HEY BUDDY, WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? No, wait, we’re not trying to be obnoxious; we really do want to know what your problem is—well, as long as it involves Adobe Photoshop. After all, that is our job: listening to problems and coming up with breakthrough solutions.
In fact, we’ve spent much of the past couple of years listening to seminar attendees about their problems, teaching new and advanced users, working with clients, reading online Photoshop forums, and talking with other Photoshop trainers. We discovered that there are certain questions that are asked over and over again—questions about resolution, opening Camera Raw files, adjusting tone and color, saving files to disk. . .
This book is a compendium of those commonly encountered problems, and—more importantly—their solutions! Some solutions are simple, such as pointing out a feature that you might never have known about. Other solutions are complex, requiring multi-step procedures and waving witchbane around your head while standing on one foot.
A few solutions involve problems with Photoshop CS which were fixed in Photoshop CS2, while some are more concerned with new problems that popped up in this most recent version. Most of the solutions in this book are applicable to both CS and CS2.
Of course, with all this talk about problems and solutions, you might get the feeling that we think Photoshop is buggy or causes headaches. No way: We love Photoshop and it is among the most stable, functional pieces of software we own. But we’ve been around long enough to know that all software has bugs—and they usually bite you just before a big deadline. And every major application can cause you to reach for the Ibuprofen at the end of a long day.
Photoshop is the best image-editing software we’ve ever used (and we’ve used a lot of them), but if you don’t encounter any frustrations with it, then you’re just not working hard enough.
As much as we’d love to fly out to [insert name of your city here] and sit by your side as you work, we just can’t right now. That’s where this book comes in: Each chapter of this book covers an area we know people have problems with—organizing myriad images, for instance, or keeping color consistent. We don’t expect you to read the whole thing cover to cover. Rather, skip around the book, gathering what you need when you need it.
You might strategically leave this book wherever you go when you have a major problem: For David, it’s next to the refrigerator. Conrad prefers a nook at his local coffee house.
Note that we have no intention of this book covering every feature in Photoshop. Sure, we cover a lot of ground, and we take an in-depth look at some areas that often cause confusion with users. But we expect that you’ll use this book in conjunction with other resources on Photoshop. For example, we don’t cover how to script Photoshop or create cool effects that look like fire or ice or whatever else you’re in the mood to add to your images. Fortunately, there are other resources out there. Here’s a few places you can go for more information.
Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2. While we are a bit biased (this book was written by David Blatner and our friend Bruce Fraser), this is also the book recommended by members of the Photoshop development team at Adobe.
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Visual QuickStart Guide. This big step-by-step instruction book by Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas offers a great introduction to Photoshop. We tend to like this better than the Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book, though that one is good, too.
Adobe Photoshop Web Site. Most corporate Web sites are filled with marketing materials. You’ll find plenty of that at Adobe, but it’s alongside excellent useful information, too. It’s definitely worth a trip to www.adobe.com/products/photoshop. Also, the answers to many of your most puzzling Photoshop questions can often be answered by the knowledgeable and helpful volunteers in the Photoshop User to User Forums at www.adobe.com/support/forums/main.html
Web sites. Besides the Adobe Web site, there are literally thousands of Photoshop resources on the Internet. For keeping up to date, check out www.photoshopnews.com. For tips and tricks, see www.photoshoptechniques.com or just go to Google, type in “photoshop tips,” and have your mind blown.
Magazines. There are an ever-growing number of magazines that cover cool Photoshop techniques. Some of our favorites are DG Magazine (formerly Digital Graphics, from Australia), PhotoshopUser (from the NAPP), and Layers Magazine.
Any undertaking that involves Adobe Photoshop necessarily taps into the rich and deep web that surrounds this amazing program. We wrote the words, but we couldn’t have done it without that infrastructure!
Thanks to Peachpit publisher Nancy Ruenzel, who liked the idea of Blatner Books. To our editor, Nancy Davis, for her extraordinary patience and suggestions. And to our production editor Lisa Brazieal for her happy, reassuring voice on the end of the telephone. To Pamela Pfiffner, our champion embedded inside the Peachpit fortress. And to Don Sellers, for his excellent copyediting.
Our sincere appreciation goes to Bruce Fraser, Anne-Marie Concepción, Deke McClelland, Greg Vander Houwen, and participants in the Photoshop User to User Forums.
David: “I am so thankful to my wife, Debbie, and our two boys, Gabriel and Daniel, who have supported me and this project in so many ways. Thanks, too, to my mom and step-dad, who loaned me the money to buy a laser printer back in the 1980s, even though they thought it was a crazy thing for me to do. And a huge round of applause to my co-author Conrad, who was instrumental in making this book a reality”.
Conrad: “My thanks go out to my parents, who from the beginning gave me the kind of support that allowed me to learn, and then to teach. Many thanks also to my friends and family and my co-author David, for their encouragement and patience during those intensive final weeks of writing and editing. Finally, thanks to the entire Photoshop community of developers and users who have turned dry lines of code into a spectacular creative universe”.