Product Reviews

Adobe Photoshop is the professional choice for photo-editing and photocompositing on both the Mac and PC. And although the power the program offers is exceptional, even its biggest fans couldn't say that it makes things simple.

To an extent this is inevitable, but Photoshop certainly doesn't go out of its way to reduce the complexity. When masking, for example, there's no context-sensitive property bar where tool options can be set. Instead, it's simply taken for granted that the user will somehow already know the necessary keyboard shortcuts for adding to, or subtracting from, the current selection.

The underlying assumption is that every user is already an expert. Of course, this isn't the case and as a result the vast majority of users are left just scraping the surface of the power on offer.

From its rather folksy title, I thought that Photoshop in a Nutshell would be aimed at this entry-level market. What I expected was a brief introductory overview of what you can do with Photoshop, followed by a user-friendly guide explaining how you'd go about it. The reality is completely different.

To begin with there's no introductory overview at all; instead, the authors plunge straight into detailing the Photoshop tools, explaining such advanced

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activities as how to set an aspect ratio for the marquee and how to add a constrained, radiating marquee to an existing selection.

After each of the tools has been well and truly dealt with, the focus turns to the menus and then to the palettes. Each is dealt with in relentless detail, with every single option of every single dialog meticulously covered.

The style is even less friendly than the structure. There's no attempt to humanise the program through personal experience or insight. Worse, the power described is rarely put into context. There's no explanation as to why you might want to understand image channel calculation, for instance, and no inspiring examples of what can be achieved. You're simply shown the workings of the dialog accompanied by a screen shot. The result is incredibly dry and hard-going, and pulls off the remarkable feat of being more intimidating and impenetrable than the Photoshop manual itself.

For this reason, the majority of users simply wanting to improve their general understanding of the program should steer clear. For those users who think that they already know the program inside out, however, Photoshop in a Nutshell could be a real eye-opener.

The reason is simple. This book is absolutely packed with information. When I wanted to find the steps for creating a duotone, or the advantages and disadvantages of the LAB image mode, or the shortcut for bringing up the Curves dialog with the last applied settings, here were the answers.

The two authors clearly know absolutely everything there is to know about the program, and have tested every feature in a production environment.

For the professional user, such hard-won information is invaluable and Photoshop in a Nutshell is packed tight with it. Like Photoshop itself, it's a hard nut to crack, but it certainly rewards the effort.