The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book

This is a great book for Photoshop. I own several Photoshop books and this one is by far the best I have read so far. From the title you might think it is just for advanced users, since it seems to be rather specialized. Even the author seems to think only experienced users will read the book. That is all wrong.
By the time you have finished a third of this 250 page book, you will not only know the layers palette (there is a great diagram on page 6), and the layers menu. He sets out his idea of the thirty essential tools, commands, palettes, and menus that you will use most often (with shortcuts) all in easy to refer to tables on pages 35-41. There are some more tables for easy reference back in chapter 1.

If you do the exercises, in that same first third of the book you will have experimented with the creation, duplication, deletion, manipulation, and grouping of layers (of course), but also color correction, techniques for selecting objects; cutting, copying, pasting, and moving objects; color balance; and most importantly how all that can be organized with the use of layers. The rest of the book explores other aspects of Photoshop all in the context of layers.
What makes this book worth five stars is that he very clearly explains not only what is being done, but also the logic of what is being done. He uses layers to organize his work and explains this workflow method in some detail. Someone just starting with Photoshop could use this book to keep from falling into some bad habits that come from poking around, which is what some of the Photoshop books with more general titles seem to do.
The author does not take on too much, but enough to do anything you would normally want to do as a photographer. He also gives you the background from which you can explore beyond the book.

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