Professional Photoshop, Fifth Edition, Coming Soon

Dan Margulis announced recently that the next edition of Professional Photoshop will be larger, mostly rewritten, and—unfortunately—the final edition…

Dan Margulis announced recently that the next edition of Professional Photoshop will be larger, mostly rewritten, and—unfortunately—the final edition.

I had covered the announcement last spring that Dan Margulis would stop writing, and his recent message to the Applied Color Theory user group reinforced this as well as gave great new details on the latest edition of his seminal book, Professional Photoshop. Margulis said the availability of the new publication will be shortly before the December 7, 2006 date given by his publisher Peachpit Press, and it also sounds like the book will be a radical advancement from the previous edition:

Since I intend this to be the last of the Professional Photoshop series, I rewrote nearly everything. The content overall is almost 90% new. The changes in emphasis come from reader requests, particularly from this list. Channel blending has been greatly expanded and redone from the ground up. So has sharpening, including hiraloam. There are many more examples of how to convert out-of-gamut colors into something printable. Also, by popular demand even though it is not strictly speaking color correction, there’s a chapter on the politics of and the best file prep procedures for commercial offset printing. Camera Raw and Shadow/Highlight, which did not exist at the time of the last edition, get full chapters.

We are also given a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the new book as it compares to the previous edition (which we are told is out of stock everywhere):

HOW PROFESSIONAL PHOTOSHOP FIFTH EDITION COMPARES TO CORRESPONDING CHAPTERS IN PP4E

1. Color, Contrast, and Channels. The introduction to color correction and its goals. 80% new content compared to last time.
2. The Steeper the Curve, the More the Contrast. The basics of curve-shaping. 95% new.
3. Color By the Numbers. The simple rules for establishing proper color in all images. 100% new.
4. Color, Contrast, Canyons, and LAB. The introduction to LAB is overhauled in light of what has been learned since Photoshop LAB Color was released. 100% new.
5. The Key Is the K. Manipulating the black channel is the most potent weapon in the CMYK arsenal. 50% new.
6. Sharpening with a Stiletto. This section gets a complete makeover, stressing proper use of all three fields of the USM command, plus the introduction of hiraloam (high Radius, low Amount) sharpening. 90% new.
7. Keeping the Color in Black and White. Look for the types of contrast that will be lost when the image’s color vanishes, and find a way to replace them in advance. 60% new.
8. Keeping the Black and White in Color. The completely revamped introduction to channel blending to improve color images. 100% new.
9. Inferences, Illusions, and When to Bet the Image. Successful color correction requires detective work—looking for internal clues that show what the final color must be. 75% new.
10. Every File Has Ten Channels. Being able to work in three colorspaces offers an abundance of tools to improve quality. 100% new.
11. Making Things Look Alike. The second half of the book opens with a philosophical chapter discussing what the goals of calibration are. 80% new.
12. Managing Color Settings. Recommended settings for various types of output, discussion of how CMYK profiles handle out of gamut colors, and the impact of working with an RGB definition whose gamut is too big. 85% new.
13. Politics, Printing, and the Science of the Skosh. In response to numerous requests, this chapter is unabashedly about the politics of the offset printing process, complete with jabs at printers, photo labs, and calibrationists. It offers sensible methods of taking insurance against bad results in a world where commercial printing is horrendously variable. 100% new.
14. Resolution for the Multimegapixel Era. The previous edition’s chapter, which discussed many forms of resolution, has been consigned to the CD, in favor of a new chapter that concentrates only on image resolution, when it is useful, and what to do when you have too little—or too much. 100% new.
15. The Art of the False Profile. If an image appears too dark, it could be because your expectations are too light. 80% new.
16. What Comes Around, Goes Around. The advantages of manipulating raw files, and the areas to be steered clear of. The chapter uses Camera Raw for three in-depth examples of different subjects from different cameras. 100% new content.
17. Blurs, Masks, and Safety in Sharpening. This chapter further discusses the characteristics of hiraloam and conventional sharpening, and shows methods of bringing out the best of both in a single image. 100% new.
18. Overlays, Hiraloam, and Shadow/Highlight. Three closely related methods of improving detail in shadows and/or highlights all depend on managing a blur. 100% new.
19. Color, Contrast, and Safety in Masking. For various reasons, selections and masks are more necessary with digital images than they were in the age of film. This chapter discusses some of the more common scenarios, and how to find the proper channel to use for the mask. 100% new.
20. There Are No Bad Originals. We wrap up the series with a proposed thought process for how to approach an image, one old and one new correction, and some speculation about the future of our field. 75% new.

You can also read a review of a draft of the book here (written by John Ruttenberg), though remember that it is a review of a draft and doesn’t necessarily apply to the final edition.

29 October 2006

Jeremy Schultz

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