There
are a couple of truly bad ways to learn how to use Photoshop.
One is to ask a friend who is an expert – who uses
imaging software every day and has all the commands and tricks
memorized — to give you a lesson.
All he will do is ask you what you want to accomplish and
nod his head as if he really cares. As soon as you’ve
got a couple of sentences out of your mouth, he’ll elbow
you out of your computer chair, plant himself in your place
and proceed, with a rapid-fire barrage of quickly-forgotten
instructions, to go ahead and do everything himself. It’s
just faster that way, he’ll say.
(I have said ‘he’ and ‘him’ here
for the reason that if it’s a woman giving the help,
she’ll
wait at least 15 minutes or so, before getting so frustrated
by your colossal ineptitude that she pushes you aside.)
You’ll
likely end up with a great image of the harbour at night
or that old junkyard in the mist, but you won’t
have learned a darn thing in the process and -- unless you
want to lock your pal in your home office for the rest of
his life -- that’s the last lesson you’re ever
going to get from him. Next time he sees you coming he’s
going to run.
Oh, and if you were to manage to keep him captive
you’d
eventually find out that Mr. Expert, like almost everyone
in the graphic arts area, only really knows the parts of
Photoshop
he uses to get his work done. He won’t have bothered
to learn anything more, and why should he?
The other simply
awful way to learn the immensely complicated Photoshop it
is to try figure it out for yourself. You’d
be a fool to even try. Enough said about that.
Otherwise,
you can go and buy one of those hugely-expensive illustrated
guides that you can haul out every time you run
into a problem. I’ve tried this approach and it simply
hasn’t worked for me. It always seems as if the troubles
I’ve encountered are similar to those in these books
(and I have half a dozen of them) but not close enough to
provide an instant solution. Or I don’t understand
the answer.
You can also take a course at a local college
or high school (probably the best idea of them all, if you
like sitting
in a classroom, which I loathe.)
I’ll just bet you can
tell by my intro to this column that I’m about to tell
you about another alternative, and you’re right.
 It’s
a new just-launched book called Adobe Photoshop CS
one-on-one (yes, that second part of the title is in lower case) by
Deke McClelland ($49.99 US,
$64.99 Cdn) published by Deke Press/O’Reilly, which is, I admit, also
hugely expensive, but better than anything else I’ve ever tried (and
less money than most courses). It’s a lesson-by-lesson approach, complete
with introductory video segments, and you can do it in the privacy of your
own home, where only
you know how bad you are and other students won’t laugh at you.
I happened
upon a mention that this book was about to be released when I was reading
a photography blog and I saw that people had made highly
favourable
remarks about its predecessor, which covered CS2. So I thought, hey, I can
buy this for
considerably less than the list price if I do it online and, if it’s
any good write about it and if it isn’t, well it’s a tax write-off
against my freelance income.
The first thing you do with Deke’s (I’ve had
him talking at me on my computer for the past week, so I feel
we’re close enough for me to call him by his first name)
book is to remove the DVD from the inside back cover, copy
the lesson files – with all the photos you’ll
be working on – to your desktop, copy his specific colour
settings to your hard drive (so your work matches the pictures
in the book), change Photoshop’s colour settings, install
what are called “dekeKeys shortcuts” (marked for
the PC or the Mac), make suggested changes in the Photoshop
preferences. If you use a Mac, as I do, you also change some
of your keyboard shortcuts.
Some of this
made me a touch nervous. I don’t like fiddling with settings
on my computer, but so far, it hasn’t made a whit of difference
to me in other programs, likely because I never used most of the keyboard
shortcuts in
the first place. (Your mileage may vary, so don’t go blaming me
if something does go wrong. I didn’t write the book.)
 There are
a dozen lessons in Adobe Photoshop CS one-on-one (the first three,
for example, are Open and Organize; Highlights, Midtones
and Shadows;
and
Correcting Color Balance) and each of them begins with an overall video
look at the area
of Photoshop you’re going to learn when you follow along in the
book. To my relief, the introductions aren’t simply a précis
of the printed material, but go over material that isn’t even
in the lessons. Score one for Deke, who is actually quite an engaging,
enthusiastic
guy.
Then you get into the lessons themselves and, using the
sample photos provided, you learn how do things like selecting
areas of an
image,
healing, applying
masks, sharpening, etc., etc. In between, there are sections of the
book devoted to
theory, like the colour wheel (with a great graphic I’m going
to be referring to again and again), so you’ll get a good grasp
on what it is you’re
doing as you manipulate sliders to +100 or 1.5 or whatever.
My advice
with this is to set aside plenty of time, so you don’t rush.
Usually, when confronted with any kind of learning situation I
put my head down and plow ahead through the material at warp speed.
This
has something to do with
my more than 40 years in journalism, where I had to learn all about
a new tech product in an hour and then spend another two hours
writing about it, so I could
go on to my next story.
But that is ill-advised in this case. So,
again, do not try to take everything in at once. If your head
is swimming with all the
information
in a particular
chapter then put the book aside and go and watch a rerun of CSI
Miami. Pick up Adobe Photoshop CS one-on-one again tomorrow.
 If
you do push ahead – saying to yourself, oh, I can leave
out all this theory stuff for now and just ingest the practical
bits – then you will
end up not remembering a darn thing. I discovered by in the second
chapter, when I realized that I had blown through all the
exercises without really absorbing
more than a few basics. So I forced myself to do all the practical
bits again until I was sure that I had most of it memorized.
And if you come to the extra credit parts that Deke says
you can ignore, don’t
do it, unless you know the contents already. You’ll learn
even more this way.
I was tempted to bypass the portion of the book devoted
to processing RAW images because I do this in other programs,
but I’m glad I didn’t, because
I can take some of what I learned going through the steps in
Photoshop CS3 and put it to use elsewhere.
It will, of course, help you to get the most out of the
lessons if you’ve
been using Photoshop for a while. I’m not sure I would recommend Adobe
Photoshop CS3 one-on-one to a beginner or to someone who doesn’t have at
least a smidgen of familiarity with editing images and, oh, just a bit of artistic
ability. And it would be a true benefit to you to have some colour theory in
your background (which I don’t, but my wife, who also
uses Photoshop, does so when in trouble I go to her.)
 Unlike a lot of how-to books, I found that if you pay attention
to the instructions (and it’s easy to follow them exactly)
you will reproduce almost exactly what Deke is doing with
his images. Praise also goes to the designers who made
the actual physical object that is this book so easy to use.
It falls open and stays open on your desk and the illustrations
are well-placed and matched to
the text.
Only once did I find a minor error in the book about a
particular command, but this may just have to do with a difference
in
the PC version, which
Deke always
mentions first and the Mac version. In any case, it took
me about half a minute to figure out that I had to place
something
in
a sub-menu rather than
a menu.
And that was that.
Now I’m not saying that to learn Photoshop you have to go out and buy this
book. That would be nonsense. But it’s certainly an option that I’d
give some thought.
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have to start another
lesson.
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