Goods and bads for this book.

Goods: I learned a couple of neat new tricks. I’ve been using photoshop for a long time, and I decided I needed to figure out what the more recent versions could do that the old ones couldn’t.I got a bunch of books out of the library, and I can genuinely say this one is better written and had more unique examples than most of the others. I was also able to read through the tutorials and understand how to do them without having to sit down and work through them. (I never do tutorials, I’m not a step-by-step person; since I just wanted to learn new tricks, I wanted to pick them up without having to do the step-by-step on a picture I don’t care about.)

Bads: I really liked the fog and planets tutorials; the rest did nothing for me and to be very frank, I didn’t like the art. What made that really disappointing is that a number of those tutorials were sf/f in nature, which are some of my favorite kinds of art. But when I think the products of the tutorials are ugly, it makes me want to find techniques that will better fit what I want to do.

For intermediate users who don’t know where to start with photomanipulations, this will help; advanced users may pick up a couple of new tricks but probably won’t want to buy. It also doesn’t make much of a reference, if you prefer reference books (I do)—once you’ve worked through it, you won’t be getting it back off your shelf much.