"?if you want a wide?ranging overview of what Photoshop offer, this is the ideal read." (Photoshop Creative, September 2006)

Packed with essential explanations, color graphics, tips, and how-to steps, this A-to-Z reference covers hundreds of Photoshop CS2 tools and techniques in alphabetical order using full-color illustrations and screen shots. Author Stephen Romaniello illustrates everything from color modes, concepts, file formats, file saving, filters, history, and icons to menu items, palettes, preferences, terminology, tools, and navigation. The step-by-step techniques describe how to achieve a specific result, such as actions and automations, alpha channels, color correction, and color management. It features definitions and examples of coverage of layers, painting, photo retouching, quick mask, scanning, selections, sizing and transforming, and advanced layer techniques. It also addresses advanced topics such as adjustment layers, clipping groups, compositing, difficult selections,and much more.

If you prefer to see what things look like and how to perform a task, instead of just being told, this is your ideal A to Z reference. Part I shows every Photoshop CS2 tool and how to use it. Part II provides step?by?step instructions for more than 130 key tasks and techniques. Both are arranged alphabetically and illustrated in full color. It?s the ultimate Visual resource ? you?ll see!

• Each tool and technique illustrated in color
• Alphabetical listings for easy reference
• Step?by?step instructions for performing dozens of tasks
• A comprehensive guide for visual learners

A Visual guide to

• Identifying and using each Photoshop CS2 tool
• Fine?tuning color, brightness, contrast, and exposure
• Automating various image adjustments
• Converting bitmaps to halftones or RBGs to CMYKs
• Applying more than 15 different filters
• Working with type in illustration

Stephen Romaniello is an artist, educator, and writer. He began his career in graphics in 1980 as a production artist and typesetter; soon he was promoted to designer and then art director. In 1982, he became a partner in Armory Park Design Group. Three years later he founded Congress Street Design, a full?service design firm. In 1987, at the beginning of the digital revolution in graphics technology, he purchased his first computer. Stephen accepted a faculty position in 1990 in the Advertising Art program at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, with the intention of developing a state?of?the?art digital graphics program. He served as department chair of the renamed Digital Arts Department for eight years.
Stephen has developed curriculum and training materials for many mainstream graphics programs and has offered seminars at the Maine Photographic Workshops, the League for Innovation, and the National Business Media. A certified instructor in Photoshop, he currently teaches digital art courses at Pima Community College in Arizona. He is the co?author of Mastering Adobe GoLive 4 with Molly Holtschlag and the author of Mastering Photoshop 6, Photoshop 7 Savvy, Photoshop CS Savvy, and Photoshop CS2 Savvy, all published by Sybex. His column, ?The Digital Eye,? appears monthly in the magazine Digital Graphics. Romaniello is the founder of Gorilla Geeks, a company that offers onsite training and consulting throughout the country. His home and studio are in Tucson, Arizona.

If you prefer to see what things look like and how to perform a task, instead of just being told, this is your ideal A to Z reference. Part I shows every Photoshop CS2 tool and how to use it. Part II provides step-by-step instructions for more than 130 key tasks and techniques. Both are arranged alphabetically and illustrated in full color. It’s the ultimate Visual resource - you’ll see!
* Each tool and technique illustrated in color
* Alphabetical listings for easy reference
* Step-by-step instructions for performing dozens of tasks
* A comprehensive guide for visual learners

A Visual guide to
* Identifying and using each Photoshop CS2 tool
* Fine-tuning color, brightness, contrast, and exposure
* Automating various image adjustments
* Converting bitmaps to halftones or RBGs to CMYKs
* Applying more than 15 different filters
* Working with type in illustration

Packed with essential explanations, color graphics, tips, and how-to steps, this A-to-Z reference covers hundreds of Photoshop cs2 tools and techniques in alphabetical order using full-color illustrations and screen shots. Author Stephen Romaniello illustrates everything from color modes, concepts, file formats, file saving, filters, history, and icons to menu items, palettes, preferences, terminology, tools, and navigation.

• Step-by-step techniques describe how to achieve a specific result, such as actions and automations, alpha channels, color correction, and color management
• Features definitions and examples of coverage of layers, painting, photo retouching, quick mask, scanning, selections, sizing and transforming, and advanced layer techniques
• Also addresses advanced topics such as adjustment layers, clipping groups, compositing, difficult selections,and much more

Very good for beginners.
This is a perfect book if you are a beginner with Photoshop.
It is full of good images and step by step actions.
If you prefer a book for beginners and avanced users, take a look in the books by Scott Kelby.

Thorough - awesom
This book is awesome - I just bought it (April 2008). I bought Scott Kelby’s Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers a while back and swear by it - but wow - Photoshop CS2 Visual Encyclopedia is even better. It has so much more content - it is chucked full of tips and techniques in a very well organized manner. While I’m working in CS3, obviously the content and tips and techniques are still very useful and valid. I’m a professional photographer and would highly recommend this book to anyone using CS2 or CS3.

NEVER ORDERED THIS ITEM
I never ordered this item. I ordered DREAMWEAVER VISUAL.
YOU SENT ME TWO OF THESE PhotoShop Visuaol books and I returned them.
I called to no avail.
It is STILL on my charge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Does anyone there take responsibility to straighten out problems?
"Customer Service" truly is an oxymoron.

