Foundation Photoshop 6 - Softcover

Colin Smith; Al Ward; Vicki Loader; Marilene Oliver; Sham Bhangal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903450667 ISBN 13: 9781903450666

Publisher: Friends of Ed, 2001

Adobe Photoshop has long been the world's most popular digital image editing solution. Version 6.0 has taken it a leap further, with a raft of new and sophisticated functionality, including vector support, layer styles, slice tools for web graphics, and enhanced text-formatting features. It's hard to comprehend just how powerful this package really is.

Foundation Photoshop 6.0 has been written by professional working designers who will teach you Photoshop from the ground up—how to master its power and make it work for you. These guys work with Photoshop every day, so they know how to get the very best from it: How to achieve professional results with maximum efficiency and how to create and deliver the truly extraordinary.

Here, they employ the Foundation approach to share their knowledge with you: Standalone technique-based chapters that also build up into a professional design project that runs throughout the book. In the final section, where the learning curve gets a bit steeper, the experts reveal the vistas up ahead, and how to make the most of your new skills.

What you’ll learn

This book will give you the essential grounding that you need to become a Photoshop professional. Techniques are taught through step-by-step examples, and consolidated through a real-world model project that you create from idea to final delivery. The skills you will learn include:

Navigating the Photoshop 6.0 interface
Painting tools
Selection, paths, layers, and masks
Real-world filters
Color theory and print output
Web design techniques using ImageReady

Who this book is for

Designers or aspiring designers wishing to expand their skills with Photoshop 6
Existing users looking for a more in-depth, professional approach
Existing users familiar with older versions who want to update their knowledge
Motion web designers who want to improve the graphical sophistication of their sites

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

The folks at Friends of Ed do such a great job of writing instruction manuals. In Foundation Photoshop 6, they cover all the basics that every beginner will need in order to become a master at manipulating images, whether for print or the Web. Experienced users aren't left out--the book helps bring them up to speed on all the new version 6 features. Since this is a team effort, with a team comprised of hip, professional designers, there're lots of insider tips.

The illustrations are mostly black-and-white, but there are so many of them, readers won't feel cheated. In fact, there's just the right text-to-image balance--what the words don't explain, the screen shot will, and vice versa. This is the kind of book where you can learn by just looking at the pictures.

The text has a light, humorous touch (but not the kind of over-jokey style that clogs up the Dummies books). Just about every sentence adds to reader's skill set. There are several mini exercises in each chapter and a larger case study that runs through most of the book (a printed postcard and Web site that uses rollovers, image maps, slices, and optimized images). You won't get lost if you skip around--each section works well on its own; for example, intermediate users who want clear, hands-on instruction in using layer masks can jump to chapter 10.

With an exhaustive index and appendices that cover online resources for stock art and fonts, file types (BMP? EPS? PNG?), and how to calibrate your monitor, this is yet another essential book for the Friends of Ed bookshelf in your studio. --Angelynn Grant

Topics covered: Tools, selections, paths, layers, color (especially for print), Web graphics, image/color correcting, filters, slices, actions, PDFs, and much more.

From the Publisher:

Adobe Photoshop is the world's most widely used digital image editing solution. As every graphic designer's trusted workhorse, this program has an extensive toolset allowing sophisticated vector manipulation, PDF and Web workflow, text handling, and file optimisation.

It is not difficult to learn many basic aspects of this WYSIWYG package. However, experienced designers with a thorough understanding of this complex tool are able to introduce professional design techniques, in order to enhance the capabilities of Photoshop, and make it work the way they want it to work.

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