Morning Caffeine

The Photoshop Anthology written by Corrie Haffly and published by SitePoint is simply perfect for almost all wide range of Photoshop users, from beginners to somewhat advanced users. The book comes in full color, cover to cover! I’ve learned some of Photoshop basics by myself, and for sure, I wasn’t familiar with using all tools. If you are like me, Chapter 2 is perfect for you to fill up the gaps in your knowledge of using Photoshop tools.

The next chapter jumps straight to making navigational buttons and explains how to apply different effects to them. You can learn how to make shiny metallic buttons, aqua buttons, plastic buttons, ones with glass effect and all that in one place. Once you are done with first chapter (considering that you need to work on your basic skills), you are able to skip chapter with buttons (and return to it later) if you are more interested in learning to handle backgrounds. Since I was just a beginner user of Photoshop, chapter that explains how to work with text amazed me because it explained how to create text to follow defined paths or how to alter the shapes of letters.

Some of the most interesting chapters are the ones that cover adjusting and manipulating photographs, converting them to black and white images, fixing well known red-eye effects, smoothing noisy images, combining different images, isolating objects from an image. I especially liked tutorial hot to make magnifying glass effect.

At the end, you will go through small tutorial from beginning to an end how to make a mockup for the web site.

Because this book doesn’t go outside Photoshop, you won’t learn how to slice what you have just created, but it will provide you bunch of great tutorials for what you have to know in order to create great looking mockups for web sites.