The authors of Photoshop 6 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide have many years' experience in writing, and their experience shows. This latest volume is one of the longest QuickStart Guides (as befits such a complex application), each page chock-full of screen shots of images, palettes, toolbars, and option panels. Photoshop's work environment has changed significantly since version 5.5, having added, for example, a new options bar. Right off, this guide maps out the landscape, with callouts and captions that define each and every item you might see when Photoshop is running. A "6.0!" icon marks every new item.

The strength of all QuickStart Guides is their abundance of black-and-white screen shots laid out in one column on the page, and the step-by-step instructions and concise explanations that appear on the adjacent column. These are not tutorials that simulate a classroom experience by taking one project though many stages (although sample images are shown). Rather, this book is more like a fix-it manual--you have a problem in your own work, you look up the appropriate keywords in the index, and then you apply the steps to work out a solution.

As would be expected, the book takes you through all the many parts of Photoshop, from pixel basics, like resolution, to selections, layers, history, masks, paths, type, filters, actions, and preparing images for print or Web. Also covered is using ImageReady to optimize images for the Web and make slices, rollovers, and animations. Features that are new to ImageReady 3.0 are also highlighted with a "6.0!" icon, making it easy to find just those topics that will be new to readers already comfortable in version 5.5. There's also a lengthy list of keyboard shortcuts for both platforms, followed by an impressively detailed index. --Angelynn Grant