If anybody is serious about editing pictures in Adobe Photoshop CS2 it is the best book on the market. Following the steps in the book you can achieve astonishing effects. Besides, this book is not so borring as Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book.

I have owned this book for one year and have been intimidated by the many favorable reviews this author has received. However, after looking up a topic in this book and, once again, having minimal clarity shed on the subject, I've decided to tell it like it is. It reads like an encyclopedia. I have 2 advanced degrees and learned chess, photography, and photoshop from books. But this book is user unfriendly and if I do not tell that to others, then they took will waste their money. If you do not believe me, then leaf through the book at one of the local book stores and decide for yourself. At least I've warned you. Stick with Scott Kelby, Rob Sheppard, Ellen Anon and Tim Grey.

I bought this book on Amazon a few weeks ago. Normally I have a difficult time staying interested in a how-to book. The Kelby books keep me interested with wit and charm (and they know the subjects they write about well) but Martin Evening has a way off keeping my interest with a minimum of humor and anecdotes. The book is laid out so well. Every subject seems to be in it's proper place to allow the continuity of the book to progress in a logical manner that will help a novice photoshop user to learn CS2. Don't worry about having to go ahead in the book to figure out something they assume you should already know. I surmise that Mr. Evening is an Englishman because of some of the spellings and terminology, such as colour vs color. But he avoids the use of any terminology that Americans will have difficulty deciphering. The CD presents some of the topics in the book in video plus it provides some sample files to work with. Of all of the Photoshop CS2 books I bought I would reccomend this one over any other. The author has worked hard to make this one a real winner.

Great onfo, just starting out on Mac...so anything seems great to me. I am a photographer and like the way the chapters are done...informative!

This book is better than an owners manual for cs2, taking you through step by step instructions, if you already know something just skip that section, if you don't then it works, and it's easy to understand. The pages are color coded, great index and it has lots of picture examples.

i would recommend this book to anyone who is a photographer or thinking about taking up photography as a hobby. it's an amazing book and has very nice tutorials. i've been using it for about a year now. the price is very nice too.

I've taken an abbreviated Photoshop class only to leave with more questions than answers. Fortunately, our teacher appreciated this fact and recommended this book to all the photographers in her class. I have not been disappointed except for lacking the time to work my way through this massive tome. Every time I open this book I discover another wonderful timesaver or neat trick to improve my photographs.

Even more than I could expect! This book is intended to teach digital photography with Photoshop to make your photos get a new level that you could never imagine before. But if you want to learn the camera or tips to make your photos better without using your computer this is not what your need. One plus is file format explanations. And if you want to get muscle, this book is perfect for you too; because it's made with the best paper I saw in a book with photo quality in all pages the weight is a ton.

Besides being a good book about CS2 I really like the color coded chapter edge tabs. Frequently, it is the little things that make a difference.

As a profesional photographer who is looking for a book to help me to use photoshop in order to do what I used to do in the darkroom, only better, this book was almost useless. It is probably a great book for art directors or designers who use a lot of major image manipulation. If you are a photographer who wishes to simply make the best possible final print from your image (be it scanned film or digital capture) and is not interested in major manipulation, I would recommend the book Photoshop Artistry for Photographers.

As a profesional photographer who is looking for a book to help me to use photoshop in order to do what I used to do in the darkroom, only better, this book was almost useless. It is probably a great book for art directors or designers who use a lot of major image manipulation. If you are a photographer who wishes to simply make the best possible final print from your image (be it scanned film or digital capture) and is not interested in major manipulation, I would recommend the book Photoshop Artistry for Photographers.

As a profesional photographer who is looking for a book to help me to use photoshop in order to do what I used to do in the darkroom, only better, this book was almost useless. It is probably a great book for art directors or designers who use a lot of major image manipulation. If you are a photographer who wishes to simply make the best possible final print from your image (be it scanned film or digital capture) and is not interested in major manipulation, I would recommend the book Photoshop Artistry.

This is a great book for photographers wanting to understand Photoshop. The author himself is a photographer which transitioned from the wet processing to the computer processing of photographs. He know the photographers language and can go around the technical language of the computer software developer.

