Preface

I have read many Photoshop books, while many of these books were written by great Photoshop users, and many of those definitely are better than me at using it, the problem with many of these books, in my opinion, is that they are kind of boring to read, and they tend to require you to fumble around to do things like finding a button or icon the book is talking about. I have also noticed that these books takes too much time to read, they talk too much, and they try to cover the tools in a logical way, not the order you will need these them. For example, when they cover the user interface, they talk about all Photoshop tools, including the ones that you won’t need to know about until much later, and some of these tools are ones you may never use. In a similar fashion, they talk about every single thing in details that you will need to read hundreds of pages before you get to see results (though that’s not a bad thing for some people).

Photoshop is already a vast program that is boring to learn, yet very fun to use, one has be brave to wade through one of these books to cross the boring learning curve to the fun world of Photo-editing.

Getting results from the very beginning

What I tried to achieve using this book is the opposite of all that, I wanted to create a bunch of chapters that allows you to achieve results from the very beginning, you will start to notice that from the second chapter “Getting Started with the Brush Tool”. If you are familiar with Photoshop user interface, you could skip the user interface chapter, which I wrote for the absolute beginners. After the second chapter, I will start building gradually on what you have learned earlier so you could achieve more things, even if you read part of this book, you
will still be able to create many things using Photoshop. The order of chapters in the book a little weird for some, but I believe it will make the learning process smoother, because of the results you will achieve from that

Less reading, more learning

The second thing I wanted to achieve using this book is to make it kind of fast & easy to read, which is why I heavily depend on pictures to convey the concepts, which won’t only make
it fast to read, but pretty much clear too. The average of words in each pages of this book is between 100-200 words; and some pages have way less than that.

For the most part, I will depend on picture for teaching you the concepts. Which I hope will make this book appealing to read, especially for visual learners. I also hope that will make it much faster to read, because I am pretty sure you want to spend your time using Photoshop instead of wading through walls of texts.

Learn Photoshop on the go

To some degree, this book can be read without having an access to Photoshop, this is nice
in case you have a tablet or some portable device, and wanted to make a use of your time, but bear in mind that some Photoshop concepts are much easier to learn if you tried them yourself. And you will get the best results if you do some experimenting of the concepts every now and then

Available in all Kindle Stores:-US–UK–DE–FR–ES–IT–NL–JP–BR–CA–MX–AU–IN

Clear Instructions

I did everything I can to make the instructions easy to read, taking into account that many of the readers are not fluent in English, and for that very reason, I tried as much as possible to cut back on the vocabulary amount & idioms that are used.

Another thing I avoided in this book is to tell you to do things without making sure they make sense to you. For example, I will never tell you to “Click button X that is located between the oval button and the OK button”. Instead of that, I will show you a picture of where the button you have to click is. Especially that making you fumble around unnecessarily is something that can be easily avoided

Also, I will never give you vague instruction like “Set X value to 34.5 then click OK”. Something many books do, sadly speaking. Instead of that, I will make sure that I will let you know where I got the value from, and what that value actually does.

One of things you will notice about the screenshots in the book is that they are all taken with my Photoshop installation is set to the Light color theme, which, in my opinion, make them easier to read (According to a research made by Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual display units through contrast reversal). So unless you changed your interface color to be like mine, your Photoshop user interface is going to be black, but that won’t hinder your ability to distinguish between the options

I am fully aware that there is some amount of repetition in the contents of this book, but
I intentionally didn’t try to lower that. Because I believe that repetition is a very powerful learning tool. It won’t only make it easier for you to remember the concepts explained in this book, but it will also help you understand the parts you find confusing at first, something that can’t be avoided when it comes to some Photoshop concepts. To make the repetition less of a problem, many of these repetitions will be explained using different wordings to avoid getting you bored by them

Chapters Layout

Instead of walking you through some fictional projects you probably don’t care about, each chapter will teach you the tools directly, without wasting any of your time, then it will proceed to a summary sections. For most of the chapters, there is going to be an examples sections that will show you some good ways to use the tools you learned. Some chapters don’t have examples section, mainly because there is no viable examples to provide other than what is explained in the chapter.

Every time you have to encounter a Computer Graphics term, I will take a little detour to explain that concept to you before proceeding, so you don’t have to worry about having a prior background about graphics in order to read the book.
Some of the most important aspects of Photoshop, like Layers & the Pen tool, will be
taught to you much earlier than some Photoshop courses do, because these concepts are so important, and because many other concepts are built on them. Plus, learning these concepts pretty earlier will give you a sense of achievement

The future of this book

This is still the first edition of the book, I still plan to make many improvements to it, add more information, and fix any possible methods of teaching I have used. If you have any suggestion, don’t hesitate to send me an E-mail Mie@SweetMonia.com

While I will try my best to cover as much of the options you encounter, there are time when I won’t really cover everything about a certain tool, this to avoid loading you with Information you probably won’t need (You don’t really need to worry about learning every single Photoshop feature to work efficiently with it), but I will try to add those in the upcoming edition of this book, maybe in their own chapters, so that the original book will stay the same

If you liked this Photoshop book, please recommend it to a friend or tweet about it, it will be a big help, as it will give me more motivation to add more and more chapters to it. And thank you in advance for supporting this book