Computer Graphics Books

Its written in easy to follow directions, instructions and example pictures. I really enjoyed the student work section in the middle of the book.

This book has greatly expanded my 3D modeling 'tool belt' and boosted my confidence for tackling difficult projects.

At first I thought to myself that this book was going to be your typical "BAD" computer book where you have to get up, look for people who know how to use 3Ds Max or you would either look for some written or video tutorials online to get you up and started running this software. So I honestly didn't bother buying the book at first until one day by coincidence my colleague happens to have the exact same book that I was looking at Amazon 5 days ago. He told me that the book is an easy read especially with the lingo that the author uses in this book. I didn't want to believe it however; as soon as I borrowed the book just 1 day I have literally completed 4 chapters of this AMAZING book! There was no question about it and I had to get hold of a copy of my own.

One of the best things that the user will be introduced in this book is that the author will get the user feet wet into the realm of CG in Chapter 2 where the user will create a simple animation and from there the author then explain how the CG world works today and how a user should be well equipped.

Honestly this is by far one of the best introductions to CG especially how to use a complex software as 3Ds Max 9. All I can say is that this book is only for the Novice and not for the semi or advanced users. However it still acts as a good reference book for the semi / advanced users.

Oh and One last thing I should mention. This may not seem important to you but to me it is. I only believe that a good computer book has to have color throughout the whole book because it makes the book fun to read with colors. But now I am going to have to change my belief on that because this book is completely in black and white and STILL the book surprises me to how EASY it is to read and to follow along through the CD exercise that accompanies this book.

This text makes an extremely complex software understandable. It's almost like the authors have taken every question a student has ever asked and provided a clear explanation. Full of computer screen captures with highlighted callouts. Most pages have highlighted Tips and Notes. Text is in two colors to help identify important points and organization. Sidebars list multiple ways to accomplish task. Important vocabulary is in bold. Exercises include exact order of how to complete, including the written prompts and your required response. Includes exercises for all disciplines. Features new to AutoCAD 2006 are starred which gives readers who are using an older version of AutoCAD relief and confidence to know which limited sections do not correspond to the software they are using.

this is the text book for my autocad class. i wish the new 2007 version would come out soon. from what i've read of it so far, it's great. i also went to autodesk.com, the company that makes autocad, and bought their tutorial dvd.

The book, Introduction to Digital Photography (2nd edition) by Joseph Ciaglia, is very helpful to those who are just begining to enter the digital world. If one already knows alot about digital photography, than this book is a great referrence to look up any questions.

I found this in the Library at the college. After taking a photoshop 1 & 2, this book helped solidify the things I learned and then some. I liked his writing style, he communicates very well. I think he did a better job of explaining things than my professor. Good book.

This book is an absolute intro to Linden Scripts. The author uses the classic presentation technique of 1) Tell your audience what you are going to tell them; 2) Tell it to your audience; followed by 3) Tell your audience what you told them. If you have ever had to do a presentation to an audience, you understand what I mean.

If you think you wish to write code in Linden Scripting Language, this book gives you a very clear, easy to grasp understanding of the basic structure of the language, the method of approach to writing code, and simple but easy to follow examples.

The approach in this book may seem a bit too simple to those with extensive programming experience. But, that serves to make it a quick read for you so you can jump right into coding. For those new to programming, the approach in this book is much easier to understand than many "introductions" I've read.

The book will not make you an expert Linden Script programmer. Only practice and experience will do that. But it helps you get into the right frame of mind to understand how to view a coding problem to make it work in-life.

While you can find this information online, the book has one significant advantage. It is written text with an index. You can underline, bookmark, circle, highlight and write margin notes (it even has blank pages for your own notes) and you can use it with no electricity or web connection. That means you can read it in a doctor's waiting room, on the bus, a train, in a car (as a passenger), or in your own "library" (don't ask).

See you inlife.

For those or us who like to read. This is a GOOD overview for those who can program to the basics of LSL (Linden Programing). I loved it.