Great Book, I needed it for school and they were selling it for 30 bucks more. The book is very well laid out and has great tutorials.

Look, I thought I knew Photoshop. I flicked through Martin's book at the store and saw a few helpful things that made me buy it. Like most books on Photoshop, I wasn't expecting too much from it, though.

Boy was I wrong.

I've learned an enormous amount from this. If you feel that you already know Photoshop inside and out, you owe it to yourself to buy this. I picked up lots of very helpful tips on how to use Photoshop's tools better than I already was.

Strongly recommended.

This book has spread like a virus in the New York City photo industry. Everyone from first year photo students to high end digital labs need a copy. It is well worth it's weight in gold, and being able to buy it half-priced on Amazon is an extra bonus!

This product is the best material to any person who want's to learn everything about Photoshop CS2, this book is fantastic and every photographers need to buy one. Thanks Amazon for the best service by internet

This book is great. I think it covers all aspects of photoshop in a "nutshell"

I have been reading various PS CS2 books to learn this somewhat deep and complex software. The book comes with the files with which I can try out the tutorial the author narrates in the book. I have learned quite a bit about PS and the book is written from the photographer's view point. I have Canon EOS 30 which can help me take high quality digital pictures. I enjoyed reading this book. I think I will do the second read in the near future to make sure I understand thoroughly.

I hate to write a negative review. I really hate to. I am a serious photographer, though, and a Photoshop user with intermediate skills. I bought this book having seen write-ups in places like "Luminous Landscape", expecting that it would help raise my game and teach a lot of new techniques in PS. What a disappointment. Yes the book is luxuriously produced and has color throughout. The problem is the content and organization. Evening never explains any concept well. He hints at the potential of each technique that he covers, then gives a single example of how to use it, and rarely more. Even the workflows mentioned in the examples is confusing and incomplete. Dodging and burning turns into a confusing discussion of how he revived an old archival photo. Sharpening becomes an advertisement for other software. There's really nothing ever systematic or complete here. Surely there must be better guides to Photoshop. This one left me wishing for a refund.

This book is extremely comprehensive and requires a fairly good knowledge of Photoshop to begin with, If you are new to the software and are looking for a step by step follow along book then this is not the book. I gave this book 4 stars because the layout of the photoshop elements, tools and functions were kind of scattered about, plus the fact that it had very few hands on tutorials and rather more lecture and personal opinions.

This edition of Photoshop CS2 is a far cry from, and much clearer rendition of, older versions of Martin Evenings guides. The illustrations and screen shots are clear and easy to understand and the level of detail for each subject is sufficient to provide readers with a solid basis from which to learn advanced techniques as well as fundamentals.

Mr. Evening however phrases his instructions in a literate, if not literal, way. It is obvious from his use of a rather substantial vocabulary, and a fairly complicated sentence structure, that he disdains the ordinary or routine use of slang and the colloquial. Having said this, readers who are willing to slow down and read for detail, will be rewarded with a much more in depth and comprehensive understanding of the powerful characteristics of Photoshop CS2.

Two criticisms I have of the book, and neither are huge, is that the book is very thick and heavy; so heavy that its often difficult to hold open while reading.

Additionally the photo illustrations, while beautifully rendered, are sometimes too small to allow the reader to clearly see the the import of the examples meant to show color, exposure, tonal or sharpening differences using different techniques.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has more than a basic need to do simple photo adjustments and desires to use Photoshop as a professional level digital darkroom and workflow tool.

I'm in a photography class in college and this book has really helped me to understand and follow photoshop. Since there are 60 students in my class, it's very difficult for my teacher to help every student, so this has helped me to review what was taught and to do it on my own.

