O’Reilly is busy publishing a complete series on creative applications such as Photoshop CS2, and Deke McClelland’s One-on-One tutorial is one of the stars in the series. The book comes with Total Training Video hosted by Deke McClelland himself. The DVD contains over two hours of lessons and companion material.

Photoshop CS2 One-on-One is for absolute beginners. Let that be clear. It’s not a tutorial for expert Photoshop users, although the book is an excellent reference work for expert users who don’t use Photoshop on a daily basis.

The structure of the book is set up so you can easily find your way; i.e. coloured pages refer to what you should have learned at the end of a chapter, while Pearls of Wisdom paragraphs refer to “power tips”.

The book itself starts with Photoshop’s interface, goes on with auto corrections and then manual corrections and enhancements, to finish with real image manipulations.

Personally, I was rather impressed with the explanation of masking and the many ways to create complex masks quickly. I’ve seldom seen such clear and concise explanations of this topic.

From the book it is clear McClelland is a teacher in every sense of the word. He’s witty, but never allows his wits to distract from the message.

Finally, seasoned Photoshop users who nevertheless do not use Photoshop as often as to not forget about details once in a while, will find everything they need to refresh their memory in this book.