Real World Photoshop 5: Industrial Strength Production Techniques (Real World Series)

As the Real World moniker suggests, this manual covers all the basics in a personable and thorough way. As the subtitle, Industrial Strength Production Techniques suggests, it covers just about everything you could possibly imagine, including color management, scanning, tonal and color correction, duotones, prepress, and selections and silhouettes.

If you use Photoshop as a regular part of your work but frequently find problems as you work with image capture, color and grayscale manipulation, and output, you'll need to get a copy of Real World Photoshop 5: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques. The authors focus on teaching professionals how to accomplish typical real-life production tasks quickly and effectively.

They use great detail to explain how Photoshop addresses color, explaining color-related issues such as the differences between RGB, CMYK, and other color models. In doing so, they help you work with Photoshop's color management systems, including its newly "device-independent" RGB editing space, along with other tonal and color-correction tools.

Other sections of the book explain subjects like bitmaps, resolution, resampling, Image Mode, and layer manipulation. You'll also find help on storing images in the various available formats, on printing your images, and on preparing your images for multimedia and the Web. With its handsome, colorful design and its clear explanations of technologies and features, this book is a good guide for production professionals who need help increasing their knowledge of Photoshop, working through its quirks and limitations, and taking advantage of its shortcuts and lesser known features. --Kathleen Caster