Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Accessible, concise information
Comment: Scott Kelby uses an easy style to get the information he wants to present across to the reader. It may not be for everyone but it made the material more accessible for me. I was able to quickly absorb a lot of information. I read the entire book first and now I am going back and doing the excersizes. I have been using Photoshop for several years but I have not used channels until now. Recommended.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A must for photo compositing, but not much else.
Comment: I've had Katrin Eismann's book Photoshop Masking & Compositing (VOICES) for about a year before finally seeing this in a bookstore. I had read several unflattering reviews of it, and one positive one which sparked my interest in it. That review mentioned it offered advice about channel masking Eismann's didn't. This proved true.
Esimann's book, although a superb one in its own right lacks one method of using channels for mask which is completely essential: combining channel masks. She does cover it, but for some reason the way in which she does is either completely baffling or a different and unnecessarily complicated method of doing it.
Kelby's book here covered that method with good detail and without any confusion. I bought the book for this reason alone.
There is other information in it which is useful as well most notably, keeping an object's original shadows. But for anyone not interested in using Photoshop for composites, this book has almost no, if any value.
Most of the complaints I see in other reviews of this book are about Kelby's lack of explaining the settings he uses. This can be easily overlooked if you have a good understanding of most of Photoshop's adjustment features. I personally was easily able to fill in the blanks Kelby left but I can definitely see how a beginner would be completely lost reading about setting blend slider settings and using the displace filter.
My only real complaint is Kelby never goes into much detail about anything. He says what things do, and how they're done in as few words as possible. Esimann on the other hand goes into nearly pornographic details about every topic and concept she mentions. A combination of these two books is all one should ever need for masking and compositing in Photoshop.
The bottom line:
If you're familiar with Photoshop and are serious about photo compositing, buy this and Esimann's book immediately. If you're still learning the program and have only a passing interest in composites, you'd be far better off looking for something else more tailored to your interests because it holds almost no value otherwise.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a very good start
Comment: This is a very good start to understanding what photoshop's channels can do to improve your photographs. Be prepared to give up a lot of your spare time revisiting old photographs that you will want to rework. After this book, if you want deeper understanding, follow Scott's advice and buy Photoshop LAB Color by Dan Margulis.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Photoshop Channels so much fun to use once you have discovered how to use them accordingly !
Comment: I found this book to be incredibly useful to me not having much knowledge on how to use channels in Photoshop.... defenately gives you so much more possibilites to expand your range of creativity and use of Photoshop may it be on your digital camera pictures or digital creative images of your own. I found this book to be very practical and not just "theoritical", it's fully illustrated with "tutorial" examples on how to use the type of channels depending on the result required in your image(color change,fast selections,sharpening, contrast.. and so on and that all with the use of channels)...which does help you work more efficiently and faster! and you can even download the examples of this book's tutorials (website link given to grab the images to work on) and follow the tutorials step by step on your own computer. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more on the subject.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best $20 I have ever spent
Comment: I am a Graphic design student and consider myself in the upper amatuer catagory, before reading this book I knew how the channels worked and how to make basic masks. This book shows you how to make very complex masks very quickly, as well as grayscale conversions, spot colors and much more. Very easy to read compared to other books. Bar none the best $20 I have ever spent.
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