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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?"
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
There are tons of filters for image processing, but I'll be damned if I know what they all mean. Instead of telling us which buttons to push in Photoshop, maybe they could stop and tell us the concepts behind them. What exactly is a convolution matrix? What is an unsharp mask? What's a gaussian blur? What is laplace edge detection? Etc, etc.
Filters are but one example. I would also like to know how to lighten an underexposed picture without making it look washed out. And other things like that.
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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?
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.