Brilliant Guides are published by Prentice Hall, and they have been developed to find information you need easily and without fuss. I can safely say that this is no hype. It’s true, the Brilliant Photoshop CS2 book by Andy Anderson and Steve Johnson is a reference work that lets you easily and quickly find what you need to know.

The book has a specific structure that makes using it a joy. Reading from start to end is less attractive. That could be personal taste, also because I don’t like the sort of vibrant green the book has been laid out in.

The structure of each page is well set up. At left there is a sidebar with step-by-step instructions. Right on the page is a larger column with screenshots and addtional information on the topic. Each topic is described shortly, and if it takes more paper to explain it, it’s broken up into sections.

The book is aimed at entry-level users, and users who want to certify as Adobe Certified Expert. The topics that are relevant for those users are specially tagged with an icon and a code referring to the particular level of expertise.

In my opinion, the book is valuable for everyone who wants to work efficiently with Photoshop without having to really learn by heart the whole program. This sort of excludes daily users as they will probably indeed know by heart most of Photoshop’s features.