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A Book on General Image Editing Concepts?
halftrack asks: "Someone I know wanted 'Photoshop for Dummies' for Christmas because she wanted to learn how to use it properly (who hasn't struggled trying to draw a simple line?) However, having a strong disliking for any sort of vendor lock-in I went searching for a book that would teach image editing without tying it too strongly to Photoshop (or Gimp for that matter). However, all my searches turned out blank. Thus I was wondering if there exists such a book, or is the field too diverse? The ideal would be a (thick) book that would cover the basic concepts (layers, paths, selections, channels etc.,) before presenting how these concepts are implemented in different applications. Such a book should provide the reader with a portable skill-set and give her/him the ability to objectively choose the right tool for the job, at the right cost. Does this book exist?"
...so it would probably be just silly to teach it without teaching to a specific program. If you're going to learn by doing, you have to do it as you go along, and to do that, it has to be taught to the program. You can't teach digital image editing in the abstract any more than you can teach painting without ever picking up a brush. Start off with a book for whatever program you feel comfortable with, and then go from there. It shouldn't be too hard to transtition from one to the other, but it's better to have a solid basis in one program than some abstract ideas with nothing to tie it to.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
Image editing isn't like databases, where there's an abstract theory behind the implementations. There's Photoshop and there are clones of Photoshop. The "basic concepts" you mention are mostly things Adobe invented and GIMP, err, "innovated".
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You have a friend who wants to learn Photoshop, so instead of finding a good Photoshop book, you're on a quest to find something to find a book that teaches graphics editing without actually teaching it.
Forget the "lock-in" nonsense. Every editing program rips Photoshop, as it is the gold standard for such programs.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If she is thinking about persuing a professional career in graphical editing, Photoshop is it.
The only reason I could think of to look at the other apps/books is if and only if this is for personal use only.
1;
It's not diverse at all; if you're going to do image editing/manipulation, there are only really four or five programs out there 'worth their salt', depending of course on what your primary motivations are.
Photoshop, Illustrator, Xara, Paintshop Pro, and a few others.
Notice GIMP isn't listed; not because it isn't any good, but because it hasn't been vetted, or 'peer reviewed' by an industry for several generations.
If your friend wants to use Photoshop, then get a book pertinent to Photoshop.
If later Xara or Illustrator or something else is more pertient, then get that book; the generalities learned in Photoshop will still be relevant, but the specifics will need detailing. It is like you trying to learn Java or Python or Ruby, and a friend saying, "Well, I don't want to get them a language specific tome, so I'll just get them a data structures book and a book on object oriented design and let them figure out the language by themselves."
You can learn about data structures and OOD/OOP using any language, and if you learn those concepts properly you can transplant them into any other language, so don't worry about your friend learning in Photoshop.
GPL Deconstructed
First of all, I think it is more lack of diversity that is causing it being hard to find generic books on the subject.
Next, while I'd prefer a book like you describe, for many people that is something that they are not even going to start on, they want something practical that allows them to get somewhat direct result. Many people I know who use either Photoshop or the Gimp while not being a graphics professional do so with some very specific purposes in mind (ie, my girlfriend uses it for manipulating and somewhat enhancing pictures of things she makes. While showing the concept behind layers was a kind of revelation to her, and is something she uses when it makes sense now, most things she does is simply following a 'guide' for getting a specific kind of effect or enhancement.
What did help her a lot more with getting a better result in the end was a semi professional camera and some practical photography experience and explanation, including some general theory of picture composition and lighting. Worked better because well, a better source is a great help in getting a better result (tho you can still mess it up badly later of course), is something of which cause and effect are relatively easy to demonstrate without needing too deep an understanding of the underlying theory, and of course it simply reduces the need to use things like photoshop beyond making a proper cut or maybe some sharpening or softening.
At any rate, I'd investigate what the intended use of the book is for your friend, your idea may be very good, but could as well end up on a bookshelf without ever serving its real purpose.
Yeah, you should probably steer clear of vendor lock in, especially since Photoshop is the industry standard for graphic design. Plus Adobe could fold at any second, especially since they bought their competitor Macromedia. *rolls eyes*
it's a sig, wtf?
Since day one of the consumer era of computing, the industry has insisted on teaching us which buttons to push instead of what the concepts behind them mean. For the most part this makes sense, because the average consumer could care less about the "why", wanting to know only the immediate "how". But not everyone is this way. Surely there's a small market out there for the "why" of computing.
Remember back to the 80's. Remember when people used to take classes in WordPerfect, or Lotus 1-2-3? Hell, I know one guy who actually got an A.S. degree in DOS! Ten years later that knowledge is worthless. Ten years from now these current classes in MSOffice will be worthless as well. Tears still come to my eyes whenever I see a 1980's office secretary passed out in the gutter and clutching a decrepit WP5.1 keyboard overlay...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
But you can. There are basic artistic concepts (Golden mean, rule of thirds, composition, balance, color theory, etc.) that apply just as well to charcoal, pencil, crayons, and finger paints. For that matter, they apply to photography. More specifically, there are basic techniques that apply no matter what image editor you are using.
