Will reading this book give me a new perspective on how to adjust the image? For someone who is self taught and does photography as a hobby can this have a positive impact on the quality of my images?
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The short answer is yes. I have also skimmed the book, now I'm into detailed reading. It is an excellent book - no question about it. It explains everything, and therefore everything you need to know, which for most of us will be important subsets of the total.
What's important is not only how to adjust images, but also the workflow - how to make the program improve image processing efficiency. There are many nooks and crannies to this and the book explains them.
But if adjusting images is your main focus, chapters 4 and 5 provide a real solid hands-on foundation in how to use this program to greatest advantage. Their advice is to use Camera Raw to the fullest before rendering to Photoshop, and they show what that means with real-world examples.
The important thing about this version of the program, and therefore one of the important things about the book, is that the functionality of CR4.1 is a major set of steps up from 3.7 - a great many more tools, and therefore an even greater number of permutations and combinations for how they can be combined to solve a wide range of image adjustment issues. The book steers through the logic of the adjustment process, showing how various controls work with eachother and how to use them together in a very practical way.
I'm not selling work, I'm also self-taught, I've adjusted about 1600 images with CR 4.x since it became available and tried all kinds of cool things with it - even written some stuff on this website about them, but I'm still reading this book line by line because I too am discovering things.
My recommendation: buy, enjoy and benefit.