The best thing about this book is it's conversational approach and handsome author. It's filled with fantastic content that's so entertaining I almost couldn't put it down, and I'm not saying that just because I wrote it! OK, maybe I am a little bit. But seriously, I had a good time writing it and I think you'll enjoy reading it just as much. Plus, my email addy is in the preface so you can tell me what you didn't like.

My sixty-[mumble] year old mom loved it and she's kinda technophobic. She's calling me and telling me about how she read a chapter, designed her own photo book and sent it off to Apple to have it printed all by herself. Trust me. If she's geeking out on a computer book, well, let's just say that she's no geek, so I musta done something right.

Calling The iPhoto 4 Book "just" an instruction manual doesn't do it justice, it was a laugh out loud don't want to put in down read. I laughed out loud so many times I started getting looks from my family. If school text books were this engaging and fun to read we would have more "geeks" on our hands. The book was written from an almost comic conversational stand. It felt like you were sitting around with some of your friends on Saturday night talking about making a funny slide show instead of the old fashioned click "oops that slide was put in backwards slide show." You almost felt like the authors were sitting there with you just shooting the breeze while they imparted their knowledge on how to make friends and family beg to see your photos.

The book is broken down into eight different parts with twenty five chapters complete with notes, tips and sidebars. The sidebars had little stories or observations that will have you chuckling. The walk through was so simple and easy to follow that you almost didn't want the book to end.

Chapter One: Taking Interesting Photos - This chapter covers the garbage in garbage out concept. While computers and software have come a long way in helping you tweak your photos it doesn't help if the original photo has nothing to offer. There should be good composition, object or person etc should fill most of the frame, good lighting and a direction that the eye follows, if it doesn't have all or most of those elements use a different photo. Lag time and how to compensate for it is covered. "Lag time the delay between when you press the shutter button to when the picture is actually taken, is usually more prevalent in the lower end digital cameras". Plus other nifty tips and tricks.

Chapter Two: Getting Started With iPhoto - Covers registering iPhoto if you haven't used it before. The "Organize" mode is where you will be spending most of your time. When you pass your mouse over the icons at the bottom of the screen a little box appears and gives you a bit more info on the icon. In "Edit" mode you can go from the default basic editing program that comes with iPhoto to whatever graphic program you have on your computer. I set mine to default to Photoshop CS. You can also adjust the display pane so your photos are displayed in the number of rows and columns you like working in. You can also change the background color of the display pane from white to black or any of the grays in between.

Chapter Three: Importing Pictures - The "Import" mode lets you bring your photos into iPhoto either directly from your camera, compact flash, CD/DVD or photos already on your hard drive. You can hook your camera up directly to your MAC with either a USB or Firewire cable and bring your photos into iPhoto that way or you could use a card reader. Some cameras have a few more hoops to jump through for you to get your photos into iPhoto, a card reader simplifies things. Using a CD/DVD or hard drive just drag and drop your photos into iPhoto.

Chapter Four: Organizing Your Photos - We sometimes get very excited once we start something new that we forget this important step that will save us much frustration in the long run. Organizing when you first start pulling photos into iPhoto it might not seem like a big deal but once you start taking more and more photos you will wish you had done so in the beginning. This chapter covers how the program will organize things to a point even if you don't in the beginning. It creates a film roll for groups of pictures from an import session. It has a quick view of sorts where you can see all of the photos you imported in the last month or the last roll you imported. You can also rearrange the order of photos, so if you are building a slideshow and you want uncle Bob goofing off to start the slide show move that photo to the beginning. Some of us remember when we had only so much space to name a file, like 8 characters. We now can put more info into naming our files, like "Northern Lights Christmas Day 2004" so at least the name of the roll can be easily identified.

Chapter Five: Leveraging the Power of Albums - Albums are the next progression from the film rolls of chapter 4. You can create and customize albums, by adding, removing and rearranging photos in the albums, you can also merge albums. Or create a smart album. With smart albums you can use keywords or ratings to put specific photos within your album. This becomes very valuable when you want to create slideshows or have a book printed.

