CS5 books/instruction

[John Camp]

Several iterations of Photoshop ago, I bought Adobe's teaching manual and tried to teach myself everything about Photoshop. The problem was, I never used 90% of it.

Now my son has bought me a copy of CS5, and I'm looking for some advice: All I want to do is some basic compositing -- reconstructing images. I don't want to know about Panoramas or sophisticated printing techniques or color management. I just want to know how to take a cow out of one photo and put it in another landscape, in a way that looks somewhat real. Any suggestions for self-instruction books that don't try to teach you everything there is to know about Photoshop, and where you have to learn everything before you can do anything?

[Mark D Segal]

Several iterations of Photoshop ago, I bought Adobe's teaching manual and tried to teach myself everything about Photoshop. The problem was, I never used 90% of it.

Now my son has bought me a copy of CS5, and I'm looking for some advice: All I want to do is some basic compositing -- reconstructing images. I don't want to know about Panoramas or sophisticated printing techniques or color management. I just want to know how to take a cow out of one photo and put it in another landscape, in a way that looks somewhat real. Any suggestions for self-instruction books that don't try to teach you everything there is to know about Photoshop, and where you have to learn everything before you can do anything?

If you activate Google and do a search with keywords such as Photoshop, Extract Background, Extract Subject, Select subject, Select item, Compositing images, etc. you will find TONS of free tutorials on the internet explaining very many ways of doing this.

[stamper]

If you activate Google and do a search with keywords such as Photoshop, Extract Background, Extract Subject, Select subject, Select item, Compositing images, etc. you will find TONS of free tutorials on the internet explaining very many ways of doing this.

It doesn't need to be a CS5 book to do this. As far as I can see very little changes in CS5 as to doing it? The refine edges is imo tricky to use and there are earlier methods that work just as well. Look at Katrin Eismann's books and Steve Caplin's, How to cheat in Photoshop.

[Mark D Segal]

It doesn't need to be a CS5 book to do this. As far as I can see very little changes in CS5 as to doing it? The refine edges is imo tricky to use and there are earlier methods that work just as well. Look at Katrin Eismann's books and Steve Caplin's, How to cheat in Photoshop.

Ya - that's the point I was making - you can find lots of material explaining individual techniques on the internet without buying a book. "Refine Edges" only comes into play once you've done the basic extraction, and once you've had a bit of practice with it, it isn't really tricky - just takes some patience trying various settings to see what works best for the image at hand. It is helped a lot by making sure that you have eliminated any chromatic aberration effects before stasrting an extraction and edge refinement process. CS5 does have some significant new features which do considerably simplify a number of these kind of operations, so much as other techniques continue to be viable, I wouldn't dismiss CS5 quite so lightly.

[jerryrock]

Photoshop/Window/Extensions/Knowledge - gives you a collection of step by step instructions on a variety of features.

[wolfnowl]

Go to Adobe TV and from the 'Products' drop down, select PS5.  That'll keep you busy for a while...

Mike.

[walter.sk]

Photoshop/Window/Extensions/Knowledge - gives you a collection of step by step instructions on a variety of features.

Sounds great!  But I opened my Photoshop CS5, went to Window/Extensions and found several choices.  However, Knowledge was not one of them.  I went to Help/Update and found that my PS CS5 is up to date.  So how do I get the Knowledge panels?