Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: I agree with everything already said about this book.
Comment: For me, this book was an excellent introduction to new techniques, subtle tricks and fine-tuning of techniques I thought I already knew, and a clear, usefully systematic review of things I did know.
Thank you Mr. Grey.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Near-Perfect Guide for Beginners
Comment: Photoshop CS3 Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide is the best Photoshop primer I've read yet. The author works through image adjustments in a very logical progression. He begins with very simple edits and works his way up to more complex fine-tuning. The instructions are both step-by-step and very clear. He also does an excellent job of explaining the "big picture" of why you want to make these adjustments and does not just turn you into a mouse clicker following steps by rote.
While no one book is going to tell you everything you could ever want to know about Photoshop, this is a fairly comprehensive tome. The entire workflow process is covered beginning with downloading files and sorting them in Bridge, all the way through printing. I would suggest using the "Look Inside" function to check the Table of Contents if you're interested in a complete list of the specific steps covered. The good news is that all the most common bases are covered, and covered well. If I could add one thing to this book, it would be a chapter or two on the basics of making adjustments in the LAB color space. For certain images, LAB will yield truly superior results, yet it receives no coverage in most Photoshop books. If you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace.
For those who own the CS2 edition of this book, you should be aware that this is largely unchanged. Most of the text is unchanged, the example photo are carried forward, etc. There is just enough new material to cover the new features in CS3. It's debatable whether the purchase is worth the money for roughly 30 pages of new material.
If this book has a weakness, it is that it doesn't really live up to its title. The book is not about workflow per se, but about all the steps that are part of a workflow. Only the first and the last chapters really focus on the aspect of trying to plan the workflow itself. This is no crime, I don't know if it's even possible to fill an entire book with workflow planning discussions without becoming ridiculously redundant and useless. But Tim Grey and his publishers chose to identify this as a workflow text and on that basis I think they have failed. If they had named the book "Photoshop CS3 for Beginners: The Digital Photographer's Guide" I would give it 5 stars and my highest recommendation. As it is, I'll still give it my highest recommendation for Photoshop novices as long as they realize that this book is really to help them with image editing skills much more than planning the workflow process itself.
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