What you can't do is a step-by-step guide covering every different way to achieve the same thing with different tools. You couldn't even cover all the different ways to do it with the same tool.
A book like the submitter suggested would be a valuable resource for learning what tools are available and why you would use them. Then you could refer to the manual to figure out how to do it with your particular tool. Being a Gimp user, that's basically what I do anyway.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
It's quite annoying to see people still trying to push Photoshop in some of the other posts. The submitter is asking for something else. If you only know Photoshop, then fine -- you just won't be helpful.
Personnaly, I've been playing with Corel Draw since version 1 or 2 and I've sticked with Corel since then. At some point, I've started using Photoshop because it was obviously more advanced in photo editing than Corel. But since Corel 7, I got back to Corel Photopaint (that's when they started copying Photoshop properly). Let me read any report, let me hear any professional, let me see any demonstration showing -- and even proving -- that Photoshop is better, I don't care. I think I even believe Photoshop is superior in many ways to Photopaint. But I'll keep using Photopaint because I like the tools, the interface and there's absolutely nothing as of now that I haven't been able to achieve with this software.
However, since Photoshop is the so-called industry standard, I'll also read documentation and tutorials on Photoshop. A lot of free tutorials can be found on the web and many are very useful and actually go behind the curtains, trying to explain what you want to achieve in the end, not only what button to press.
I think the point is: know your tool. When you experiment enough with a program, you'll get used to it and your skills can be ported to another software. And it also goes the other way around: things you'll learn on a different program will easily be reproduced on the program you use if you know it well enough. So that book on Photoshop may very well be useful, especially considering there'll be a lot more books on Photoshop and, consequently, more chances of finding a high-quality book.
You should be looking for a book that explains what you want to know and disregard what software they're using as an exemple. If they're really explaining things thouroughly and if you know your tools enough, it'll go like a charm.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
For a busy professional "how it works" is not really going to be in most books. Maybe the "geeky" edition. What most need to get work done (the point of most software) is the "what" aspects. What filter will lighten an underexposed picture.* The "how it works" aspect will not really help, and in fact will hurt by adding uneeded information (there is such a thing as too much of a good thing).
*The good books also show you the pros and cons as well.
"But you can. There are basic artistic concepts (Golden mean, rule of thirds, composition, balance, color theory, etc.) that apply just as well to charcoal, pencil, crayons, and finger paints. For that matter, they apply to photography. More specifically, there are basic techniques that apply no matter what image editor you are using."
I think some of you are forgetting two simple things. One not everyone's like you. Two the artistic endevours are a very hands-on field. Even if one's work is done in a computer, it's still "hands-on". Being creative means that every sense plays it's part. Sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher go on about color theory, and composition, and balance only goes so far. You need to be able to feel the process, and internalize it if you're going to be any good. As others have already pointed out. Once you've done so, you'll find that your knowledge and skill will cross-over more easily.
Not because of vendor lock-in - I really don't care about that and I do own a copy of Photoshop. But because it would be nice to understand the concepts. For instance, I'm told to blur something in step by step directions, but not told why blurring is a good idea and what kind of effects it performs.
Something that described how to draw or how to paint, but with emphasis on how to do it electronically instead of by hand.
I really think I'd have an easier time with something that was a blend of conceptual ideas (which are rare in these books) and concrete examples (that are everywhere, of course).
So if anyone can suggest such a book, I'd love to hear ideas.
D
This whole thread is a sad comment on the state of computing as a field of study. People confuse "Alt-key trivia" with understanding computers.
As a longtime photography enthusiast, I understand the concepts of gamma curves and color temperature. I know that I want detail in the shadows and in the highlights. Since I have deep knowledge of photography, it doesn't matter which program I use. I can produce "better" results in 5 minutes on any image editor than than someone who has read a photoshop book, but doesn't understand the concepts involved could in an hour.
I think the whole "windows vs. linux" problem is the same. I can switch freely between Mac, Windows and Linux without any loss of productivity because I understand conceptually what I'm doing.
[the summary]
"Someone I know wanted 'Photoshop for Dummies' for Christmas because she wanted to learn how to use it properly (who hasn't struggled trying to draw a simple line?) However, having a strong disliking for any sort of vendor lock-in I went searching for a book that would teach image editing without tying it too strongly to Photoshop (or Gimp for that matter)."
"It's quite annoying to see people still trying to push Photoshop in some of the other posts. The submitter is asking for something else. If you only know Photoshop, then fine -- you just won't be helpful."
