Adobe Photoshop CS3 Studio Techniques came to be when the author, while looking at all the Photoshop books at the local chain bookstore, realized that there were fundamentally two types of Photoshop books. First there are the "cookbooks" that taught you Photoshop in a step-by-step manner. These, which while showing how to do something, never seem to explain why you should do these steps in enough detail to make you feel you understood. Secondly, there are the technical books that are so technical that, unless you knew Photoshop, they were too hard to understand and left you frustrated.

Enter Adobe Photoshop CS3 Studio Techniques. The goal here is to explain, in everyday language, how to use Photoshop, taking everything from the simplest feature to the most advanced technique an distilling it down so that you can understand it. As an instructor, the author has used this approach for many years and hundreds of seminars and workshops. His goal with this book is to take you from "going through the motions" to "at last, I really understand." The book is 592 pages long and divided into 16 chapters (there are five bonus chapters on the CD which required no update for CS3 and so I will concentrate on the 16 printed chapters and list the bonus material below). It is also divided into three basic areas.

Working Foundations

Chapter 1, "Tools and Palette Primer," is all about effectively managing your workspace and finding your way around all of the features that has made Photoshop the industry standard that it is. Here you will learn about the palettes, tools, and panels that you will be working with in this book.

Chapter 2, "Selection Primer," will take you through what many consider to be one of the most central techniques to Photoshop success: the ability to make selections. This is because when you want to be able to edit a portion of an image you must first select it. Here you will work with the marquee tools, lasso tools, crop tools, selection tools, magic wand tool, and others.

Chapter 3, "Layers Primer," examines what is another fundamental Photoshop device - Layers. The Layers palette is what helps you keep everything organized. While on the surface it may appear to be complex, it really is very simple to learn. Throughout this chapter the author shows you how to use Layers while teaching you all sorts of tricks that will prove invaluable later in the book.

Production Essentials

Chapter 4, "Optimizing Grayscale," explains that when working with grayscale, your adjustments and corrections are tonal in nature and therefore you only have to deal with the brightness and contrast of the image. Here you will learn about all of Photoshop's tools for working with these tonal adjustments which will be of use as well later when you get into working with color.