Adobe Photoshop 7.0: Classroom in a Book

Each Classroom in a Book features consistently well-written and conceived lessons, part of Adobe's official training and certification program. They guarantee solid instruction, taking readers step-by-step through professional-level projects with topnotch artwork. Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Classroom in a Book book assumes no prior knowledge, and beginners will benefit from the slow and deliberate pacing. However, more experienced Photoshop users won't find it difficult to speed ahead through familiar material and there's a thorough index for troubleshooting specific problems. They'll find new techniques to make their workflow more efficient, and, perhaps, "unlearn" any bad habits (for example, getting a better grayscale conversion for a color photo by using the Channel Mixer rather than clicking "Mode > Grayscale").

Chapters cover the fundamentals: the work environment and help resources; making selections (with the wand, lasso, and marquee tools); using layers and masks; working with the pen tool and other vector graphics techniques; retouching and color correcting; selected effects like hand coloring; color-management issues; and creating images for print or the Web. Areas new to version 7 include working with the File Browser, using the new paint engine to create custom brushes and patterns, and working with the healing brush and cloning stamp.

All lesson project files and fonts are on the companion CD-ROM. Each lesson begins by outlining what will be learned and how long the project should take, and ends with review Q&A. The color section not only shows finished artwork for several projects, but also includes some useful reference pages: a toolbox overview (with color illustrations of what each tool does), a layer blending mode sampler, and a set of images helpful in color management.

In addition to the above topics, the book also shows how to create slices and optimize images in both Photoshop and ImageReady, make rollovers and animations in ImageReady, and use droplets for batch processing. You may not become a power user after these tutorials, but you'll certainly have a firm working knowledge of Photoshop upon which to build expert skills. --Angelynn Grant