Chapter Six: Assigning Titles, Comments & Keywords to Images - Your camera has a default name that it gives your images, most of the time it begins with DSCN followed by several numbers. That's fine to a point but the images that you are keeping you might want to give a relevant name or something other than the numerical code. Comments and keywords are a great tool to use to find that image or images later. You can use "vacation" as a all around comment or keyword, but if you want to get more specific you can put in where you took the vacation like "Brazil Vacation". So you can use those words or comments for iPhoto to only show you the pics you want, it's a great way to weed through the tons of photos and create a smart album.

Chapter Seven: Understanding the Edit Tools - Once you click on the edit tab you see a bunch more tools available to use. You can crop, rotate, retouch, enhance, fix red-eye, adjust brightness/contrast, convert to B&W or to Sepia tone. You can use the default edit tool within iPhoto or you can double click and it will take you to the other application you specified during your setup phase.

Chapter Eight: Better Photography through Editing - You learn about aspect ratio cropping. I really like this chapter so when my clients want me to crop more of the photo to make them look slimmer but they want more of the back ground I will have them read this chapter. You should however have a general idea how you are going to use the photo. You will need to decide if you want a 5x7 or a 4x6 or if you are just using it for the web. You learn how to use the red-eye correction tool. The enhance tool works by taking the lightest part of your photo and the darkest part of your photo, it however is going under the assumption that the light part is white and the dark part is black for it to get a balance of colors between. Sometimes the enhance tools works well and at other times when the colors are not so readily discernible it can make your photo a bit cartoonish. If you want to try and tweak the image yourself you can use the brightness/contrast tool. You can also "retouch" that piece of broccoli stuck between uncle Bob's teeth to make you image better. Changing the photo to either B&W or Sepia tone. This technique works better with some photos than with others. Experiment to see what works best and remember if you don't like any of the changes you can always revert back to the original.

Chapter Nine: - Editing Outside of iPhoto - You set this up in an earlier chapter. iPhoto allows you to make some basic edits to your photo if you have some text you want to add or other more dramatic changes you will need to go to the outside editor. You need to open the outside editor within iPhoto for any changes to apply to the current image. iPhoto makes a copy of your original file so if after your changes you decide to go back to the original you can. You do however have to make sure that the images is saved in the same format .jpeg or iPhoto won't recognize that you have made any changes to this file. If you add layers just save a .PSD file then flatten the layers and save it as a .jpeg file and you're covered if you want to go back and make more changes.

Chapter Ten: Making A Slideshow - This is not your old high school slide projector slide show. This one is way cooler. You can add transitions, set how long the slide will be displayed and chose to have the slides displayed randomly and scale the photos to fit the screen. Need to check this before going ahead because you might cause a few decapitations. You have the choice of creating a slideshow using an album or by selecting specific photos. To add some pizzaz to your slideshow you can add music. The only thing about this slideshow is the transition and timing applies to all slides you can't have different transitions within the same slideshow and you have to use the whole song.

Chapter Eleven: Basic Print Tools - This chapter covers the different types of printers, printer resolution, plus the different types of paper. It explains how to configure your printer to work with iPhoto. I loved the last part of this chapter about the photo off the low res camera, I laughed so hard. I have had clients bring me their out of focus, underexposed print and want me to make uncle Chester look like he's sitting there with them in the correctly exposed photo I just shot.

Chapter Twelve: Using iPhoto to Print Your Pictures - So after setting up your printer you are now ready to print out your photos. You have many options when it comes to printing you can print either one photo, a couple of photos on one page or a contact sheet of all of the photos within an album or that you have selected. You can choose the size of the images you would like to print, like 2 5x7's on one sheet, or 4 3x5's on one sheet, greeting cards etc...you can do this by using the presets that come with iPhoto. However if you print a contact sheet it does not print out the file name which can be a bit of a bummer if you have a lot of photos that look similar.

