Katrin Eismann is a well-known writer of books that teach you how to use creative technology in products such as Adobe Photoshop. Her latest encyclopaedic work “Photoshop Masking and Compositing” is a fat reference and tutorial type of book that covers literally everything you need to know on masking, either by using channels or layers, or anything else that fits that job. The book also covers compositing. With 540 pages, it is a heavy-weight.

I knew Eismann from the first book that I reviewed. It was the book she wrote on using Photoshop as a professional and powerful retouching and restoration tool. Photoshop Masking and Compositing is just as complete as that first book. It doesn’t exactly read like a novel, but it’s well written, with many screenshots that you can use as a reference for your own experiments.

It’s a tutorial in that it will teach you how to mask and select difficult stuff like blond hair on a light background. Simultaneously with her book on masking, I read Nigel French’s Photoshop Unmasked. While French covers the same “features” that Photoshop has to offer, his book focuses on select ways to mask, select and composite.

Eismann’s book goes a huge step further. In fact, Eismann doesn’t make a selection at all. While French’s book is nice if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the many different ways to come to the same end-result, Eismann gives you all the possible methods to achieve a specific result. This has a disadvantage: the book becomes quite heavy and also some chapters repeat themselves in terms of what the result is going to be.

But the biggest advantage of her approach is that you learn in one book how to do the same in many different ways. That in turn enables you to make out for yourself which method fits with your workflow, indeed with your personality.

And that is why I favour Eismann’s Photoshop Masking and Compositing above French’s Photoshop Unmasked.