The Adobe Photoshop CC Book by Scott Kelby - Review

Short Review: The Adobe Photoshop CC Book

I have watched a lot of Scott Kelby's YouTube videos, including his weekly show called "The Grid". I like his show and his guests. I have picked up a number of good tips from him such as the one that led me to purchase the Tether Tools Case Air. He's shown me a number of good ideas for using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. When he came out with this new Photoshop CC book I decided to try it. I was hoping to get even more cool tips.

I got this in January, 2017, from Amazon. It's a decent sized book, clocking in at 360 pages. Almost every page is split into two - images and screenshots on the inside of the page and text on the outside of the page. The text illustrates a concept and the images or screenshots show the steps or results of the steps.

Pros (or is it "prose"?)

The book covers probably everything you'd need to know to edit photographs using Adobe Photoshop. He concentrates on using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for the basic edits, and, in my opinion, rightfully so. I don't remember if he mentions it, but if you shoot RAW, you'll probably be working with greater bit depth which generally works better with the edits. The more you can do in ACR the better.

I liked his writing style and the book format. He doesn't waste a lot of space or writing. He provides a short explanation of a problem and how it can be addressed then explains the steps to accomplish the task. Not much nonsense. It makes for a book that can be a useful reference - if you need a refresher on how to do something you can turn to that section and you'll quickly get the instructions for completing the edit.

Most of the individual edits take only 1 or 2 pages including the images. There are some that span a few more pages.

He provides some quick tips at the end of each chapter that are usually a few sentences at most. These can include keyboard shortcuts.

The book is printed on nice, glossy paper. I think I only saw one or two spelling errors.

Cons

I only have one personal minor complaint about the book, and one comment.

My complaint may not apply to everyone and I also don't know that much can be done about it without making the book more expensive. I had problems seeing some of the details in some of the images with my old eyes. I don't think I would have had the same problem some years ago. If the images were larger, however, it could double the size of the book and that would make it even more expensive. The only suggestion I can offer is that maybe it'd be cool if all of the images were available online (he does have a companion website for the book but I haven't visited it - perhaps the images are already there).

My comment is also self-centered... I did read the book cover to cover, although I skimmed over the sections pertaining to portraits since I don't shoot them. I found that I already knew most of the material. I picked up a few things that were new but not many. I've been using Photoshop for a couple of years now and have watched a lot of videos plus I have the Martin Evening Photoshop CC book (the 2013 edition) so I've learned a lot about processing images. I was just hoping that I'd pick up even more "insider" tips.

The Bottom Line

I like this book a lot. There's a lot in it, Scott's writing style is easy to understand and follow. It doesn't cover every filter or every menu item, just the ones you're likely to use when editing a photograph. Note that it is listed as NOT targeting beginners so there are some steps he doesn't cover such as a lot of the preferences, how to use Adobe Bridge, etc.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants a thorough guide to Adobe Photoshop CC for editing photographs.