For those who want to learn to use Channels | The Photoshop Channels Book

Just a little too superficial | The Photoshop Channels Book | Scott Kelby

books:


	• The Photoshop Channels Book Scott Kelby Peachpit Press, 2006 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 54 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

At last!!

I've been waiting for this book for over a year, ever since it was first advertised with his PS for Photographers. I love channels and love what they can do. Finally a book that has all the basic information in one place. Other books just barely mentioned or gloss over channels.

Now I can wade through the last part and reread the first part of Dan Margulis' book, Photoshop Lab Color, with Kelby's book at my side. Thought it was very nice of Mr. Kelby to acknowledge Margulis's book and pioneering work on channels.

For those who want to learn to use Channels

I loved the format of this book and Mr Kelby's style of writing, albeit abbreviated by the format, shone through again. His disarming manner of writing and the succinct way in which steps were presented had me 50 pages into the book and wishing I had more time on my first sitting.

This book is not a philosophy of using Channels; it is a hands-on, step-by-step process where the reader learns some powerful and subtle ways to utilize channels. If you are looking for prose then this book isn't the Scott Kelby book for you. If, however, you want a book designed to teach you how to use channels and you want Scott Kelby's perspective interspersed with those seemingly quick-witted comments then this is the best book you can find right now.

The format was well thought out; it seems incredibly well suited to teaching an moderate to advanced PS user how to take advantage of channels and the design lends itself well to becoming a reference that should be on your shelf for years to come. The book itself is a very fast "read" due to the nature of small, paragraph-length steps and I found myself spending more time actually editing photos to reinforce what Mr Kelby was teaching than I did reading (to me that's a great thing to say about any book that aims to teach something - the learner spends time involved in his own learning process instead of spending more time reading about it what he should be doing).

If you are interested in expanding your PS skills by mastering the use of channels then do yourself a favor and pickup a copy of this book.

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Just a little too superficial

This is the book that seemed to never arrive. Announced last summer some time, many of us waited and waited, watching the delivery date recede. When it finally did arrive the book turned out to be just slightly disappointing.

Kelby seems to have committed to a book on channels and then realized he had to fill pages with nothing but techniques that somehow use channels. The result is a book that stretches to find a way to work channels into the discussion or veers off into little used techniques only because they make use of channels. How often will you work with spot color? Not unless you do prepress work for newspapers.

That said, the useful chapters are pretty useful. But if you ordered Dan Margulis's book on LAB color while you were waiting for Kelby to finish writing, you got the bible before you got the Cliff's Notes. Margulis does the heavy lifting. Kelby keeps it pretty light and breezy.

Some of the best stuff in here is about mixing channels or overlaying them to create better contrast or to control blown highlights etc. Doing that can create some side effects that are often corrected with a final layer blending technique called "Blend if". In the several cases where Kelby uses "blend if" he never tells you why he chose the settings he did, so his technique is really only useful if you want to correct the particular photo he uses as an example. Rather than teaching us about spot color, it would have been much more helpful if he had spent more time and ink teaching us the "why" of the blending technique.

I still found the book useful and enjoyable, and I still review it often just to make sure I completely grasp the techniques. I just wish Kelby had used the pages to go a little deeper into the useful stuff.

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Good but no cigar

Kelby's instruction is excellent. The utilization of channels transforms PS CS2 into an extremely easy, more accurate way of making selections. The only flaw is that you dl the photos used in the book from Kelby's site and they all contain a massive iStock banner over the images themselves. This makes it difficult in some cases, to obtain the desired result and in all cases is most disturbing. Too bad that an excellent book is ruined by such an easily correctible fault. Kelby should have eschewed the commercial advantage in order to make the book superb.

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Somewhat frustrated

Have you ever tried to use a PS filter, like "Colored Pencil", over a red channel of a duplicated background layer of a portrait psd file?

Well, I must comment that I was expecting something quite close to that, a kind of testimonial book written by an artist to share some of his trade secrets, similar to the books of Caponigro in his Adobe Master Class series or Maggie Taylor's wonderful Landscape of Dreams.

My mistake.

Nonetheless, in spite its more conventional and technical goals, The Photoshop Channels Book is a helpful, well written, easy to follow book and certainly a pleasure to read. It is certainly more about "alpha -channels" and related useful layer techniques than those applied directly to R,G,B channels to amplify artistic modes of expression.

Note about the style: Why is it that some Photoshop authors think they are some kind of TV comedians when they write technical books?

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