Chapter Thirteen: Printing Your Photos Professionally - With so many places offering you an opportunity to have your prints made from digital camera it's a shame not to take advantage of them. You have your local services like WalMart and Costco offering to make prints, greeting cards and calendars with ease. You also have your web services that allow you to upload your images and order more cool stuff like T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads plus other neat stuff. Of course with iPhoto you just have to hit the order prints button and you are on your way. It's pretty self explanatory once you log in.

Chapter Fourteen" Sharing Your Photos Electronically - This chapter covers sending email photos, building a QuickTime slideshow, creating a desktop image, making a screen saver and backing up your photos. I remember the first time I scanned an image and tried to send it (this was years and years ago) it took forever and of course it got kicked back to me and I crashed my aunts computer. I have since then learned the correct way to send photos via email. In iPhoto it's very simple to email photos. You can choose what size, small, medium or large and it automatically resizes the photo for you and off it goes. You can also make a slide show and export the images into to a QuickTime movie and email it to your family of baby's first steps. It shows how to setup a screen saver using your photos instead of the default blue. Plus the biggest reminder of all to backup your photos. I had the unfortunate experience of having to have my external drive saved. As we all know CD's are great but you can only fit so much info on one. I have over 250 GB's of photos from my clients. Burning CD after CD was driving me insane so I bought a large external drive dumped all of my work on it and thought I was safe. The partition failed the company couldn't figure out why because it never went anywhere it just sat on my desk it wasn't moved or anything. After the $1300. price tag to recover the photos (they were fortunate to recover everything) I do a double back up now. I went and bought a DVD burner to put my images on so at 4 GB's I will at least not have to store as many as I would a CD but I backup like a mad person now. (This is from the PC side of my life.)

Chapter Fifteen: Sharing Your Photos on the Internet - For those of you that have wanted to post your photos for the world and your friends and family to see this chapter walks you through setting up a .MAC account and publishing your photos with HomePage. You can build your website pretty easily with this program. Just click, click and click and a few more clicks and you're done. Pretty neat if you are one of those people that like to share your images while still on vacation you can send an email letting everyone know to go look at the new slides.

Chapter Sixteen: Creating an iPhoto Book Design - Any wanna be author's out there? Here's where you can astound your friends and family with a hard cover bound book of your photos. There are seven basic book themes that are built into iPhoto. Choose the one that bests suits the types of photos you are arranging. Try to do this before getting to far into the book, while you can change themes mid-book all of the custom text you so laboriously entered earlier will be lost. Remember however that it's one album per book. Make sure it's your best stuff that goes into this book the minimum charge for the book is $30.00. This book feature would be a great gift idea for the grand parents. Put together a day, a week or a year in the life of their favorite grandchild(ren) and you are sure to get unlimited baby sitting for a really long time.

Chapter Seventeen: Laying out Pages of the Book - Here's where you get into the meat and potatoes of laying out the pictures for your new bestseller. Get those photos together, make sure that the photos tell a story. Some pictures work best when they are shown together to tell a story some work stronger by themselves. This is where you get to decide how many photos will go on a page what order etc...

Chapter Eighteen: Adding Text to Dress up Your Book - Here's where you get to add the little blurbs that you think your picture needs. You can choose the font style, size and color in most of the templates. Make sure to spell check, spell check, nothing screams amateur like a misspelling for all the world to see. The font limitations I think are great. I know some of you want to add every font you have in your arsenal to your book, I have over 400 fonts and I use them sparingly. I have seen some brochures that contain so many fonts that it becomes a distraction.. OK down right annoying. So double check that your colors and typeface are easy to read.

Chapter Nineteen: Previewing and Printing Your Book - If you are going to plunk down $30.00 to have your book printed and bound preview before you buy. Heck make your own ink jet print of the book so you can see what it will look like. Also when you preview you can see if any text was cut off, and many other little things you might not have noticed on the screen. For those of you that like a challenge you get to learn about making your own book theme in this section. Once you have proofed your book you are now ready to order. Just click the order book and follow the directions and your master piece will be on its way.

