Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature,   ISBN:9780321534163

Customer Rating: 

The book presents various layer applications in a clear user friendly representation. A very good learning tool.

Customer Rating: 

This is the book I wish I would have had the first day I started using Photoshop. I was given a copy of Photoshop CS3 for my birthday a couple of years ago and thought I could learn using the software by just tinkering with it. To my detriment, the tikering led to absolute frustation and I stopped using the program altogether for an extended period of time. A few months later, I decided that I would take another crack at it and purchased the Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team. Although I found the tutorials in the book helpful, I felt that it failed to explain the reasoning behind the steps that needed to be taken in order to accompish a certain effect. There was way too much material cramped into the book without any logical order for a total beginner to digest. Matt's book on the other hand was very refreshing, no enlightening!! A must for someone just starting in Photoshop. He is very humorous and explains "the hows and the whys" of Layers which is absolutely fundamental to learning PS. This book has given me a new hope since Matt has shown me the ways of the force.

Customer Rating: 

I found "Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Power Feature" to be a well-written and clearly illustrated explanation of layers. It clearly explained layers, and gave many savvy tips on how to use them. A very valuable book.

Customer Rating: 

I normally skim and flip through books on photoshop... so many, so little time, so much complexity. This book is complex but very practical and every page has something useful.

Customer Rating: 

Layers
by Matt Kloskowski

This book dives right in with a short but sweet introduction that the author himself promises to keep brief. Matt gets right down to business by organizing the book into 9 chapters devoted entirely to working within Photoshop's layers functionality. Each chapter's introduction also gets right to the point, so when the time comes to need the information, the reader can easily find out what each chapter will cover. The digital files are available online for following along. His instructions are very clear and to the point. At the end of each chapter there's a bunch of "How Do I..." questions that pertain to that specific chapter.

I love how the individual steps are very clearly defined by way of a colored bar.

Matt's included a couple of pages at the end of the book to learn more, appropriately entitled "How Do I Learn More From Matt?". This is a great way to find out other ways that he teaches Photoshop. For example, I learned that he also creates weekly podcasts for both Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Killer Tips.

Looking forward to the day that I can say I've gone through every exercise in the book! By then he'll probably have a new edition ready. He's already written seven. Look for Matt in Photoshop User Magazine as well.