The book give me the information I'm looking for and I can use it as a reference guide.

This book is well written and entertaining while also teaching you all the little things you need to know about using Photoshop. I also have Look and Learn Photoshop 6 and the Photoshop 6 Bible, all by the same author, and all are great books for learning to use Photoshop!!! I highly recommend them all!!

I love the dummie books. They explain things in English so you can understand it. The illstrations are great. It's a step by step to learning things for us "Dummies" when it comes to PC programs. I hope they continue to publish these kind of books. Highly recommended.

Although this book can be quite useful for basics, it is too laden down with useless titbits. Also, a lot of important stuff is hidden between these, so it can be very easy to become frustrated. The book is presented well, slightly too much light humour but it does at least presume that you (like I did) have no experience. Practice will make you a much better photoshop user than reading this book, but combining this with thousands of F1 searches will set you well on your way.

I'd rather eat the pages of this book for lunch and swallow them without a glass of water than read any further from this bone-dry book. I found the humor in the book more iritating than helpful, and the expanse of long drawn-out paragraphs with very few visual aids proved this to be the worst Photoshop book I've laid my hands on.

I strongly reccomend the Photoshop WOW! series, as well as Down and Dirty Tricks.... great for beginners who would appreciate tons of full-color visual tutorials and examples. Glass of drinking water optional :)

I have been a pen & brush graphics artist all of my life. Now that I have retired, I decided to try computer image manipulation. I bought this book in the hopes of learning to recolor, flip, distort, or whatever via my computer (I just got my first one in 2000)and have found it maddening to use. The authors gloss over information vital to a basic understanding of Photoshop and then blithely show highly advanced image techniques that cannot be duplicated without the underlying knowledge. It pretends to being step-by-step, but ignores crucial steps. For example, a complex collage is created using a number of disparate images: how did they select only that portion of the original? How did they make the surrounding parts of the image transparent so the background shows through? This are the most basic maneuvers, but a couple of months with the book left me unenlightened. I have since found another book that delivers on the premise of this one, Photoshop 6 In An Instant by Toot & Woolridge, and am now happily photoshopping away -- this despite the fact that Photoshop 6 for Dummies was more ... and has many pages of color illustration, in contrast to Photoshop 6 In An Instant's reliance on B&W even to show color manipulation!

I have been a pen & brush graphics artist all of my life. Now that I have retired, I decided to try computer image manipulation. I bought this book in the hopes of learning to recolor, flip, distort, or whatever via my computer (I just got my first one in 2000)and have found it maddening to use. The authors gloss over information vital to a basic understanding of Photoshop and then blithely show highly advanced image techniques that cannot be duplicated without the underlying knowledge. It pretends to being step-by-step, but ignores crucial steps. For example, a complex collage is created using a number of disparate images: how did they select only that portion of the original? How did they make the surrounding parts of the image transparent so the background shows through? This are the most basic maneuvers, but a couple of months with the book left me unenlightened. I have since found another book that delivers on the premise of this one, Photoshop 6 In An Instant by Toot & Woolridge, and am now happily photoshopping away -- this despite the fact that Photoshop 6 for Dummies was more ... and has many pages of color illustration, in contrast to Photoshop 6 In An Instant's reliance on B&W even to show color manipulation!

This book purports to be about "photoshop 6 for dummies," but it really isn't much help for real dummies. If you assume that most photoshop beginners, dummies if you will, are most interested in working with their own photographs, this book is of limited utility. It's terrific in discussing graphics and technical points; none of which has anything to do with working with photographs that may have red eye, have faded, need touching up in a variety of ways or even more basic information, like how a "dummy" should take advantage of Photoshop's organizational features. It's not that this is a bad book--indeed, the reverse is true. It's just not much help for the group its supposedly targeted.

barry anderson

I do not care for this Dummies' approach to Photoshop at all. It is very non-visual and it is laced heavily throughout with attempts at humor, all of which should have been editied out of the book. However, I've discovered that this author's, McClelland's, strength is not here but in the videotape series he does for Adobe, some of which can be seen online at Adobe's main site. I've taken some of his tutorials there and they are excellent and extremely visual. My guess is that he got locked into this Dummies' book format, which may have worked for another topic, but does not work for learning the most visual graphics program in the computer world. Bypass this product and investigate this author in other, visual media he uses for teaching you Photoshop instead.

