In a recent post, I talked about my favourite books. Well I have been adding to them. My collection of PhotoShop How-to’s has suddenly mushroomed, courtesy of a nasty and virulent Amazon habit. There is a reason for this. An expensive reason.

I have just upgraded my 1Ds Mk II to the MK III. Apart from the 21-23Mb Raw files, which have necessitated switching to fast 8Gb cards (gulp), I have come to realise that my PhotoShop skills just aren’t good enough to realise the quality level that I now perceive I want to accomplish with my images and which  I have learned the Ds, in the short few weeks I have had it, can deliver. It has little to do with the resolution. It has everything to do with the 14 bit files, which give me more information to murder/manipulate, and the ability to render smoother tonalities. Suddenly I feel out of my depth, as if someone has handed me the keys to a Skyline GT-R, or Topgear’s Richard Hammond trying to drive a Formula 1 car. There is too much that I do not know, so I am doing something about it.

Enter the great god Amazon.

It is quite exciting really. The prospect of all this cool knowledge waiting for me to master excites me. A new journey, new discoveries, and hopefully a new level of quality somewhere down the road.

But first a little learning.

It is a curious thing, but my comprehension skills need text. Printed text. I can stare at a monitor for hours and not get it. Give me a book and I can start to get it. Maybe it’s an age thing, but I don’t think I am alone.

So herewith, without further ado, five how-to books I really recommend.

1. The Adobe PhotoShop Lightroom book -Scott Kelby. A must for LR users. I am still learning new stuff.

2. The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers-Scott Kelby. Really useful, with techniques applied to real-world situations.

3. Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. He puts the whole workflow thing together, and shows how to make ordinary images look stand-out.  Hmmm, maybe it’s time to go through the back-catalogue of my image library again….

4. Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) by Katrin Eismann. Gasp! My eyes are watering!

5. Photoshop Masking & Compositing (VOICES) by Katrin Eismann. See comment #4

Be warned: The last two books are heavy-duty, with the sort of tranquillising effect that would knock out an enraged bull elephant. Great bed-time reading for the insomniac; guaranteed to send you off in 13 nanoseconds. The information is however invaluable and hugely worth it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Books I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.