I have to admit to a peculiar affection for PeachPit’s Wow! series of books. It was with their help that I first learned how to make some decent-looking graphics in Painter and Photoshop.
      One of the early Illustrator Wow! books was a huge help in gaining some understanding of how to make some usable marks in the previously alien sphere of vector drawing. And the CorelDRAW Wow! Book showed me that, despite that product’s most unMac-like interface and terminology, remarkable things could be made in it as well.

Big Book, Larger Program
The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book is thicker than its predecessor, which was about version 5.5. The size reflects the nature of this latest version of the graphics tool few designers can do without. Photoshop 6 was the single biggest, and most important, upgrade in the history of the program and its has become quite a production powerhouse for print and web graphics now.
      My favourite new Photoshop features are Shapes and Styles. Shapes are vector-based and they make Photoshop much more of a vector drawing program than it was previously. Many of the functions you might have once carried out in Illustrator you can now do in Photoshop with its shape tools and their options.
      Styles, or more properly Layer Styles, are an evolution of layer effects and allow you to use and create presets for styling type and forms, tweaking them to the n-th degree to suit each individual graphic. Both Styles and Shapes are nothing new to FireWorks users, but Photoshop 6 has given them a new level of sophistication and subtle control.

Show, Don’T Tell Me
Almost too much control. Call up the Layer Styles interface and the multitude of choices can be bewildering to a new user. That’s where The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book comes in. Its Anatomy of a Layer Style section shows you how the Wow Plastic Clear Blue style—included in the book’s CD—is broken down into all its elements, and thus how you can alter it to your own satisfaction.
      Clear blue plastic buttons have become a new web design staple since Mac OS X came out with its beautiful new Aqua interface, and The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book shows you how to make endless variations on the style, as well as supplying you with almost as many variants in the form of presets for Photoshop and ImageReady. The book has a double-sided sampler in the back as a hint of what lies within the CD.

All The Others Too
Photoshop 6 has much improved typesetting capabilities now, and not before time. Setting type well was a real chore in previous versions of Photoshop. Now the typesetting tools in version 6 share many of the same characteristics as those in InDesign, Adobe’s new generation DTP design tool.
      InDesign is an evolutionary new product for Desktop Publishing that promises to replace Quark in many print page layout offices. Many of the functions you have to buy as third-party plug-ins for Quark come built-in with Indesign. Its typesetting features are superb. Its PDF export, an extremely important feature nowadays, is excellent.
      And if you are a web designer transitioning to print design—as some are now given the downturn in web publishing in some areas—then InDesign’s interface will be logical and easy to use, and the price is so much more affordable than Quark XPress and all its plug-ins.

Typeset Like A Master
The best aspect of InDesign’s typesetting is the choice between its Single-Line and Multi-Line Composers. Photoshop 6’s equivalents are its Single-line and Every-Line Composers. InDesign users will know what is meant by that, but if not then this is where The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book again comes in.
      Page 295, Typesetting Options, is an excellent exposition of what Photoshop’s new type options mean and how to access them in version 6’s new toolbar and palette layouts. Subsequent pages go into how to further push the parameters, and add Layer Styles, for your typesetting.

All The Expected, Too
In common with previous Photoshop Wow! books, and their Painter, Illustrator and CorelDRAW companions, The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book covers many other more mundane aspects of the program in depth with copious quantities of full-colour illustrations, screenshots and detailed graphic expositions. That includes all the Photoshop tools like channel operations and masking that you know you should be using more but can’t quite get your head around yet—and I include myself and a number of graphic designer colleagues here.
      Since The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book, and Friends of ED’s new series on Photoshop, appeared in the bookstores, I have been reviewing my collection of Photoshop books, with a view to giving most of them away. There is more than enough in the Wow! Book and the FoED books to do me now.

In Summary
If you can only have one Photoshop 6 book this year, then The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book would have to be the best recommendation that can be made.

The Book:

• Title: The Photoshop 6 Wow! Book
• Authors: Linnea Dayton & Jack Davis
• Publisher: Peachpit Press
• Publication Year: 2001
• Pages: 472
• Illustrations: Monochrome
• CD: Mac and Windows
• ISBN: 0201722089
• Rating: 4.5

• Fundamentals of Photoshop
• Color in Photoshop
• Retouching & Enhancing Photos
• Combining Images
• Using Filters & Liquify
• Painting
• Type, Shapes, Paths & PostScript
• Special Effects for Type & Graphics
• The Web & Motion Graphics