Good for Reference

I loved this book but it took a lot of effort to read it. That may sound funny but the format of this book is nothing but tip after tip after tip and that can get old pretty quick. If you can stand it, read through the whole thing. Then you'll find yourself either using the tips you've learned, or like me stopping and saying to yourself, "Uh, wasn't there a tip about how to do this faster?" at which point you refer back to the book and find the quicker way to do what you were doing.

Did you know that you create a flattened layer from your whole layered document without flattening the image? Yep, Mac: command-option-shift-E, Win: cntrl-alt-shift-E. Something I learned from the book that has changed my life with Photoshop.

Cool.

Good Tips, but missing a few things

This book is for someone who is experienced at PhotoShop, but wants to work a little faster and get more familiar with navigation. It is also slanted toward new features in CS2, though it still contains many older tips. Scott devides the book into about 9 sections: The Bridge, Essential Tips, Production Tips, Way Cool Tips (?), Camera Raw Tips, Layer Tips, Text Tips, Image Correction Tips and Advanced Tips. Curiously missing is a section on Selection Tips, or any mention of Web tips. The book is very heavy on pointing out the shortcuts in PhotoShop. All but a few shortcuts are well documented in the software, so if you throw out these "tips" you are left with about 50% of the remaining book - which does still leave some cool stuff.

If you are interested in these types of things, you may want to get this book:
- Finding the Center of a Document or object quickly
- Creating a flattened copy of your layers
- Changing brush sizes and types quickly
- Using Photo Filter Adjustment Layers
- Drawing Lines with Arrowheads on them
- Putting Photos into Type
- Typing within (or on) a Perfect Circle

The biggest disappointment is the lack of tips around creating better selections - which tools to use and when, how to configure them when making different selections, etc.

Almost anyone who buys this book will find a couple of "I didn't know you could do that" items here. However, if you are relatively new to PS, you'll want a more complete book and if you are really experienced with PS, there may only be a few great tips here. Thus, the audience is a bit limited and if you fall into either of these groups, there may be better books out there for you.

What You Need to Move Up in Skill

After you are familiar with Photoshop you can get a lot done. But then you meet someone who is a true pro and you learn that what you did works, but what he does works better, faster and easier than your approach. He (or she) just happens to know a shortcut, a tip if you will, that is specifically oriented to just what he wants at that exact time.

Here the Editor-in-Chief of Photoshop User magazine (Scott Kelby) and the Creative Director of the magazine (Felix Nelson) have combined to bring several hundred of these tips to your attention. As such, these are not for beginners, many of them are simply short cuts for things that you could do using other more standardized techniques.

The authors suggest that you read this book in front of your computer ready to jump in and try new things. I'd suggest instead that you don't. I suggest that you read through the book rapidly, from front to back, covering the whole thing before you start experimenting. The reason is, I find that I learn best when I actually have a need to do something. So, read it quickly, then just remember the concepts. Then when you need to do something, go back to the book. There's even a convenient couple of pages in the back of the book to make some notes to make it easy for you to find what you need. Then, every few months go through the whole book again. You'll have forgotten all the tips, and the next time you'll be working on a different project, needing to use different tips.

These are the tips, the information that enable you to move from say intermediate level to advanced.