Chapter Twenty: Creating an iMovie Slideshow - This is a step above the slideshow that you can create in iPhoto. The transition and slide duration limitations are gone. You can add a voiceover, use part of a song instead of the whole song and you can use multiple songs for more dramatic effects. The possibilities start becoming more exciting. You don't have to open iPhoto to create this slide show just launch iMovie and start drag and dropping and you're on your way. For the voice over you can use your built in microphone or attach your camcorder and use that microphone. You also have access to more effects to spice up your slide show. Just don't over do any once effect and you will be fine.

Chapter Twenty One: Creating and iDVD Slideshow - iDVD is the next level up from iMovie and the next level down from Final Cut. iDVD comes with many templates choose the one that suits your needs. You can customize it a bit by changing the colors and font sizes and some more stuff. You however have to use iPhoto to access your albums for this program. You have to use entire albums so get all of your photos sorted before you pull them through into iDVD. You can rearrange and delete slides in your show. You can add music for the intro and the slide show. Then preview before you burn.

Chapter Twenty Two thru Twenty Five: Are mostly odds and ends about what folders to stay out of, so you don't mess up your iPhoto library. Automating iPhoto with Apple Scripting. Twenty Questions and Using your digital cameras.

As I said in the beginning the book is very user friendly. It points out some of the glitches and things that will make you see red. Gives great examples and it does it with lots of humor. The only thing that I found a bit of putting was that the book was in black and white. Not a big deal. So even my totally afraid of the computer Grandmother could follow this book and make some cool slideshows.

The Visual Quick Starte Guides are just about the fastest way to get started on using a software package around. As stated from the title, this is a highly illustrated book that uses tons of screen shots to get you started using a software package.

In this case the package is iPhoto and it's written by a master writer. Because of the large number of illustrations in the book, it is very fast to go through. (My only problem is when I click on something wrong, my screens don't look like his, and then have to backtrack and find my error.) The easy visual approach works well for me.

If you're a beginner to iPhoto, this book will help you get it up and doing what you want in a very short time. The next step is to do more, say up to the intermediate level, and all that takes is that you go further into the book.

The other surprising thing about this book is the way it's organized. Most tutorial books are just that. You follow the tutorial through and then go do things. These books are then useless as a reference book. This one is different. Each task, almost each page, is organized with a headline of what you're going to do on that page. Then the index has an entry that points to the right page. For instance if you're going through the book there's a chapter on Sharing Photos. There's a page on Printing Greeting Cards. Learning about sharing photos will send you through the page on Printing Greeting Cards. But if you forget that, going to the index will give you an entry on Printing Greeting Cards that will send you to that page which is complete enough to enable you to get the greeting cards without having to go through the whole chapter.

His approach works for me.

Before picking this book up, I'd all but given up on iPhoto. I found it a bit too simple and way to encumbering of my system. But this book really changed my perspective. Well, this book and the fact that I needed a better way to organize my pictures on my Mac than simply having massive folders of pictures.

The book is very accessible and although I thought I was familiar with the program, it opened a lot of new doors and taught me a lot I didn't know. It also provided resources for other programs that work well with iPhoto and how to connect iPhoto to Photoshop (or any digital image editor) so I can do more advanced editing outside of iPhoto.

I think most important for me was learning that I didn't need to have my photos all in one library - that I could use a separate program like the iPhoto Library Manager to make separate, context specific, libraries. This was amazing, as the more photos in a library, the more encumbering it can be on your system.

Without a doubt, I find this to be one of the best and simple books out there covering iPhoto. I highly recommend it!

