Book Review: The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Umpteen numbers of books gets flooded in the market on the wizardly Adobe Photoshop software, highlighting its unique features for enhancing your images. The latest book launched by O’Reilly, the publishers of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers and authored by Derrick Story has all the ingredients a typical Adobe Photoshop would offer.

What stands out is the unique feature of Photo download and Adobe Camera Raw application incorporated in it. Unlike other books on Adobe Photoshop which primarily focus on software tools for improving one image, this book dwells more on the advantage of using Photo downloading and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). The author makes an impressive presentation in its simpler and elaborate narration of applying CS4 to its optimum utilization. It goes on to explain right from importing images from the camera by using Photo download to defining pictures in A C R and then giving final touches in Photoshop.

Photo downloader helps the pictures open in Adobe Bridge, which I suppose most professional photographers might be familiar with for organizing and editing images. In CS4 the automatic Photo downloader can create two copies of each picture during the download process and one set of copies can be stored in an external drive attached to your computer, which works as additional backup, all in one go. Adobe Bridge acts as a sophisticated image browser and an effective photo management tool offering innumerable features such as collections, filters, thumbnails, a filmstrip, file properties, a keyword pane and much more. After organizing the first batch of images, one can review the shots in the overview, Photo-edit by sorting pictures and finally give rating to the pictures. Bridge CS4 has added features like smart collection that let you group images across folders and main advantage is that you can create folders according to the your rating assigned besides choosing your favorite images .

In the images editing section we have another important application that is ACR. It is a plug in that is bundled with Photoshop CS4. This is the most amazing software for image processing as it allows you to fine tune your pictures using adjustments tools such as Exposures, Fill lights, Brightness, and Saturation. ACR is not just to process RAW file but also to process JPEGs and TIFFs. ACR is non-destructive as the image that opens in this application saves all its meta- edit, thus protecting your images.

In advance ACR, if you shoot series of images under similar conditions you can use batch processing to adjust multiple pictures simultaneously. ACR tools have other features like Black and white conversation, spot removal, cloning and tonal and color adjustment with graduated filter tool. There some chapters giving some useful Photoshop recipes for Photographers and about using Photoshop to control printing. Photographers already using CS4 and for those who intends to use, this book would turn out to be a useful companion.