Home » Archives » August 2005 » Deke McClelland's Photoshop CS Bible, Professional Edition, Review
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Deke McClelland's Photoshop CS Bible, Professional Edition, Review - or
Review of Photoshop CS Bible, Professional Edition
category: graphics, digital photography and image editing
Photoshop 7, CS, and CS2 Bibles, the Professional Editions, by Deke McClelland et al, and published by Wiley, are pretty much hard cover, full color reprints of the standard editions, except there is a lot of stuff missing, and they cost $20.00 dollars more. The pitch is that professionals already know the missing stuff, so why add to the weight of the book unnecessarily, but the reality is you will buy two copies of the exact same book expecting to find reference detail in the standard edition and advanced techniques in the professional edition, and you won't.
You will be disappointed in the Professional Edition because advanced masking techniques, blend modes, and layer styles discussions, and everything else I care about, are all the same as the standard edition, which itself hasn't changed, as far as I can tell, since the Photoshop 4 Bible. I don't know if there was a Bible before Photoshop 4, but since then it seems all they do is add whatever new features are in the new release and go to press.
With fifty million copies sold, and Photoshop in release 9, it seems that Wiley could have afforded to pay Deke to tell us what he has learned in the past dozen or so years in the Professional Edition instead of just giving us color pictures and a cover that won't curl up.
You know, I would happily pay an extra $20.00 for a plain old standard edition with a CD containing a searchable PDF of the books text. On the other hand, if all I get that's really NEW in the Professional Edition is a really cool color wheel to help me find my way in the Hue Saturation dialogue box, I think I'll spend my money on another of Deke's books, because he has learned a lot, really.
He said on 08.27.05 @ 03:51 PM CST