This is a really helpful addition for any mac owner that wants to really use all that iphoto has to offer! Easy to understand even for cyber dummies . (Like me)

I'm a long time Mac user and have been using iPhoto since it came out. This book really hits every aspect of the program, and tells not only what's there, but how and why to use it. Examples are concise and relevant. This book is a good book for an advanced iPhoto user, and a must have for the beginner. Apple should include a copy of this book with every Mac.

I only found two points to comment on in the book:

1) You don't need to rename the iPhoto Library folder or use any third party tools to maintain multiple iPhoto Libraries. You can simply hold down the Option key when launching iPhoto and iPhoto will ask if you want to create a new library or find an existing one. This worked with iPhoto 4.

2) One thing users can do to improve the performance of iPhoto is to turn off the Drop shadow option in the Appearance preference. I don't think he mentioned that.

Otherwise he hit everything a person using iPhoto needs to know about. Great book!

Allan Marcus
Los Alamos National Lab Mac User Group

For those, like myself, who like to hold a book, look in the index and find the topic, then learn it, this is an invaluable resource. In todays day and age where real manuals are almost non existant, it's nice to have a real resource

I've read several Photoshop Elements 3 books and scanned several others and as an introduction I found this the best of the lot. The author has the knack to cover the essentials very clearly. The high quality of the printing and the excellent layout add greatly to the clarity of the presentation. Highly recommended!

I have not used my high school drafting lessons since 1968, when I last attended Maricosta College in California. The computer was not very popular in that field, at the time, and now that it is, working with it is interesting and rewarding.
Auto Cad makes it simple, easy, and quick, to produce drawings from specifications. The T-Square and Drawing Board, are truely things of the past; and the protractor,compass and various other devices used for measureing angles, are very neatly displayed in the configuration of the program itself.
sylvspst@aol.com
01/06/2007

Just Enough AutoCAD 2007 is an excellent purchase. It does just what it's title entails, it give the user just enough information on the use of autocad to give them a fairly decent jumping off point. It is extremely easy to use and read and offers a more inexpensive way of finding out what you need to know/

Today more and more Website designers are taking advantage of creative graphics design to enhance the appearance and functionality of their sites. A number of commercial graphics programs are available to them to create real attention-getting graphics. Kai's Power Tools 3 (KPT) is a leading collection of filters and tools that can be used with many of them to create truly phenomenal graphic image results.

Nick Clarke has produced Kai's Power Tools 3: An Illustrated Guide to offer an extraordinary gallery of cool KPT special effects! This book is a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated tutorial guide to understanding how to use this filter collection. Clarke takes his readers on a grand tour of the description, operation, and use of each filter. Exceptional color photographs of every filter interface control panel and their individual controls are provided to assist Clarke as he demonstrates just how easy KPT is easy to use. His own mastery of the use of KPT is evident throughout the book.

The book is accompanied by a CD loaded with KPT presets, KPT graphics, a graphic image showcase featuring the work of KPT users from around the world, a portfolio of KPT artist work, tutorial resources, software, and links to Websites offering additional information about this amazing collection of graphics filters! The graphics on this CD provides some of the most breathtaking illustrations ever created to bring out the rich details of this product!

As I read through this book it became clear that Clarke enjoys sharing the use of KPT with others. I experienced his enthusiasm as I read every page. This book also left me with the impression that I had just completed a full course on the use of this product. This book will inspire readers to create their own cherished works of art which may one day be featured in a book! Highly recommended!

An excellent choice for unlocking the beautiful world of Kai Having purchased KPT3 and KPT5 for Windows to beef up the capabilities of CorelPhotoPaint8 (also new to me) I found myself floundering to understand the user interface and minimal help documentation. Nick Clarkes book is an absolute god-send - not only does he demonstrate the basics, he knocks you dead with the advanced capabilities and unleashes the "secret" controls within KPT3. So well is this explained that KPT5, though not specifically covered in the book is just as easy to utilise fully.

I am a self taught designer running a new CD and flyer design business and this book is as powerful a tool as the Kai program itself . How about a follow up on KPT5 and an advanced techniques book please Nick - you get my vote?