Very pleased...
The Adobe Photoshop CS2 Visual Encyclopedia is of a great help as a by the mac side reference look around something you forgot or heard about and are not sure how to proceed book. It is visual, for as there are many intelligences, and it goes right to the point. And, as every thing else on life, it does not tell you what the end is going to be.

Other books are better
I bought this book based on the reviews I read on this website. I also got 3 other books: The photoshop cs2 book for digital photographers by Scott Kelby, Photoshop masking and compositing by Katrin Eismann and Photoshop cs2 killer tips by Scott Kelby and Felix Nelson. The visual encyclopedia is the worst of the four. Scott Kelby is a photoshop wizard who is also a very clear and often amusing writer. I’d buy any of his books. Katrin Eismann’s book, masking and compositing, is pretty much indispensible if you are going to be seriously manipulating and compositing images. She has years of experience and her writing is in depth and easy to understand.
The Visual Encyclopedia was put together by about 30 people with Stephen Romaniello as the Author. He is a very bad, very boring, very confusing writer. Take this sentance for example:"To finish the process, you need a brush tool and a black or white Forground color swatch to finish the process." That’s from page 304, one of maybe 20 pages that I’ve read. In addition to several credited editors there are also 3 people credited for ’quality control’. You could learn from this book but you won’t learn much. A true photoshop encyclopedia would require volumes of books much thicker than this one. This book barely scatches the surface. Camera Raw is covered in 4 picture filled pages. Unless you like reading bad textbooks or are looking for new ways to fall asleep, I would not buy this book. I wish I never had.

An Extremely Useful Format
Most computer books are either a reference guide in a dictionary like alphabetical format, or else they are a tutorial where they start with a blank screen and tell you to do this, do that until you have used most of the functions avaiable in the software package.

This book is different, an interesting and useful combination of the reference format and the tutorial format. Basically it is a reference book, but then each subject is treated in tutorial format. The book is broken into two major parts: tools (about one third of the book) and techniques. Within each part it is arranged alphabetically:

A - Annotations: Attach a Note
B - Background Color
- Blur Tool
- Burn Tool
and so on.

Reading the table of contents will give you a pretty good idea of what’s included in the book, and then you can go to the particular entry as you need to do something. This is a format that works for me. As the Visual Books tag line says: ’Read Less - Learn More.’ Sooner or later you will have read about and used all the tools and techniques, and it’s almost painless to learn what you need as you need it.

An Extremely Useful Format
Most computer books are either a reference guide in a dictionary like alphabetical format, or else they are a tutorial where they start with a blank screen and tell you to do this, do that until you have used most of the functions avaiable in the software package.

This book is different, an interesting and useful combination of the reference format and the tutorial format. Basically it is a reference book, but then each subject is treated in tutorial format. The book is broken into two major parts: tools (about one third of the book) and techniques. Within each part it is arranged alphabetically:

A - Annotations: Attach a Note
B - Background Color
- Blur Tool
- Burn Tool
and so on.

Reading the table of contents will give you a pretty good idea of what’s included in the book, and then you can go to the particular entry as you need to do something. This is a format that works for me. As the Visual Books tag line says: ’Read Less - Learn More.’ Sooner or later you will have read about and used all the tools and techniques, and it’s almost painless to learn what you need as you need it.

Made me an instant PS expert
This book is absolutely awesome. I’m just an amateur who uses Photoshop on digital photos, and the beauty of PS has always been that just about anyone can use it at a comfortable depth -- relying on the adjustment tools and not doing anything too tricky. However, this book give me an instant boost to several levels above where I was operating previously. Now I’m working with layers, masks, and channels, doing color replacements and composites that I never would have considered or attempted before...and all I had to do was go to the technique in which I was interested and simply go through the illustrative steps. I’m an instant expert, so to speak, and my creativity has been unleashed. Amazing!

Made me an instant PS expert
This book is absolutely awesome. I’m just an amateur who uses Photoshop on digital photos, and the beauty of PS has always been that just about anyone can use it at a comfortable depth -- relying on the adjustment tools and not doing anything too tricky. However, this book give me an instant boost to several levels above where I was operating previously. Now I’m working with layers, masks, and channels, doing color replacements and composites that I never would have considered or attempted before...and all I had to do was go to the technique in which I was interested and simply go through the illustrative steps. I’m an instant expert, so to speak, and my creativity has been unleashed. Amazing!

Awesome, definitive reference
This book is a heavy volume, but I venture to say that it’s just about worth its weight in gold. It contains nearly 400 pages of large-format, step-by-step, illustrated references to Photoshop tools and techniques. Every major tool is here, along with scores of easy-to-follow techniques -- all in color, with numbered steps. An added bonus is the multitude of useful cross-references that appear in nearly every spread. All of this works together to create a supremely useful reference for quick, accessible Photoshop solutions. Every Photoshop user would benefit from this superb publication, and for students, beginning or intermediate users, or those getting acquainted with CS2, it’s a "must have."

Awesome, definitive reference
This book is a heavy volume, but I venture to say that it’s just about worth its weight in gold. It contains nearly 400 pages of large-format, step-by-step, illustrated references to Photoshop tools and techniques. Every major tool is here, along with scores of easy-to-follow techniques -- all in color, with numbered steps. An added bonus is the multitude of useful cross-references that appear in nearly every spread. All of this works together to create a supremely useful reference for quick, accessible Photoshop solutions. Every Photoshop user would benefit from this superb publication, and for students, beginning or intermediate users, or those getting acquainted with CS2, it’s a "must have."