Like almost all Dummies books, this one spends WAY too much time trying to be funny and cute, and not enough time cutting to the chase. For every paragraph that teaches you how to use a tool, you have to read 2 paragraphs of absolutely mindless dribble, that isn't even funny. I used to buy dummies books just because the choice of books can be overwhelming. Now that I've realized (for me anyways) that there are so many better books out there, I will never buy another one again. I guess, they title them appropriately. I highly recommend other books like Lynda Wieman's books, which are succinct in prose, and very effective.

Like almost all Dummies books, this one spends WAY too much time trying to be funny and cute, and not enough time cutting to the chase. For every paragraph that teaches you how to use a tool, you have to read 2 paragraphs of absolutely mindless dribble, that isn't even funny. I used to buy dummies books just because the choice of books can be overwhelming. Now that I've realized (for me anyways) that there are so many better books out there, I will never buy another one again. I guess, they title them appropriately. I highly recommend other books like Lynda Wieman's books, which are succinct in prose, and very effective.

Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool. It is industry standard for imaging professionals, and is by far the best image-manipulation software out there. But, all that power comes with a pitfall: if you don't know what you're doing, it is pretty much impossible to get Photoshop to do anything worthwhile. This book is the solution.
I've always been a big fan of learning to do something by fiddling with it, not reading about it. I'm the sort of person who throws manuals away (I suspect a lot of us are). For me, this book allowed me to very quickly (4 hours of reading) reach a level of understanding where I could use Photoshop to produce results. But months later, when I got puzzled by something (like histograms, or color manipulation, or printing), I'd crack out this book and find an explanation. Quickly, easily, without hassle.
And that may be the motto of this line of books. Quick, easy, without hassle. If you got a copy of Photoshop with your printer, or you've got access to a copy but don't know how to use it, buy this book. You'll be fixing red-eye, cropping, and saving for web in an evenings easy reading.
That said, if you already use photoshop, go browse the magazine aisle. You don't need this book (stay away from the photoshop bibles, too. If you needed them, you would already know).

Look out folks!! Bad book alert!

Not only is most of this book a regurgitation of the Dummies book for PS 5.0, but that was bad to begin with. Considering the myriad of other PS 6 books out there, this one is plain old bad. Confusing examples and chapters, some wrong information every so often, and pages that leave you wondering how th eheck to do some functions. Skip this and get "Adobe Classroom in a Book for PS 6."

it's a bit difficult to use. This book is a great bargain at the price if you are a Photoshop beginner. The writing here is clear and short of an expensive course or video series, you couldn't do much better to get started than get this book to learn Photoshop. Will you need more later on to get proficient at Photoshop? Yes, probably. But here is a great way for beginners to dive in.

This book was very useful for me. I have not used any previous versions of PhotoShop. As a beginner I find this book very easy to follow, with step-by-step learning. I think most mid and advanced PhotoShop users will have little or no benefit of reading this book... But, I recommend it strongly if you haven't worked with PhotoShop before. You'll be able to do most common techniques and a bit more... Just what you need to get started...

Well P6 is an expensive program but well worth the price if you do web work. P6 for Dummies does a good job of breaking down the intracies and making sure you know how to use the programs.

I will say this though. If you are familiar with web graphics then you may find most of this somewhat tedious but it will help you get a hand on the newly included vector drawing tools. But if you are new to photoshop and web graphcs then this book will be a good starting point for you, especially if you want a good solid grasp of Photoshop.

It may seem overwhelming at first but the Dummy series does a good job of keeping technical things simple and this book is no different from the others in the series. While geared more towards the beginning user of photoshop it will still provide enough new information for more advanced users as well. Because of this I can recommend this book for both beginner and advanced users of the Photoshop program.