Others say...

"Something must be missing"
I needed to learn how to make banners so, I got myself this book, although I did not expect much from it. My husband showed me first steps and with the book, I was able to learn how to use Photoshop in a week. While the book is full of helpful information might not be anything but a very basic beginner guide how to use colors and what pixels are, but if you actually want to make good looking product this book by itself will not be enough.

"Very Disappointing"
I bought this book hoping to learn how to use Photoshop's various functions and settings. I've looked up two so far - batch processing and screen auto resolution. Neither are in the book's index, which makes me wonder how much more is not explained.

Worse, it's too full of distracting cute you're forced to wade through. From the section, Resolving Resolution: "The Resolution value determines how tightly the pixels are packed when printed. It's kind of like the population density of one of those ridiculously large urban areas cropping up all over the modern world. Consider Lagos, Nigeria, which is a city of nearly ten million souls - more than London, Paris, or Shanghais. Lagos, in case you're curious, is the fastest-growing major metropolitan area in the world, with an annual population explosion of 5 percent. (If that doesn't sound so bad, consider that it would put Lagos at 33 million people in the year 2020, which would be more than Tokyo, the current topper.) The population density of Lagos is second only to Honk Kong, at roughly 150,000 people packed into each square mile (on average, that's 15 times as crowded as New York City.)" And it goes on and on.

When I want cultural geography lessons, I'll buy a cultural geography book. I don't have the time to wade through this kind of stuff in hopes I might eventually stumble across what I'm looking for. Few of us do. I'm sure I'll get something from this book, but I wish I hadn't bought it. Save your money.


"Great for beginners"
I'm new to Photoshop but no novice to computers. I needed something that would give me the basics of PS just to get me up and running. This book is well suited for that purpose, but a little too basic for me at times. Of course I understand it's a Dummies book, and even programming books have to assume a low base line for it's audience, so all in all I can't hold that against the book. It does have plenty of goodies to offer, you just have to suffer through a little novice fluff if you're not one.

Conclusion is it's great for novice beginners and still good for non-novices that happend to be PS beginners. And actually, It may even be a decent reference for people beyond beginner stages, though it's not really indexed to be a reference like that.

"Photoshop 7"
Very informative, very helpful. This book has helped me to understand some of the more advanced features of photoshop in a simple language that anyone can understand. The book also has graphs, charts, and very detailed instructions.

"This Dummies is a mess!"
Dummies books have been a staple of my computing/software resource library for a long time. This book was very disappointing. If you're looking for an organized presentation of the functions and capabilities of Adobe 7, leave this on the shelf. There are few visual examples in the book and very few tutorials that lead you through a topic in any organized way at all. To get something out of this book, I found myself jumping all over the place, following topic and function chapter references tossed in all too frequently, sifting through meaningless and annoying chatty writing, trying to piece together a tool's functionality on my own. And did I mention the writing style? Distracting, distracting, distracting. I felt like I was sitting in a computer class for octogenarians with ADD. Get to the point!! Leave it on the shelf.