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.

Wherever in this book it says you should switch to ImageReady; this only applies if you’re running the CS or previous versions of Photoshop and ImageReady. In many cases, with CS 2, there’s no need to switch anymore.

This being said, the book is a great training manual for achieving stunning results that previously would only be possible with Macromedia’s Fireworks. Of course, Photoshop is much more powerful when it comes to graphics, but web graphics are something special.

For example, you wouldn’t normally think of creating animations for the web in Photoshop, yet the authors show that it’s not only possible to do so with photoshop, but also at least as powerful and easy. With CS 2, animations don’t need ImageReady anymore.

The book takes you through a number of very nice projects with beautiful results. There is a CD in the book with training material and a number of Actions that will save you time when playing these in Photoshop later on.

The book is somewhat unique in that it doesn’t only rely on graphics made in Illustrator or another drawing program first, but also takes photo shoots as the basis of web elements.

It starts with easy projects and then gradually becomes more difficult. The last chapters cover the creation of complete interfaces.