Book excerpt: Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques has been completely updated to cover the new features in CS4. In a friendly, easy-going style that's long on information and short on techno-babble, Photoshop Hall-of-Famer Ben Willmore and photographer Dan Ablan guide you through the concepts and features that will truly make a difference in how you use Photoshop every day. They'll take you from blindly following step-by-step instructions to an in-depth understanding of how Photoshop works, cutting through the fat to focus on what they consider to be Photoshop's essential features. This full-color book delivers the content in three easily digestible sections: Working Foundations, Production Essentials, and Creative Explorations. Streamlined for this new edition, the book will distill Photoshop's vast capabilities down to what you need to know for a full understanding of the program, while simultaneously focusing more directly on best practices for the photographer. Beginning with a quick "refresher course" on the working foundations of Photoshop, you'll move on to real-world production techniques. Finally, you'll get to fully explore Photoshop's creative potential by blending and enhancing images, creating collages, retouching photographs, colorizing, and working with filters and layer masks. By the time you finish this book, your creativity and efficiency levels will soar and you'll feel like you finally "get" Photoshop.