Since I am a patent attorney specializing in computer-related inventions by trade, as well as an avid photographer, I consider myself extremely well-versed in computer technology and digital photography. I have been using digital cameras and Photoshop for years. Suffice it to say that I am not in any way, shape or form a "beginner." I bought this book in order to learn advanced tips, secrets and techniques that would allow me to improve and streamline my workflow while processing my images using Photoshop CS. However, this book is poorly written in the extreme. It seems that almost every other sentence refers to a step, process, function or Photoshop menu item that the author fails to adequately explain, thereby leaving the reader with more questions than answers. Every few weeks or so I keep trying to plow through another section or chapter in the hope that the descriptions and examples will get better. But it never does. I have yet to finish a single section of the book and think to myself, "okay, now I understand this particular concept." Most often I am left clicking around Photoshop menus and searching for options in dialogue boxes trying in vain and with much frustration to find and use some function that the author says should be used but failed to explain or show. Most often, the author does not bother to give any examples of what he means when he says you should use some function or process buried behind 2 or 3 levels Photoshop menus. This has turned out to be a complete waste of time and money.

I purchased this as a text book for my digital photography class. Even though there are many basic steps and techniques that begginer photoshop users can learn, this book is a bit more complex and seems to cater to those more familiar with photoshop and its terminology....this being the opinion of my teacher and myself!

Well, I was hoping for this book to help me understand special CS2 filters, enhancements, etc....and what I got, was great stuff I cannot redo as shown in the pictures and very short guidelines for the most part of it. One example was the enhancing of the eyes (sometimes the iris turns out too dark, and there are ways of enhancing it to brighten the eyes.) The so called step-by-step guide in the book, I followed it and followed it, even got my husband to take a turn, and neither one of us was able to manage the enhancement, at least not in either of the 2 different versions explained. (We later figured out a different way, but I'm sure it's not as good as the example pictures shown in this book.) Like I said, overall it's a great book, that teaches you tons of neat stuff, but I don't think it's very easy to recreate, not even with the provided CD. You really need to be a very advanced CS2 user to be able to use this book as a tool for it's full potential. I'm hoping that once I've mastered more about CS2, this book will come in handy again. And yes, all the pictures are terrific quality, and it's nice to read and look at, but how much does that really matter, if you can't even recreate the things explained in it?

I've found this book absolutely invaluable and perhaps the most useful book on Photoshop I've ever read. I agree with all the other reviewers whom endorse it but to those who ask: "who is this book for?" I'd point them in the direction of many other books better suited to their needs. How can you fault a book for not catering to everyone?! However this book was perfect for me - a busy professional photographer. I've been using Photoshop for years but have huge holes in my understanding. I really needed to gain more sophisticated and practical understanding of many fundamental principles and complex procedures as quickly and efficiently as possible. I don't have the time or patience for lessons rarely practical to my needs.

Instead the detailed and clearly explained texts were great. Specifically the chapters of color management and digital capture were excellent and gave me exactly the information I needed to align color settings in Photoshop and Indesign when almost every other Photoshop book I read (from Photoshop for Dummies to Adobe Photoshop Classroom) was useless, confusing, insufficiently detailed, poorly explained or contradictory!

I feel very reasssured having this sitting on my desk - knowing that it's most likely going to save me hours every time I run into a Photoshop problem. in the meantime, I'm backtracking over months if not years of mistakes I've made when saving images!

Best suited for someone who has at least a little experience with earlier versions of Photoshop, this text could be better organized. Could also benefit from more detail and better expalnation of how things work. I did find useful the sections on camera quality, historical references, and the author provides links to external websites which this reader found helpful for research. Print and paper quality is very good, but when are we going to see a software book written (or at least containing images) by a non-fashion photographer? The women in ME's photos are merely over-decorated objects, and might as well be artificial mannequins.

I had a good working knowledge of Photoshop before reading this book. I'm only halfway through, and I'm learning a lot of very practical tips that I will be able to apply to editing my portrait photographs.

I only gave it a four because the order seems odd to me. The introduction to layers is several hundred pages into the book, I thought that didn't make sense.

Superficially Evening's book appears to be all that anybody would ever need about Photoshop CS2. In fact, it is an impossible introduction for people making the jump from a simpler program, say Elements 3.0.

The organizational structure is poor.

Many ideas are used before they are explained, a fatal flaw as a text, tho' excusable in a pure reference volume. But "For Photographers" claims to be a text and not a reference.

Terms are slipped in for somewhere without adequate definitions.

