Is it a coffee table book or a tutorial? Both perhaps? Indeed, both. Daniel Giordan is a renowned Photoshop artist. He has written, or rather created, a book which can be used as a coffee table book --the first chapters contain a beautiful sample of his art. But it is a tutorial and reference book as well, teaching you how to achieve some of the results in his art pieces.
Dan Margulis wrote a book on Photoshop LAB colour and the Canyon conundrum. Margulis calls LAB the most powerful colour space and explains why you should use it to enhance and correct photographs, and not only those that have a canyon as their subject.
Martin Sitter wrote this Apple Pro Series book on music creation and audio production with Logic Pro and Logic Express 7. The book contains a DVD-rom. Sitter starts with the most simple and works his way through most of the programs’ basic and medium-difficult features. He starts with setting up the Logic environment, then the MIDI setup.
David Dvorin takes on where Martin Sitter leaves off in his furthermore excellent tutorial on Logic Pro and Logic Express 7. Dvorin concentrates on the Pro version of Logic and goes way deep into its rich and complex feature set. Whereas Sitter focuses more on Logic’s many features and how to get at them, Dvorin focuses more on the workflow a professional audio engineer would follow with Logic.
It’s everywhere: podcasting. As many others, I receive Scott Sheppard’s podcast “Inside Mac Radio” at least once a week. According to Gartner, podcasting is on the rise and will mature in 2 to 5 years from now.
Damian Allen takes the reader on a trip to Motion’s more difficult to achieve compositing effects. Allen assumes you’ve read the Getting Started tutorial from Apple Pro Series.
The book takes a project-based approach, which works well in covering complex Motion topics.
Mary Plummer wrote an entry-level tutorial book on Apple’s compositing application Motion. It says “Introduction to Motion Graphics” on the cover, but it’s a bit more than just that. She covers about everything Motion has to offer, including the Primatte RT filter.
O’Reilly published a series called Designer’s Notebook. This is the third in the series. It’s written by French artists and contains illustration projects done in Photoshop. Most of these projects are well explained, but there’s always the question whether you like the art in the first place. However, the mix in this book is quite good, so you’ll probably find something worthwhile to learn about in there.
Second in the A Designer’s Notbeook series by O’Reilly, is this retouching book. Again, it has been edited by a group of French artists. I was very enthusiastic about the Creating Photomontages with Photoshop book that I reviewed earlier.
O’Reilly isn’t exactly known for its graphics design books, but it has done a great job of this “A Designer’s Notebook” series. Eight leading French artists each explain a project in this book. Creating Photomontages with Photoshop is a trip to an unexplored world.
Katrin Eismann wrote a complete reference on retouching and restoring photographs with Photoshop for New Riders. The copy that I reviewed is the 2nd edition, and this book is the absolute reference for the job, in my opinion.
Jan Kabili and Colin Smith wrote a book that teaches you how to use Photoshop for Web graphics purposes. With Photoshop CS 2 just having been released, this book is of great use.
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