Not as annoying as a submitter that ignores what the lady wants because of his ideology.
find a host, start a wiki and lets write the book. (When its done, we publish and split the profits among those involved ;-), no, not really)
/. who know these programs in and out. I am no GIMP expert, but I spent 12 years in printing doing photo retouching with Photoshop. I think I know it pretty well...Just from having done so much of this, I know the theory behind a lot of it. I would contribute to such a site. I get tired of having people ask me how to do something, or how something can be done, and of course they do not have Photoshop. They may have GIMP, but I can tell you the keystrokes in Photoshop, not GIMP. If I could point them to a place where they can learn the theory, with notes on the implementation by the different programs, it would be great. If you really are interested in this, then do more than just ask slashdot, set upa project and lets get started.
I know there have to be some folks here on
I reject your reality
You might find some vaguely useful thin books, but a "thick" book? No fucking way. You CAN NOT talk about image editing in detail without getting application-specific. Just like programming: what's the thickest "how to program" book you've ever seen that didn't talk about one language? You can only get so far with generic statements like "Make two arrays, then loop through one, and for each value, loop through all the values in the other array and see if any match."
Having used Photoshop for a few years (at the time) it was very easy for me to pick up The Gimp. A friend asked me some pretty hard questions once and I was able to do everything I needed with just a bit of poking. "Vendor lock-in" is not a big problem here. Yes, everything is slightly different, but the concepts are the same. A good Photoshop book *is* a good generic text on image editing because a) there are only so many tasks and b) everyone who makes "an image editing program" is going to more or less do things the Photoshop way, anyway. (For example, my friend was trying to select a weird thing, and I showed him how it was easier to select the things he didn't want and then invert the selection. Worked in PS, worked in the Gimp.) Yes, a Photoshop book will have a section on Photoshop's "healing brush" and no, the Gimp doesn't have it, but the sections on how to adjust color, do blurs, crop, resize, etc., will apply anywhere.
You might hit the used book stores and buy a book that was written for Photoshop 3 or 4--that'll cover all the bases but won't go into a ton of detail on the millions of new features that have been added since. Hell, the manual that came with Photoshop 2.5 will cover all the true image editing concepts, at least as far as photography goes--saturation, levels, etc. Newer versions added layers and masks for compositing, followed by tons of effects--shadows, bevels, effects, etc.
In this day an age, a "general editing concepts" book that doesn't talk about a program is nearly worthless. It'd be about as useful as a computer book that wasn't tied to any operating system--you can only talk about "manipulating files" for so long before you need to ask "do I use `mv` or a mouse?!?!?" to get some actual work done. Same here--talking about hue and saturation is great, but you need to be in the editor of your choice, WITH the hue/saturation dialog open, to *really* see what's happening. And you're not going to find that dialog without a) trial and error or b) an appropriate book. And if your friend wanted trial and error, they wouldn't be asking for a book.
All that said, if your friend asked for a Photoshop book, buy them a damn Photoshop book. Preferably one for the version they have. Have a Photoshop-savvy friend come with you to help you pick what looks like a good one. There are millions, from basic stuff, to every-feature-Photoshop-has, to ones that just cover all kinds of crazy effects (the WOW! books.) Get something good, but not *too* thick that it will be intimidating. In fact, too-thick books are just hard to deal with, physically. 8.5x11", 1 inch think, should be about right.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You're asking wrong questions. You're asking: "here's a list of them shiny tools; what can I do with them?" You should be asking: "here's a list of things I want to do with images; how do I do them?"
If you want to edit photos, the first item of any answer would be "get Photoshop". No ifs, ands, or buts. Then learn to use it. You probably want to buy Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction by Dan Margulis.
If you want to draw stuff, there's probably a different answer.
GIIMP-related books can be found at: http://www.gimp.org/books/. Better yet, go to its online tutorials at: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/, and just print them out on sheets of 3-hole punched paper and bind them into a book, and then download a copy of GIMP (from http://www.gimp.org/), burn it into a CD, and gift-wrap all the items and present the package as a Christmas gift for her.
t -old-movie-classics.html
Without using any dead-tree books, I taught myself how to use GIMP and other free graphic software like Pixia and ArtRage by consulting their "Help" sections and online tutorials. Here are some examples of what I, someone who has no formal computer graphics training, can do: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/2005/10/new-looks-a
Sun and Fun
If you aspire to be a hardcore Photoshop user, this book is probably the one you want above all others. It's not a step-by-step tutorial, a mere reference book, or a book that leads you through the tools and various functions of the software. Instead it discusses the fundamental concepts you need to know to use Photoshop to its fullest. ... Most of the book is still applicable since Photoshop today still has channels, alpha channels, paths, layers, and calculations. This book hasn't been updated since it was written in 1998, but it really doesn't need to be. It's not about how to use particular tools and new features. It's about how to think with Photoshop. ...
