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Topics covered:
Open and Organize
Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows
Correcting Color Balance
Making Selections
Crop, Straighten, and Size
Paint, Edit and Heal
Creating and Applying Masks
Focus and Filters
Building Layered compositions
Text and Shapes
Styles and Specialty Layers
Printing and Output

I can fully appreciate why this author was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame. Not only does he know his material backwards and forwards but he has the gift of writing in a way that is easy to understand. He includes many colored images that demonstrate what he is teaching. His book is appropriate for both the beginner and the more advanced user of Photoshop.

I loved how he organized the book, chapters and topics and made it so user friendly. Each chapter number and name is located on the bottom left side of each page and the specific topic is named on the bottom of the right-hand page. At the end of each section he has a review page of what the reader learned in that chapter and a way to test what concepts have been understood.

While I have been using Photoshop for a number of years, I found his review of Photoshop and all the additional improvements added with the latest CS3 version to be exciting and immediately applicable to increasing my work flow.

I found the examples the author provides on the CD, and the way he walks you through each exercise, easy to follow and helpful in translating what he is teaching to the practical level. His Chapter on Correcting Color Balance was my favorite and worth the price of the book. Within this section he gives the reader a great tutorial on using camera raw images, the most effective ways to colorize images, and explores the advantages of High Bit Depths (24 bits). He reviews how powerful and fast the Variations command (under adjustments) can be to correct color casts and shift saturation levels.

I find in my use of Photoshop that I have often used the same approaches over and over again and haven’t always taken the time to discover newer, faster and more effective ways at getting to the results I am seeking. I fully appreciate having a great resource book available to quickly remind me of more effective and/or efficient ways of getting the results I want.