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This book is Scott Kelby's typical witty and unpresumptuous style. So if the content suits you, it's a good and worthy read. However, you should be aware that it is really a set of recipes for correcting 'problems'. Some of the problems are 'real' problems, like gross underexposure, best handled by better camera work, and some are 'enhancements'. Granted, all photographers, or cameras, make exposure mistakes so the material is valuable. Some of the 'enhancements' are very distinct departures from reality, also OK if that is what you want, but might violate some of the ethical rules held by nature photographers. These are not serious problems, just issues of choice... serious choice. Bigger issues for me are the inconsistancies of the methods described. Sometimes color balance is achieved in Camera Raw, sometimes in Photoshop; same for contrast, same for sharpening. In most cases there are no explanations about how that decision is made. Recipes, not instruction. And the largest issue is that of retaining the ability to manage each step of correction so that intermediate changes can be recovered or changed. So while Scott makes a big deal of the fact that a change to LAB mode and back will not 'damage' the pixels, this requires that the image be flattened, which causes a much bigger problem (the need to start over from scratch if subsequent changes are not satisfactory.) In the very first example, Scott shows a very sophisticated approach to using the Shadow/Highlight filter as a smart object that avoids the issue of irreversibly changing the underlying pixels, yet later flattens the image to make the change to LAB mode. In example 1, the image is flattened 4 times! Geesh! Missing is the discussion of the possibility of managing irreversible change, when necessary, through various file and image management techniques. Overall, this book is written for the beginner, but uses very sohpisticated techniques more suitable to a more experienced user. The steps are demonstrated, but the reasoning is lost; and the advantages of the technique are lost in subsequent steps. So this book remains just a set of recipes, useful if you have images that correspond to the examples, but less ueful for generalized work.
November 2007 · Books · verified purchase
the product in question
Scott Kelby's Seven-Point System For Adobe Photoshop CS3
4.4★ · 140 ratings, as of 2023
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