Everyone has their favorite books. I was thinking a thread with people recommending 3 books to be read, in order, by a newbie to Photoshop who wants to do R&R would be useful.

Here's mine:
Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book - Comprehensive, visual, and assumes no prior knowledge

then read
Real World Photoshop by David Blatner & Bruce Fraser - Everyone needs one big, fat Photoshop book, and this is the one that taught me advanced Photoshop

last, you should read (and I do mean last):
Photoshop Restoration and Retouching by Katrin Eismann - To this point the final printed word on R&R

You should also subscribe to at least one popular computer magazine for the operating system you use. I like PC Magazine and Macworld.

I don't have anything to recommend, but I would recommend buying through the link to Amazon.com from this site. I'll pick up a copy of PC magazine to have a look.

Ed

Inside Photoshop Bouton. (esp v5 - I haven't seen later versions.) Full of all kinds of tips and exercises. He also has a chapter on scanning objects.

Photoshop Artistry Haynes. Also great tips, a mountain of useful shortcuts and a chapter on setting up a scanner.

Photoshop Magic expert edition Perkins. Although written for v4, has a great chapter on "advanced hair restoration".

Margulis's books as also great for realising how difficult it is for people working in digital art to get their work ready for print media. Unfortunately, I think you have to attend one of his courses to get the most out of the book.

My recommendations are:

Classroom in a Book, Katrin's book and a new one I picked up yesterday called: Photoshop - Photo-retouching secrets by Scott Kelby. Scott Kelby is editor in chief of Photoshop User magazine.

I've got a stack of Photoshop books, but it really began to make sense to me after I discovered this web site and red through all the forums and started asking questions.

Suggestion: could the ReTouchPro forums be compiled into a book??

Margaret

I have always liked Ben Willmore's Adobe Photoshop xx Studio Techniques. That's the book that got me started and I found it very easy to learn from. It doesn't really focus on retouching/restoration though. For that, Katrin's book can't be beat!

Jeanie

Of course it was stupid of me to leave out Katrin's book from my list. It's one that everyone on this forum should own.