Updated 11-1-2001


GDTPUG Resource Favorites

Dana Trout's Favorite Resources:

Books:

PhotoShop in Black & White by Jim Rich & Sandy Bozek
This book is an easy introduction to scanning, correcting, enhancing, and printing black & white pictures. It's quite old (copyright 1994) but the concepts are still valid and the exposition is straight-forward and quite clear. This book introduces you to the issues of printing halftones, why and how to compensate for dot gain (as well as what dot gain is), sharpening, corrections, what causes and how to reduce the problem of moire patterns (sometimes called plaids or lace-curtain effects), and resizing and resampling images. The book is thin, direct, and filled with many well-chosen images that illustrate the issues.

Start With A Scan by Janet Ashford & John Osham
This book covers all the material (and then some) of "PS in B&W" in about 20 pages (so it isn't nearly as leisurely or detailed an introduction as "PS in B&W"), and uses the remaining 120 pages to cover other topics, like clip art, creating textures & backgrounds, changing color, transforming photos into graphics, creating type treatments, scanning real objects, and using scans in arts & crafts.

Real World PhotoShop 6 by David Blatner & Bruce Fraser
This book is often considered the "PhotoShop Bible" because it covers so much of PS's capabilities. It is a good choice for a person who wants to get the most out of PS, for it covers (among other things) the following topics:

These authors have been writing and rewriting this book as each of the various versions of PhotoShop has hit the market. As a consequence, they have learned from their readers how to explain the topics more clearly (as well as correctly), making this one of the best-written books on PhotoShop. However, like any bible, it takes careful study to get the most out of it.

Visual Quickstart Guide HTML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro
Even though you may be using a web-page creation program like GoLive or DreamWeaver to make your pages, from time to time you need to figure out why you aren't getting what you wanted. At that point, you need to be able to puzzle out the HTML file, and Ms. Castro's book is a concise and useful guide to HTML. Like all the Quickstart guides, this one is arranged by topic with only a few pages assigned to each topic. It's easy to find the appropriate pages, and the presentation is pretty good. One of the things I especially like about this book is that each topic is illustrated with a concrete example, which gets me from the point of half-understanding what the author was trying to tell me to seeing exactly what it is I need to do.

Mail lists:

epson-inkjet@leben.com (go to www.leben.com for instructions on how to join)
This mail list is devoted to Epson inkjet printers. Topics include not only the usual "Why does it do that", but also related things like paper, inks, metamerism, color management, monitor calibration, and choice of color space. Another special inducement to join this list is the fact that even Bruce Fraser shows up here from time to time!

filmscanners@halftone.co.uk (go to www.halftone.co.uk/welcome.htm for further info)
While largely focused on film scanners (mostly 35mm, but a fair number of comments deal with larger sizes), lots of discussion includes scanning techniques, scanner features and foibles, dynamic range, scratch and dust removal techniques, compression technniques, PhotoShop setup and issues, FireWire, and USB.

Web Sites:

Most of my favorite web sites are listed on the GDTPUG page, namely at
    www.troutcom.com/gdtpug/

People: