Please recommend a manual for a photoshop newb

[@dam]

Hi guys. I just got a Rebel XTi with three nice lenses, and a MacBook for an around-the-world 9-month trip. However, I'm not very good at retouching my photos with photoshop yet. I'd like to find a compact book (or, preferably, an even more compact DVD) with a decent index. For instance, if teeth need whitening, or red eye needs fixing, or if barrel distortion needs correcting, I just want to look it up & fix it. I'd prefer the book to be photography based- I'm not interested in creating special effects or graphics.

Any recommendations?

[John_Reed]

Hi guys. I just got a Rebel XTi with three nice lenses, and a MacBook for an around-the-world 9-month trip. However, I'm not very good at retouching my photos with photoshop yet. I'd like to find a compact book (or, preferably, an even more compact DVD) with a decent index. For instance, if teeth need whitening, or red eye needs fixing, or if barrel distortion needs correcting, I just want to look it up & fix it. I'd prefer the book to be photography based- I'm not interested in creating special effects or graphics.

Any recommendations?

Have you tried iLife08, which contains iPhoto '08 (ver. 7)? It's a pretty robust photo editor, able to do most things you mentioned (except perhaps the barrel distortion), and cheap. It will keep your photos well organized too, in trip segments, by dates, or however you want to arrange the events you'll see. And using it is so intuitive that I've never even seen a manual on it, yet I've done lots of image editing with it.

You might want to combine that one with Photoshop Elements to allow your trickier edits, but keeping iPhoto as your organizer? iPhoto can send photos easily to Elements (or other editors) for editing, then when you save from the editor, the edited image is available in iPhoto.

[@dam]

My Mac is only a couple of months old, and has iPhoto 6. It was a throughly disappointing piece of software. I have my photos organized in a particular way, and it would no longer allow me to keep folders within other folders, instead breaking them out to the root directory. When it imported them, it also put some folders into the wrong year folder (it put 07 photos into the 06 folder, even though the metadata was corect). When I tried to move the photos to the proper locations, it thought they were gone. Then, when I started it, it would load thumbs of all 20,000 photos, making finding anything very difficult.

Also, I hear the new version of iMovie isn't as good. Oh yeah...and I can't use iTunes on my trip, since I want to keep my music on my ipod only so it doesn't take up harddrive space.

Besides- I already have photoshop.

[D Thompson]

As long as you have a pretty good understanding of Photoshop then check Katrin Eisman's "Photoshop Restoration & Retouching". It will not teach you Photoshop however, so you need a good understanding of layers, masks, etc. Also check Scott Kelby's "The Photoshop (CS2 or CS3) Book for Digital Photographers". I'm not sure you'll find one that says if this do this in such a compact way. There are usually several different ways to accomplish the same task in Photoshop. Best of luck.

[@dam]

Thanks. Unfortunately, I'm really a newb. I've managed to clone out telephone poles and wires on photoshop 5, but beyond that, I really don't know how to work with layers very well or anything. I'm trying to learn as much as I can before I depart (in three weeks), but I have lots of other things occupying my time as well. I think I'll have to learn as I go along.

[Norm in Fujino]

Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers is a standard, oft-recommended title. He has another one for CS3, too, but I'd start with the older title because he doesn't repeat everything he said in the earlier book.

[D Thompson]

Thanks. Unfortunately, I'm really a newb. I've managed to clone out telephone poles and wires on photoshop 5, but beyond that, I really don't know how to work with layers very well or anything. I'm trying to learn as much as I can before I depart (in three weeks), but I have lots of other things occupying my time as well. I think I'll have to learn as I go along.

Is Photoshop 5 the version you have?

[@dam]

No- I have CS3 now.

[TheObiJuan]

Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers

I definitely agree with this, Norm!
Good reference.

[Rooz]

there are heaps of great photoshop video tutorials on youtube and all over the web. i find them much easier to understand than books.