Unfortunatelly it is out of print:-(
If you are serious, go to Wikibooks.org, part of the Wikimedia project (same people who do Wikipedia). It looks like someone has already started a book on the GIMP. Maybe you could add to it or use some of it.
Just like programming: what's the thickest "how to program" book you've ever seen that didn't talk about one language?
Looking on the shelf behind me, that would be The Art of Computer Programming, weighing in at several thousand pages. Its use of a language was merely illustrative, and to make this point even clearer it uses a language which effectively doesn't exist outside the book.
A language may help make concepts clearer, but especially in programming it's both possible and desirable to learn to program generally, without learning a specific language.
It seems to me that you won't be able to find books that don't deal with specific apps like Photoshop at introductory levels. However, back when I first studied computer graphics in the early1970s, the standard high-level image processing/programming books were all vendor-neutral because there really was no standardization, and the books only standardized on one thing: low level code. The books focused on the image processing algorithms and the specifics of output were left up to you to adapt to your specific device. I only vaguely recall these books, but IIRC some early volumes used pseudocode, some used Pascal, and later these same volumes used C as that language became more widely accepted. So it seemed to me that while it might not be possible to avoid product-lockin at newbie levels, it might be possible, even preferable at higher levels.
Back in the early days of CG, there was one book, I forget the name, but it was one of those authoritative tomes that was referred to by its author's name. It was called something simple like "Digital Image Processing," because there really weren't any other major books on this new subject. I saw the latest edition a couple years ago as I was browsing in a bookstore, so I decided to go to Amazon and search for it, and I was surprised at what I found. Now most of the high-level books are like "Digital Image Processing with Matlab" or "Digital Image Processing in Java."
So perhaps this question is a bigger issue than just how to teach one newbie how to use GIMP instead of Photoshop. Is the Computer Science curriculum becoming too product-specific? Is there an advantage to learning algorithms separate from specific coding implementations in Java, Matlab, C, or whatever? Is there an advantage to learning something highly abstracted from coding specifics (like Knuth's pseudocode) or is everyone in such a rush to implementation that they have no time to really learn what they're doing, and they'd rather just cut and paste a few quickie algorithms?
The primary problem here: Improper exposure reduces the amount of information on the negative. Contrast adjustments can help, but only so much.
If a picture is improperly exposed you aren't using the full range of the film, since everything is moved towards white (overexposed) or black (underexposed) so you lose detail. If you take a low contrast image (dark or light) & adjust it to normal brightness, the low contrast will make it look washed out. Postprocessing of contrast can help, but you still are missing a considerable amount of information from the picture. It may not exactly look washed out, but it won't look quite right (although often more than good enough.) This goes back to what another poster said about fixing the source by learning photographic techniques.
With film, you tend to lose less information to underexposure than to overexposure but I think this is an artifact of the responsiveness curves of film, and less true of digital images.
An analagous situation is a picture taken at a low resolution. If you blow it up too much, it will look pixellated (not pixilated.) You can play with bluring & sharpening edges, but it'll never look like a picture taken at a higher resolution. I saw this in my pre-digital photo class with film. The difference between images taken with 35mm versus a 4x5 large format camera was astonishing. The textures were amazing in the prints from large format negatives.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
GIMP isn't listed; not because it isn't any good, but because it hasn't been vetted, or 'peer reviewed' by an industry for several generations.
Say what? Major movie studios use Cinepaint, a fork of GIMP.
Agreed.
Though a good book not for dummies that covers a lot of theory is Computer Graphics Prinicples and Practice by Foley and Van Dam.
I think the newer versions have C code instead of abstract code.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
It probably won't discuss "layering" etc but it will teach good composition and structure, some of the graphic design books might also say how to do blah in a software program, but given how frequently software programs change, why bother.
I did a graphic design course that focused on fundamentals - like how a normal person reads a page, and what shapes grab attention, etc that required all drawing ideas to be done with your hands - not your computer.
I backed this up with a lot of books on airbrushing, which do discuss layering, but you're layering stencils (or friskets) which is very similar to layering in photoshop. And some more books on good web page design and CSS which also discuss design, colour choice and layout skills.
Just raid the graphic design sections of an art shop or book shop. But the best design books I got were from the shop section of our National Art Gallery. Buy the book that makes sense to you - or the person you are buying for.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Our group at Intel has recently completed porting about 35,000 lines of
VAX/UN*X code to the PC/AT using Microsoft C, version 4. We had the usual
fun with longs and ints; learned that you need to be careful to declare
huge pointers properly; found that their implementation of stdio does not
handle writing the same file concurrently on different streams correctly
(not too surprising...); but found *no errors at all* in the compiler.
Every other piece of microcomputer software should work this well.
What a wonderful, wonderful world it would be....
Andy Wilson
Intel Corp., MS JF1-58
Hillsboro, OR. 97123