The Photoshop 4 Wow! Book with CDROM

If you're looking for guidance on creating excellent effects in Photoshop 4.0, this is a great book to get. As with a lot of other Photoshop books, The Photoshop 4 Wow! Book teaches you how to paint; use filters; create special effects; manage selections and layers; correct photos; create montages and collages; work with Illustrator and Photoshop together; and output your work for 3-D, multimedia, and Web applications. But here, each chapter is broken down into discrete tips, and each tip is highlighted on one, two, or three well-laid out, full-color pages, so it's easy to find exactly what you need. For example, you might jump from the tip on "using images to make selections" in the second chapter ("Selections, Masks, Layers, and Channels") to "chiseling" in the eighth chapter ("Graphics Special Effects").

Everyone from beginner to advanced users can glean plenty from this book. The initial chapters are pretty basic, offering an introduction to Photoshop's interface and various digital-imaging and memory-management issues. Besides lots of screen shots you also get thorough instruction, so there's not much room for messing up or being led astray. At the same time, most of the tips include suggestions for producing your own variations on the artwork presented. Galleries show artwork produced by several Photoshop experts, along with explanations of how each artist produced his or her effects.

The bundled CD-ROM has stock photos; demo versions of filter software; demo versions of Adobe packages, such as Photoshop PageMaker, Premiere, and Illustrator; and ready-made Actions (Photoshop's batch processes) that run special effects. There's also a Macintosh edition of this book, which is identical except for keyboard commands and the platform-specific advice in the first chapter.