My background in photography is that of a complete layperson. I started out in middle school with the Kodak equivalent of a Polaroid. Eventually I graduated to a 35mm point and shoot. Following that was an Olympus D-490Zoom. All cameras that didn’t allow for a lot of tinkering with settings. Since that was all I knew, I still took pictures that way when I moved on to the more capable Canon Powershot G5. It has full control over aperture, f-stop, etc. But I was very intimidated by trying those kinds of things out. Over the years I had managed to get a few pictures that I was really proud of, and even some that garnered compliments from total strangers.

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Photography forums are littered with posts from rookies asking about filters and other effects. Almost immediately someone will post “that’s easy to do in Photoshop,” without a link or any other explanation. For a Photoshop AND photography rookie like myself, that makes it doubly frustrating. Luckily, help is just one book away.

“The Photoshop Show Starring Russell Brown” is a timeless book with techniques that will help you regardless of which Photoshop version you might have. As someone who has only used Photoshop to edit images for websites, this book was a helpful glimpse into the full power of what the program offers. Brown covers such topics as Channels and Blending, Layer Masks, Filters and Patterns in a way that makes it very easy for the novice to ‘get’ the concept being illustrated. The enclosed CD offers sample files for all of the exercises, which is invaluable for retaining the skills this book teaches. Several chapters are also devoted to transforming an image to create a completely new work. Again, all samples are included on the CD so that you can get the most out of the exercises.

I still consider myself a Photoshop novice, but this book has enabled me to do much more with photos than I could before I read it. I highly recommend it for photography and Photoshop novices alike.