Great Books on Photoshop and Digital Imaging

I've listed some of my favorite Photoshop books below, along with my perspective on why they're useful and what they'll help you learn. If you plan on buying them, please use the links below and we'll get a few dollars to help defray the cost of publishing DPS. These aren't the only good books on Photoshop, but most of the others either spend most of their time on fancy graphics effects or document dozens of commands you don't really need to know--which makes it hard to learn the ones you do.

	Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2: If you're curious about using Raw files, or you're already shooting them and want to make the most of Photoshop's newest built-in Raw converter, this is the book to get. Bruce Fraser is not only a Photoshop guru, but has pried into every nook and cranny of Adobe's Camera Raw to provide you with everything you need to know to use it to get great images from your specific camera.
	Dan Margulis' LAB book is packed with lots of other goodies including sections on using LAB to color correct skintones, fix images which require massive color changes, and quite a few good general purpose Photoshop tips. As always, there is plenty for the advanced user, including sophisticated use of channels and blending modes, while the cookbook approach makes a large portion of the book accessible to anyone willing to spend some time with the book and a couple images. I'm incredibly happy I read it as it will save me many hours in processing landscapes and portraits.
	Photoshop CS2 Artistry, Haynes. This is my all time personal favorite Photoshop book, revamped for Photoshop CS2. Like many Photoshop books it has a large section which reviews the important commands. Unlike other authors, though, Barry Haynes doesn't bother to explain all the commands, just a subset that will get the job done. However, for Photoshop that subset is still a staggering number. That is where the second half of the book comes in. Haynes presents sample images in chapter after chapter of practical 'how-to' sections. Rather than forcing you to learn obscure commands in a vacuum, you can easily flip through the colorful table of contents looking for a sample image that has the same issues as your image. Then turn to that chapter and see how he deals with it. Frankly, if your images are half as bad off as some of the ones he repairs you probably need a book on photography--so you'll find that you can pick and choose a subset of the tools he provides. But by showing you how to recover from many serious image short-comings he gives you the confidence to tweak your own images.
	Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers, by Martin Evening. Despite the title, this book is about a great deal more than Photoshop. It covers the gamut from digital input sources through to file formats. That may or may not be of interest to you. But the bulk of the book is a very extensive overview of Photoshop and its tools from the perspective of the photographer. While it has less detail in its coverage of some of the major tools than Haynes or Blatner & Fraser it provides a broad perspective without being too much of a "kitchen sink" introduction.
	Real World Photoshop CS2, Blatner & Fraser. This book has grown with each release and now is a virtual encyclopedia of Photoshop. That is mostly a good thing as in a single volume you can learn everything you need to know and more about Photoshop. However, the sheer volume of information is a little daunting and the user needs to pick out the sections that are really important to them.
	The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby. If you like step by step "cookbooks" Kelby's book is one of the best I've read on Photoshop. It covers dozens of practical topics, from fixing up faces to color correction. However it doesn't have as much background material on why the techniques work, so if you're interested in the theory you might prefer one of the other books on this list.
	Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, Dan Margulis (****). ICC is right up there with Raw mode as an important technology that has gotten used and then over-used as a solution for nearly everything. Dan Margulis has been color correcting images since before most folks knew what a digital darkroom was. He has a healthy scepticism for ICC/ICM systems as a replacement for a fundamental technical understanding of color and of ink. His work is of more value for those producing CMYK prints or doing pre-press than for those who have the luxury of staying in RGB for their entire workflow, but in either case you'll learn something about color and learn to view ICC solutions as more of a tool and less of a panacea when it comes to color. This book is listed last because unless you do a lot of pre-press I don't think it is at all essential, but it is unique and informative on the difficult topic of color. Many pre-press pros still do color management 'by the numbers' and this book explains why and how.