This is a book that anyone who delves into the program Photoshop should have on their shelf. It's written simple enough for the novice user and has ample nuggets of information for the professional. The book being in full color is something unusual for Photoshop books too. Most have a section or two in color and the rest in black and white. Not this book, its color, cover to cover.

I love the way the book is broken up. It has the feel of a Photoshop textbook without the tests. The book starts out giving a brief overview of Photoshop's work environment and works into the different features.

I like the fact the book touches on some of the not so glamorous yet most important features, like the chapter on channels and the time saving capabilities of automation. The steps on modifying actions were easy to follow and helped me understand how to tweak some of my favorite actions. Something I'd wanted to do since I started using actions. Something else I had never really understood was using droplets. Basically it's a Photoshop action that you can create an icon for and put it on your desktop. Then whenever you need to call that action, instead of physically opening Photoshop and doing the action manually, you can drag your file/folder over the droplet icon and it will launch Photoshop and run the action for you. 

The book also covers some of the new stuff in CS2. The coolest is the new "vanishing point tool." With this new tool, you can take any image and in a few minutes put it on the side of a building or vanishing into the horizon. This is something that use to take anywhere from a half hour to many hours depending on how real the new perspective needed to look. All you have to do now is copy the item to be moved into the new perspective. Then take the image you want to apply the new perspective to and enter the vanishing point dialog box. There you draw a grid in perspective to how you want the copied image to look. You'll know when it's a good grid by the color of the grid. You need to keep adjusting the grid until it turns blue. Then paste the image into the grid. ITS MAGIC, ok maybe it's not magic but it sure feels like it.

Throughout the book there are small sections with the following titles to give you a heads up on what they're about. Tip, note and caution. They usually consist of 2 or 3 sentences but there are a lot of little bites of useful information in them. 

In the back of the book you'll find a gallery/tutorial section from some of the best digital artists around. I found this section really enjoyable.

The book was a joy to read with plenty of new information and a lot of information I had forgotten about. That's what makes this book so great. It truly has information for all. I would strongly recommend this book to any and all Photoshop enthusiasts. I give the book 5 out of 5 stars.