Photoshop is in people’s estimation the most advanced and best-developed professional level photo editing software. Its great power, however, can make it very complicated to use for all but the most essential tasks. There are many excellent resources for those who want to learn more about Photoshop and its uses ‘videos, online tutorials, forums, magazines, journals, and books. ‘Photoshop CS5 essential skills’ is one of the best book-length tutorials that I’ve come across thus far.

The book covers many Photoshop topics that are near and dear to all those who like to fiddle with digital photographs. It is divided into three thematic ‘modules’: foundation module, advanced skills module, and imaging projects module. Within each module there are several sections, such as ‘Workflow,’ ‘Raw Processing,’ ‘Selections,’ ‘Layer Blends,’ ‘Align and Blend Projects,’ and several others. The book is very well written, and very easy to go through.

As you might have expected from a book on photo editing, there are many nice large photographs, illustrations and screenshots throughout. They really help with the overall readability, and improve your ability to absorb the material. Overall, this is a very nicely designed book that is a pleasure to go through.

The book comes with an access to the website that contains over 10 hours of videos, as well as royalty-free high-resolution images. This is great improvement over the previous editions of this book, which instead included the videos on a DVD in a very inconvenient format. The videos are in general pretty good and very easy to follow. They are definitely well made and very pedagogical. The free images are really beautiful and definitely of pretty high quality.

Whatever your level of experience with Photoshop you’ll find a lot of interesting and valuable information in here. Even though the book contains several more advanced projects and topics, anyone with some knowledge of the basic Photoshopping will be able to go through all of it in a reasonable amount of time. The book can also serve as a reference for any of your own projects.