If you’re familiar with the For Dummies series, you surely have noticed already that there’s something, well, different about this book. It looks like a For Dummies book, but it doesn’t. The cover’s color scheme and the cartoons are there, but there’s a lot more color. And the layout is, well, not as boxy as the For Dummies books you’ve seen in the past. Welcome to the new age of For Dummies!
It’s been quite a collaborative effort over these weeks and months, brain¬storming, discussing, negotiating, finding middle ground — all to present you with the best possible format for Photoshop CS2 For Dummies. This is a com¬pletely new book, from the ground up. New author, new text, new images, new layout, new format. New Photoshop, too.
One thing hasn’t changed, though: This book was produced with an eye toward you and your needs. From Day One, the goal has been to put into your hands the book that makes Photoshop understandable and useable. You won’t find a technical explanation of every option for every tool in everysituation, but rather a concise explanation of those parts of Photoshop you’re most likely to need. If you happen to be an astrophysicist studying the origins of the universe, your Photoshop requirements might be substantially more specific than you’ll find here. (Yes, I do know at least two of those folks — and I’m sure they bought this book, too.) But for the overwhelming majority of the people who have access to Adobe Photoshop CS2, this book provides the background you need to work efficiently and competently with Photoshop.
As I wrote this book, I intentionally tried to strike a balance between the types of images with which you are most likely to work and those visually stimulating (yet far less common) images of unusual subjects from far away places. At no point in this book does flavor override foundation. When you need to see a practical example, that’s what I show you. I included a number of images from PhotoSpin.com, my favorite subscription stock art source. But, again, I worked to ensure that each piece of artwork illustrates a tech¬nique and does so in a meaningful, nondistracting way for you, the reader.
You’ll see that I used mostly my Apple computers in producing this book. That’s simply a matter of choice and convenience. Other than the buttons in the corners of the windows, the modifier keys, and a few choices in terminol¬ogy (such as pop-up menu versus drop-down menu), Photoshop works pretty much the same on a Mac as it does in Windows. (Okay, well, one other difference: I find color management on Apple computers to be much simpler and more reliable.) You’ll also see (if you look closely) that I shoot mostly with Canon cameras and use Epson printers. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t shoot with Nikon, Sony, or Fuji, or that you shouldn’t print with HP or Canon. If that’s what you have, if it’s the equipment with which you’re comfortable, if it fulfills your needs, stick with it!
One additional note: If you’re brand new to digital imaging and computers, this probably isn’t the best place to start. I do indeed make certain assump¬tions about your level of computer knowledge (and, to a lesser degree, your knowledge of digital imaging). But if you know your FileOOpen from your FileOClose and can find your lens cap with both hands, read Chapter 1, and you’ll have no problem with Photoshop CS2 For Dummies.
How This Book Is Organized
Photoshop CS2 For Dummies is primarily a reference book. As such, you can check the table of contents or the index for a specific subject, flip to those pages, and get the information you need. You can also start at the beginning and read cover to cover (just to make sure you don’t miss a single tip, tech¬nique, or joke). To give you an indication of the type of information in each chapter, I organized the book into parts. Here’s a quick look at what sort of content you’ll find in each part.
Part I: Breezing through Basic Training
The first set of chapters presents the basic operation of Photoshop, what you need to know to get around in the program, and the core process of getting images into Photoshop and back out again. If you’re new to digital imaging, and particularly unfamiliar with Photoshop, make sure to read Chapter 1 through Chapter 3. If you’ve worked with Photoshop or another image editing program and aren’t quite sure about the concept of resolution or which file formats are best for which purposes, don’t overlook Chapter 2. Chapter 4 is the meat and potatoes of Photoshop: scanning and downloading images from cameras, cropping to fit specific print and frame sizes, and printing or post¬ing your images on the Web. All in one nice, tidy package.
Part II: Easy Enhancements for Digital Images
In Chapters 5 through 9, you discover ideas and techniques for improving the appearance of your images. You read about tonality (the lightness and dark¬ness of the image), color correction (making the image’s color look natural), and making selections to isolate individual parts of your image for correction. Part II also includes a full chapter on the Raw file format for digital cameras — what it is, why it’s important, and how to determine whether it’s right for you. At the end of this part, I include a chapter on the most common problems in digital photos (red-eye, wrinkles, and unwanted objects and people). And, yes, that chapter includes what to do about those problems, too!
Part III: Creating “Art” in Photoshop
The chapters in Part III take a walk on the creative side. Although not every¬one wants to use Photoshop as a digital painting program, everyone should understand how to get around in the complex and daunting Brushes palette. Compositing images (making one picture from two or more), adding text (whether a simple copyright notice or an entire page), using paths, and adding layer styles are all valuable skills for just about all folks who work with Photoshop (even if they don’t consider their work to be art).
Part IV: Power Photoshop
The two chapters in Part IV are more specialized than the rest of the book. If you don’t work in a production environment (even cropping to the same dimensions regularly can count as production), you might not need to use Actions in Photoshop. But there’s far more to Chapter 16 than just Actions and scripting! It also shows you how you can create an onscreen presentation that anyone can view, automatically generate a single page with small thumb¬nail images of all your photos, and save paper by printing multiple images on a single sheet. Chapter 17 is a Web-only chapter. If you don’t create graphics for the Web, you probably don’t need to read it. However, if you skip it, you might never see how to create cool little animated movies.
Part V: The Part of Tens
The final part of this book, The Part of Tens, was both the easiest and most difficult section to prepare. It was easy because, well, the chapters are short. It was incredibly tough because it’s so hard to narrow any Photoshop-related list to just ten items. Photoshop is such a beautifully complex and deep pro¬gram that I had a very hard time (as you’ll read) restricting myself to just ten favorite tips and tricks, just ten bits of hardware and software to make your work in Photoshop easier, and just ten reasons to own a digital camera. But I did it (more or less — beware of hidden tips and tricks)!
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