Book Recommendation: My Favorite Photoshop Books

There are scads of Photoshop books out there – befitting the long history of Photoshop. The vast majority of those books aren’t terribly useful – they basically document features and don’t solve real photographer’s needs.

Over the last year, I’ve come to enjoy two Photoshop books that are actually valuable to photographers needing to understand a workflow that solves their needs.

The first, published about a year ago now, is Welcome to Oz: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop (VOICES) by Vincent Versace. This book broke new ground for me – helping me understand how to apply the features (oh so many!) of Photoshop in a logical way. This was the first book I had found that addressed the creative side of Photoshop for photographers.

The second, published about a month ago now, is Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Voices). Kelby’s book takes a basic 7-step process and, through repetition over more than 20 images, tries to make it second nature. Perhaps the book is a bit overproduced – given how simple the 7-steps are – but it was still a very useful resource for me.

Both books are really, really useful for understanding the process of refining images in Photoshop – much more so than the usual Photoshop reference books. Both are Highly Recommended!