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Photoshop for the Web is an odd piece of work. On the surface, it's a tutorial in how to use Adobe Photoshop to prepare graphics for the web. But Aaland appears to be befuddled about the book's audience, and this severely limits the book's usefulness. The "cookbook" instructions for processing images are mostly unaccompanied by rationales or explanations of what is actually going on, so only a Photoshop expert would be able to generalize the instructions to other situations. On the other hand, a Photoshop expert probably wouldn't need this book in the first place.
Here's an example from page 13:
"In the first photo, the colors are washed out. The background is full of electronic 'noise' and there is a glare in the glasses caused by the digital camera's flash."To fix it, I adjusted the curves (Image:Adjust:Curves) by clicking on the Auto button. I used the Clone tool to spot the glasses to reduce the glare. Then I applied an Unsharp Mask (Filter:Sharpen:Unsharp Mask) set at a radius of .4 pixels and 100%. Then I applied the Dust and Scratches (Filter:Noise:Dust & Scratches) filter with a 1-pixel radius to the selected background. I applied a Gaussian blur (Filter:Blur:Gaussian Blur) with a 5-pixel radius to the blue channel. And finally I applied an Unsharp Mask with a .3-pixel radius to the entire image."
After reading this, I was shaking my head and wondering to myself what "used the Clone tool to spot the glasses" actually means, or how the heck the author knew to pick a radius of .4 pixels in one place and .3 pixels in another, but comforted myself with the expectation that this would all be made clear eventually. Well, it wasn't.
I was also disappointed to find that Photoshop for the Web did not benefit from O'Reilly's usual impeccable editing. For example, "compliment" is confused with "complement," and one section begins and ends with a virtually identical sentence (p. 50-52). Of course, this merely brings the book partway down toward the industry standard -- most computer book publishers don't bother with manuscript editing in the traditional sense at all.
There are better books on PhotoShop, and there are books on preparing web graphics that are considerably more clearly written. You can pass this one by.
-- Ray Duncan (duncan@cerf.net)
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.