers next covers recipes for photographers including topics such as portraits, pictures of the world around us, and panoramas. It ends with color collaboration, making the print, and viewing the print on the wall so that you look at it over time and listen to comments about it to continue to learn as a photographer.

Comments about oreilly The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers:

I have read a number of "how to" types of books over the years. Nearly all of the books focused on specific features of the application. This is a necessary "evil." However, in such a small book, Derrick Story manages to do something that I find unique. He describes a simple workflow suitable for a digital photographer and explains the benefits and why it works. He spends quite a bit of time in Photo Downloader and Bridge, then moves over to Adobe Camera Raw. There are two chapters devoted to Photoshop. This may seem odd given the title, but I feel it is perfectly inline with the purpose of the book.

This book is a great way for a new Photoshop user to "get their feet wet" and it offers tips that may be great for Pros as well.

Comments about oreilly The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers:

this is a great little book for the price. It's got everything in it that you would expect; download, processing and printing. It's all there. What you'll discover is that after reading the book, you'll find it easier to just leave by your keyboard. It's small enough that it doesn't get in the way.

This is by no means a complete photoshop book. It is targeted for a specific task and it's priced that way too. Far too often Photoshop books are crammed with everything and weigh in at a few pounds. For many that's a necessity, but that's not what this book is about. In fact, if you're a shooter that is mobile and processes on site, you'll probably end up throwing this book in your bag as a quick reference.