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.

Giordan takes a few dowen examples of his art in the first chapter of this book, using these as a foundation to explain to you how you can achieve the results he gets in those compositions.

What makes Giordan’s compositions special are the effects he achieves by using Photoshop’s most basic capabilities to their fullest. For example, adjustment layers and clipping masks are often used in his art to achieve some very “dreamy” results.

Almost never does Giordan write about Photoshop’s newest additions like the perspective tool for example, and yet the results he achieves have a quality about them that far surpasses any of those “quick-and-dirty” effects. And that’s exactly why you should buy the book.

The quality of the effects, the ways to achieve them, the in-depth coverage of Photoshop CS2’s capacity to create genuine art in the hands of a master, those are the reasons why this book is valuable. It comes with a CD-rom, containing a sample of Giordan’s art and the images used in the tutorial sections.

The tutorial section itself is written in small, easy to digest text blocks. There’s little if any fluid text, which makes the book a little dry to read, but then again, it was never intended to be a novel.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to master some of Photoshop’s hardest basic tools in order to achieve some of the most beautiful and visually powerful effects.