Nik Software
Fine introduction to most of Nik's software. It's a shame that it doesn't cover Sharpener 3.0; there have been significant changes in the upgrade.
Painful
I have to agree with the other one star reviews. I tried to get through this book but it has very little to do with images other than the samples presented. I've been using photographic software since Photoshop 2 and am currently using Aperture 2 and the entire Nik software collection plug in's. This book covers none of the Aperture plug in functionality and marginally covers the Photoshop version. Nik software's website and tutorials while sometimes tedious do a much better job and for a lot less money. The spelling and grammar errors are painful as well. This one is going back.
Guide? Humbug
Don't waste your time or money. You'll get more from NIK's website and it will be spelled correctly.
Illustrations OK, coverage (filters for example) spotty and incomplete. Personally, I got nothing from it at all.
Want to buy a used copy?
Save your money
This book is truly awful. First of all, it is unreadable. Almost every illustration is a full screen screen-shot reproduced at 4 1/4" x 3 1/4", two on a page, with plenty of white space. The Nik screens use light gray text on a dark gray background, which is fine on the screen, because it doesn't corrupt your color vision, but it is totally unreadable when printed at such a small size in the book.
The text itself is bad. It is so full of typographical and grammatical errors that it is jarring to read. For instance, on page 106, what does "In steps the Reflector effects, and their ability to bring back an image." mean? Is there a verb in there that I missed? Is "reflector" a proper noun?
If the copy were redeeming, the book might be worth the struggle; but it isn't. I was hoping for a reference book that would help me figure out what the various filters do and how to use them. Instead, the book is a random walk through the filters that the author particularly likes, with a description of how he would apply them to specific images. Color Efex Pro contains 52 filters, with variations on many of the filters. The book covers fewer than 20 filters.
These comments apply only to Color Efex Pro, which is the only product that I own and the only part of the book that I slogged through. By the way, Color Efex Pro is a great program, even though it is not well documented. I bought this book to try to fill that void.
Not very in-depth, poor sizing of images
The author too frequently breezes through some of his applications of the Nik filters. In his attempt to cover all the filters and give examples of the use of many of them, he makes his discussion of the applications too brief.
Although he often explains what you're seeing in the accompanying images, the small size of the images makes it difficult to read some of the parameters he's set in the screenshots. There are times when he refers to what are supposed to be obvious parameter differences between screenshots, expecting you to read them from the screenshots, but the size and colors used make it impossible to do so. Both Josh and the publisher should have realized that the light gray-on-gray and white lettering-on-gray UI that Nik insists on using do not improve readability on the scales used in the book.
(8 reviews)