And neither the table of contents nor the index are detailed enough to help somebody find most detailed topics.

I bought Scott Kelby's book after putting Evening's on the shelf, probably for good. Kelby gives the info a photographer making the jump to CS2 requires, although his language is famously just a bit to glib.

I have some experience with Photoshop - but I'm hardly an expert. I bought this book when upgrading from CS to CS2. I found it to clearly and concisely cover all the basic tasks that you would want to do, such as color correction (with any of several different techniques), sharpening, cropping and so on.

It's the best book I've read on the topic (I have five in my library).

I was advised to buty this book for a Photoshop CS2 class that I'm taking. The class (8 weeks, 2 1/2 hours/week) covered so much material and went so fast that I (a novice at Photoshop) had difficulty keeping up. The book made all the difference!

It covered all the techniques, tricks, and concepts in good detail, and made far more sense than the instructor did. It will serve as a worthwhile rerefence as I get more deeply into Photoshop in the future.

My book got to me in no time, thank you for sending it so fast.

well if you own the first book than i can't honestly recommend to buy this one because it's mostly an update with explanation of new tools. But if you don't own the first book than by any means get this one! It covers most of things a pro photographer shold know about PS and goes beyond that. Higly recommended

This is a very good book for photographer - I was recommended by a friend. It is easy to understand, but it deploy the contect in a large span, and in certain depth, thus take effort to go through. There is anohter book titled "Photoshop CS2 balabala for digital photographers", it is a good book, but very shallow in contect. You could find e-copy somewhere on the internet of that.

If you own the prior version of this book, I would say only 3.5 stars for sparse amounts of truly new content. However if you don't own any comprehensive Photoshop reference books, and your focus is on digital photography (not graphic arts), you would be wise to purchase a copy. You can learn many (very) useful tricks for speeding your workflow, improving the quality and realism of your images, and the like. Think of it more as an encyclopedia - in terms of depth per subject - than a detailed manual or cookbook style reference.

If I had to own one book of this type for Photoshop (and personally I recommend you buy at least two to get different perspectives on how the tools can be used), it would be this book.

Martin Evening has outdone himself with this hefty tome which quickly rolls up it's sleeves and dives right into the remarkable Photoshop CS2 program. The nicest thing about this book is that it does what it's title says: focuses on teaching CS2 to photographers, not those seeking to use the software for creating illustrations or drawings and the like. From improving the quality of your images to converting them from RAW format, it's in here, along with numerous tips on how to create amazing effects that will take your pictures to the next level. This book assumes you are a photographer and are familiar with the tools of your trade, so perhaps it may be slightly daunting to an amateur. Still, if you are an amateur and are determined to become serious about photography, this book deserves a place on your bookshelf. And needless to say, if you are a photographer of intermediate to professional skill then by all means get this book as quickly as possible to improve your workflow and images.

I have been reading this book for a few weeks now, and I have to say that even though the techniques sound really good, and the book appears to be extremely useful for someone who has a decent understanding of Photoshop, do not expect to be able to have this as your only beginner Photoshop book. The book does not guide you step by step on how to utilize a photo shop tools most of the times. (The lessons on the cd help, but they are quite limited). If you do not know what a "vector mask" is, how to make "selections" and "alpha channels", have not used "layers" beyond very trivial operations, I would suggest you supplement this book with a Photoshop tutorial. (I just purchased Adobe Photoshop CS2 one-on-one due to success with the PE version earlier)

Having said that, this book has great information on techniques, Photoshop workspaces and I think it would prove to be a great book on picking up the tricks of the trade ;-)

I have been reading this book for a few weeks now, and I have to say that even though the techniques sound really good, and the book appears to be extremely useful for someone who has a decent understanding of Photoshop, do not expect to be able to have this as your only beginner Photoshop book. The book does not guide you step by step on how to utilize a photo shop tools most of the times. (The lessons on the cd help, but they are quite limited). If you do not know what a "vector mask" is, how to make "selections" and "alpha channels", have not used "layers" beyond very trivial operations, I would suggest you supplement this book with a Photoshop tutorial. (I just purchased Adobe Photoshop CS2 one-on-one due to success with the PE version earlier)

Having said that, this book has great information on techniques, Photoshop workspaces and I think it would prove to be a great book on picking up the tricks of the trade ;-)

Great book, great photos and great instructions. I especially liked the non-rote tutorial approach...it made me think and experiment. The only shortcoming was many of the photos in the lessons were not on the CD. I understand the copyright restrictions but think that Martin should have used only photos that could be put on the CD.

