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By Root 1663 0

and workflow steps that are described in the book. It is inevitable in a book like this that the author will want to put forward their own personal views on how you should or shouldn't do things. I am probably no different, but I would point out that the advice I give is based on over 16 years of experience in which I have worked extensively with the Photoshop engineering team at all stages of the program's development. Not only that, but I have also been fortunate enough to work closely with some of the leading Photoshop gurus such as Katrin Eismann, the late Bruce Fraser, Mac Holbert, Ian Lyons, Andrew Rodney, Seth Resnick, Jeff Schewe and Rod Wynne-Powell. The techniques I describe here have therefore evolved over a long period of time and the methods taught in this book reflect the most current expert thinking about Photoshop. What you will read here is a condensed version of that accumulated knowledge. I recognize that readers don't want to become bogged down with too much technical jargon, so I have aimed to keep the explanations simple and relevant to the kind of work most photographers do.

My approach to digital imaging is as follows. I aim to preserve all of the information that was captured in the original and wherever possible I prefer to work non-destructively. By doing this I can keep all my options open. In this book I recommend that you shoot in raw mode (where it is appropriate to do so) and make full use of the tools that are available in Camera Raw to prepare your images before you open them up in Photoshop. For example, the ideal time to carry out the capture sharpening is when you are working in Camera Raw. Therefore, I have placed the Capture sharpening chapter towards the beginning of the book. I recommend you use the wide gamut ProPhoto RGB workspace because this can help you to preserve more color detail through to print. I also suggest editing your images in 16-bits per channel so that you can preserve the maximum number of levels of tone information and keep your options open for whatever you might want to do to an image in the future. Later in this book I will also be showing you how to use adjustment layers and Smart Object layers to keep your pixel image settings fully editable.

Macintosh and PC keys

Throughout this book I refer to the keyboard modifier keys used on the Macintosh and PC computers. Where the keys used are the same on both platforms, such as the key, these are printed in gray. Where the keys used are different on each system, I show the Macintosh keys in magenta and the PC equivalents in blue. So, if the shortcut used is Command (Mac) and Control (PC) this appears abbreviated in the text as: and .

As with the CS4 book, this version has been re-edited to put most of its emphasis on the Photoshop tools that are most essential to photographers as well as all that's new in Photoshop CS5. There is also a Photoshop for Photographers Help Guide on the DVD that accompanies this book, where you will find a lot of extra material with descriptions of all the tools and Photoshop panels. Just load the DVD into your computer, or for improved performance copy the contents across to your hard drive. Then double-click on the welcome.htm file to launch the DVD contents welcome page into your default web browser.

Figure 1.1 shows an example of the Tools and Panel page that's included in the Web-based DVD Help Guide. From there you can then visit the various sub-sections. For example, in the Tool Panels section you can click on a tool icon to be taken to a page that contains a complete, illustrated description of what each tool does. In the other sections, you'll find descriptions of the Photoshop panels, layer styles, plus a guide to all the keyboard shortcuts that are in Photoshop, Camera Raw and Bridge. There is also a whole chapter on digital capture and how digital cameras work, a chapter on sharpening scanned images in Photoshop, plus a copy of Chapter 12 on color management. These are available as PDF documents which can be read and printed out using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader