On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:47:54 +1000, Troy Piggins
wrote:

After a little deliberation, reading reviews, trawling a few
forums, I decided so splurge and buy a couple of books. I love
reading novels, but for some reason for technical information
I've always preferred online mailing lists, forums, and USENET
newsgroups.

Splashed out and bought CS4 Photoshop and Lightroom 2 recently,
and figured they might be worth having some books to accompany
them. Decided on "The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital
Photographers" by Scott Kelby and "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers" by Martin Evening.

Man, Kelby has so many books out. I know he's "the PS go-to
author", but you have to wonder if reputation precedes and if
there's actually better PS books out there but they get drowned
out by Kelby overload...

Well, my fears have been realised.

Books received quite promptly from Amazon. Good service, first
time I've dealt with them. But...

The Kelby book. Very disappointed. The layout of the pages
themselves is quite appealing at first glance, plenty of images
to display what he's talking about. But when I think about it,
that's one thing that annoys me about it. Too many images. I
mean, if he's giving a step by step on something, does he really
need to give an image to show him clicking the menu button
described in the text? Waste of space where he could add more
text/info/tips.

That brings me to my next annoyance. Every new chapter title
takes up 2 full pages. One shows a photo, the other some text.
The text is the chapter title, then the rest is the explanation
of how he came up with his "clever" chapter title. He seems to
have this thing where his chapter titles are songs or movies or
whatever that have words or something relevant to what that
chapter is really about. eg there's a chapter on Bridge so he
calls it "London Bridge". That's fine, cute, whatever, but we
don't need a page explaining why you called it that. We get it.
Just put a paragraph about this little nuance in your intro or
something and give us more meat in the content of the book.

Next point. Give the man meat. I bought this book wanting to
learn uber-tips from the Photoshop guru. But in reality, it looks
to me like he's taken the easy road. Quite a few pages (like 10
or so) on the unsharp mask. Not really cool things like using the
unsharp mask with edge masking or surface masking or anything,
just 10 (or so) pages on different combinations of amount,
radius, and threshold.

Some of the cooler tips he's posted actually come from "friends"
of his showing him the tip. I like that he's passed it on, and
has acknowledged his mates, but I want to see more of his cool
stuff. I don't reckon he's sharing it all. Can't be.

The first third or so of the book talks only about Bridge and
Camera Raw. Too much. Reckon you could split the book up, have
another thinner book on those, or each of them, sell them
cheaper. Gimme a book on CS4 Photoshop please, not the other
stuff, that's why I got Lightroom.

Summary - I reckon the title should contain the word "Beginners"
in it. I'm not pro PS user, only had it for a couple of months.
But I picked up much of what was in the book by playing with it
and reading some online sites.

I'll keep the book as a reference for some of the tips in there,
but reckon if I tore out the pages that contained stuff that was
either obvious or wasted space, I wouldn't be left with much
inside the covers.

I'm just starting the Lightroom book, but initial flick through
looks like it goes into much more detail, which is what I want.

Should have just downloaded them from alt.binaries.e-books.technical
instead of wasting all that expense and time.

They are both often uploaded, along with many other PS tutorial and tips
books. None of which are worth buying. I've browsed or read large parts of
the PDF versions, then promptly deleted them. Those useless 30 or 50 megs
were wasting valuable terabyte drive space. Photography instructional books
are written by failed photographers.