"Derrick shows that Photoshop can be friendly as well as powerful. In part, he does that by focusing photographers on the essential steps of an efficient workflow. With this guide in hand, you'll quickly learn how to leverage Photoshop CS4's features to organize and improve your pictures." -- John Nack, Principal Product Manager, Adobe Photoshop & Bridge Many photographers -- even the pros -- feel overwhelmed by all the editing options Photoshop provides. The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers pares it down to only the tools you'll need most often, and shows you how to use those tools as part of an efficient and enjoyable workflow. This book explains an easy method for processing your images using the new user-friendly features that come with Photoshop CS4, including Adobe Bridge, Photo Downloader, and Adobe Camera Raw. A perfect fit for your laptop bag, this guide is designed to help you process photos in the field. Professional photographer and bestselling author Derrick Story teaches you how to quickly and efficiently organize and edit your photos without compromising the originals. With this book, you will:

• Import your images and apply metadata with Photo Downloader

• Rate your images and add keywords with Adobe Bridge

• Make basic (and reversible) edits with Adobe Camera Raw, such as cropping, color balance, and tonal adjustments

• Use advanced ACR tools for black & white conversion, spot removal, batch processing, and more

• Refine your images with Photoshop using adjustment layers, masking, and smart objects

• Apply advanced Photoshop techniques for retouching portaits, swapping colors, correcting lens distortion, and much more

To use Photoshop effectively, photographers must know which tools they really need and which ones they don't. The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers gives you the knowledge to create your own efficient path to great-looking photos.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 16 Ratings

Good newbie guide to Photoshop CS4 - 2009-10-01
Reviewer Rating:
I had never used any form of Photoshop before I purchased CS4 during 11/2008. I bought a couple of very good books but found that both Photoshop and the books were a little too hard to get started with. This book provided the introduction that I needed.

Story manages to provide a highly abridged and simplified guide to PS CS4 because he is the one author who isn't afraid to make choices for you. He freely admits that his Companion isn't meant to cover every feature of PS, just a bare minimum of the most essential ones. And instead of telling you about the 50 different ways to accomplish some task, Story just tells you what he does. The result is that you quickly begin to use PS in a useful manner.

I've since moved on to other sources. In particular, I highly recommend the video tutorials that come with Photoshop CS4: Essential Skills (Photography Essential Skills). Those tutorials fit very well into my learning style. But a newbie will need something simpler to get started. This book is an excellent choice for that purpose.

Great introduction for the digital photographer - 2009-08-07
Reviewer Rating:
I got this book to complement Deke McClelland's excellent One-On-One volume (ISBN 978-0596521899) and am glad I did. The books are definitely complementary.

The Companion for Photographers is well thought-out. Mr. Story presents a totally Adobe-based workflow that starts with importing images using Photo Downloader in Adobe Bridge, adds metadata, then does quite a bit of editing using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR), and finally uses Photoshop CS4 for final adjustments when needed.

The book doesn't attempt to make you a Photoshop CS4 expert. I found it to be an excellent introductory guide for digital photographers who want to know enough about Photoshop CS4 to use the program well without getting inundated in too many details. It succeeds well at that level.

No sample/demo disc is included. Instead, Story invites the reader to follow along and try the techniques on their own images. This works fine for me, although some may prefer to use something provided with the book.

The workflow is logical and presented with sufficient detail and delightful prose. However, my workflow is based on Apple's Aperture, and I didn't know quite what to do with the Bridge description. What did interest me, and will likely cause me to try importing with Bridge in the future, was the automatic metadata addition/embedding during import, which I didn't know about until reading this book.

I found the Adobe Camera RAW presentation excellent. ACR received a lot of enhancements in CS4 and Story covered them very well, succinctly and interestingly. He really shows how much you can do in ACR--much of which required Photoshop in earlier versions. His descriptions are simple, direct and understandable.

Layers--whose capabilities and accessibility were greatly improved in CS4--are covered very well in the book. You won't become an expert in using layers after a casual reading, but you should definitely feel like exploring them if you haven't already. And if you've been using Photoshop for a while, the discussion on new layer capabilities will serve as a good introduction to their capabilities.

There's a very valuable "Recipes" chapter that covers many of the most common adjustments/edits photographers are likely to need for their images. Story presents them with impressive clarity.

Big plusses for me in this book: very approachable introduction to CS4; delightful prose (almost conversational, as opposed to academic); copious use of photos and screen captures; useful recipes for the most common photographic corrections; and the physical size of the book (makes it very easy to carry with you if desired). I'm highly recommending this volume to my digital photographer friends.The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Now We Are Talking !! This is a good book. - 2009-06-30
Reviewer Rating:
There are so many limited and silly Photoshop books out there -- THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM.
This book has a LOT of information and is well written. The subjects of the photographs are mundane but as far as information that is expansive and easy to get to without having to navigate through time wasting unnecessary anecdotes this book is excellent.

Bravo Derrick Story!

Brice Bowman
www.bricebowman.com

Pleasant beginner's Photoshop intro but not very filling - 2009-05-23
Reviewer Rating:
Here's the conundrum: how do you create a small, "take it with you" guide for the heavy-hitting, industry-leading image editing program Adobe Photoshop CS4 that has enough meat to really make it useful. And useful for whom? Or is the goal itself a bit of an oxymoron? The author, Derrick Story, an accomplished photographer, writer, and educator, has a very nice way with words and considerable expertise regarding the subject, but the book's purpose seems flawed.

Here's the problem. While there is plenty of competition in the image editing arena (iPhoto, Aperture Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, LightZone, and many, many others) Photoshop CS4 is still at the top of the heap. It is a deep, broad, powerful piece of software designed to fill the needs of many users (not just photographers), and accordingly takes a long time for most people to reasonably master. While it's a delightful idea to artfully package a half-letter sized book with fewer than 200 pages and imply that it's a portable guide for this huge, multi-faceted program, the truth is the book is more like an upbeat beginner's introduction to Photoshop. And that's fine, except it really doesn't deliver on its stated goal.

On the other hand, there's little to fault technically in what is presented, though the author does recommend some practices (such as keeping derivative files in the same folders as originals) which may be a personal preference but not necessarily a "best practice." The discussions of several of the basic Photoshop tools and processes are clear and understandable, even for a novice, and additional "before and after" topics of file downloading, monitor calibration, and printing are included, though they are somewhat peripheral to Photoshop itself. So if your goal is to take your laptop on the road while you begin to learn Photoshop and you want a light-weight portable "guide" to help you get started, this one won't weigh you down excessively. But you'll be barely scratching the surface and could possibly be creating some habits you'll wish later you hadn't. Though this book is a pleasant intro, you'll need a much more complete textbook to learn the many additional required knowledge elements on the way to even modest competence with Photoshop CS4. But don't be discouraged by that; if you're serious about photography, Photoshop is worth learning, and if you've never dabbled with it, this otherwise attractive little book might help you get going.

You need this book with photography and PS-CS4 - 2009-04-24
Reviewer Rating:
I knew nothing about PS-CS4 and this book amazingly enabled me to start working with my pictures as if I had been working with PS for years. I really like how you can use the book as needed and not have to re-read it constantly. I gave it four stars because there are couple details about menus that were not very descriptive and it took me a bit to figure out what the author was talking about and were exactly the drop down menu was. Also, I would have liked to see a quick reference card or something. For someone just getting into PS-CS4 for photography you have to buy this book.

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