In Focus Vol. 3 No. 12

New Book: The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Is it worth upgrading to Photoshop CS4? The answer to that question will depend partly on who you ask. According to photographer/teacher/author Derrick Story, if you already use Lightroom or Aperture to organize your images, perhaps you might not need to upgrade to Photoshop CS4. But, he says that if you haven’t yet established a good system of organizing and managing your images, then the upgrade to Photoshop CS4 may be well worth the investment.

Story explains all the reasons why in his slim, easy-to-read new book The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers published by O’Reilly Media. Story will also be discussing his thoughts during a webcast and online Q&A forum sponsored by Safari Books Online on Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 10:30 a.m. EST.

In the 190-page book, Story walks you down the path of best practices, zeroing in on those features in Photoshop that photography pros will use most often. His goal is to help photographers feel less overwhelmed, more confident, and more productive.

While working on the book, Story landed an assignment to work in the Main Press Center at the Beijing Summer Olympics. Sponsored by Kodak and Apple, his job was to help photographers manage their work in the digital photography lab.

“I was fascinated by the various workflows photographers had cobbled together over the years. Those using Photoshop rarely took advantage of its bundled tools such as Photo Downloader, Bridge, and Adobe Camera Raw,” he explains. “Instead, they often dragged the contents of their memory cards to the computer desktop, where they proceeded to open the pictures directly in Photoshop and try to sort out the shoot from there.”

In the guide, Story shows how to use Camera Raw to make color and tone adjustments, perform black-and-white conversions, set up batch processing, and make localized corrections. For images that need to be perfect, he provides 18 Photoshop recipes for such tasks as portrait retouching, correcting architectural distortions, retrieving a blown-out sky, creating a virtual custom matte, and panorama merging.

Story is a staunch advocate of printing your best work, noting that “you can’t really evaluate an image until you see it on paper. By studying the subtleties in print, you’ll often find ways to improve your photograph.”

The book discuss monitor calibration, the ten steps to making a beautiful print, and includes reference tables for resolution and selecting the right paper surface for different types of images. The book lists for $24.99 and is available through O’Reilly Media or Amazon.com.