I highly recommend this book for amateurs and professionals alike who want to step up their knowledge of Photoshop

This is a great book. Job well done. things explained very well.

This is a great book. Job well done. things explained very well.

Do not pass go! The improvements in a remarkable application make it even more remarkable.

Do not pass go! The improvements in a remarkable application make it even more remarkable.

This book covers pretty much everything you need to know to be comfortable with Photoshop CS2, up to the point when you can start experimenting on your own. In my opinion, Photoshop is very complex and intimidating. The entire bookshelf of Photoshop books doesn't help, because it adds another task of getting the right book. If you are a photographer, digital or film-to-scan, this book is probably the first AND last you'll ever need. All the basics are covered, as long as you're familiar with your operating system (both Mac and Windows are presented equally). All the topics are chosen in a logical manner and separated into a distinct chapters. I found myself reading this book twice from cover to cover to grasp all the aspects better. And it is still on my desk at all times, as I often refer to it for specific tricks and techniques.
The language is concise and simple. There is no overuse of technical jargon, but there is no unnecessary frivolousness either. Martin Evening is a wonderful teacher, always sticking to the point in a hands on relaxed manner. All the techniques are given in a step-by-step instruction with richly illustrated diagrams, screen captures and images. I must say, the editors did an excellent job proofreading this manual, as I found no typos or misleading parameters, that I found in other books, followed by an extensive errata. The CD-ROM is useful if you want to play with the files mentioned in the book - I did to a great success and to further your understanding. The chapters on hardware and file performance considerations are extremely useful and up to date.
My only little annoyance came from slightly unclear index at the end, which occasionally omits menitioning of a topic. However, realizing how complex indexing of such volume may be, I don't find it very objectionable. If you have questions about this book, feel free to contact me at alexander /at/ artofcapture.com.

This book has it all. A great beginning to teach you more than the basics of Photoshop in a clean, concise way and the remaining chapters you can use as a "How-to" guide for specific tasks, issues or problems. Text is clear and illustrations are beautifully done to show before and after and dialog boxes throughout the image editing process.
If you only want one book, this should be on your very short list.

This book covers everything from the basic instruction that any novice PhotoShop CS2 user would utilize to the professional user. I have learned more from the first few chapters of this book than from the previous five so called PhotoShop teaching books. If I were to teach a course in PhotoShop I would suggest this book as required reading. A must have for any digital photographer, young or old, novice or pro.

J. Johnston
www.digitalphotoart.net

I returned this book to Amazon after reviewing it for a couple of days. I was put off by the dry writing style. I borrowed Scott Kelby's "Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers" from the library and much prefer his easy to read style.

Mr Evening's writing style just wasn't for me.

This is the first version of this book that I have read. I have found it to be an excellent read for anyone wanting to get the most out of CS2. Pretty much every aspect of CS2 is covered, from the layout of the program windows to calibrating your monitor to photo retouching.
The only reason I am not giving it a 5 is because of the way the author dismisses working in the LAB color space. Ever since reading ther Dan Marguilis "Photoshop LAB Color the Canyon Conundrum", LAB has become a major part of my workflow. Martin Evening has either not read Dan's book or disagrees with it. Too bad because I think that Martin's insights would be valuable.
Never the less I highly recommend this book. I would also like to mention that even though the book uses only Mac screenshots and keyboard references, as a Windows XP user I did not find it to be a hindrance. The folks at Adobe have done an excellent job at keeping the interface on the 2 platforms identical.

Just like the last of edition of this book, this edition is a must read. I cover CS2 extremely well, with lots of useful example and illustrations of techniques. I would consider is a good teaching bible for photoshop CS2.