Welcome to Oz by Vincent Versace is perhaps one of the most unique Photoshop image editing books I have ever seen. The book primarily covers how to take your digital camera images that didn’t come out as you saw them in your mind and then using masks and other techniques turn that image in to the one you saw in your mind when you took the image. The reason for the image not coming out like you saw it in your mind are many and are unimportant as far as this book goes.

To achieve this Mr. Versace has you start by creating layers on your image that you place hand drawn adjustment guides (basically using a paint brush with various colors) so you have an idea which areas need to be adjusted. Each type of adjustment has its own set of hand drawn guides. For example exposure, color, lighting, etc. would each have its own layer and own hand drawn guides in a different color for each (makes it easier to keep track of what is for what.) To see what I mean take a look at the image gallery below, I have included a sample.

These hand drawn guides are generally simple to create and not very complex. What can end up being complex is the number of layers and hand drawn guides you need and that depends on what you need to do to the image to get it so it looks like you pictured it in your mind. The better you are with your camera and the closer you can get the image to what you saw in your mind the less you will have to do. So the complexity is completely dependant on your photography skills and even to some extend the equipment you use. For example the first image in the book is of a woman and because some of the photographer’s equipment didn’t arrive for the shoot, he had to shoot the best he could and then do a fair amount of adjusting in Photoshop. Had he had all of his equipment the amount of post processing work needed would have been much less.

Welcome to Oz, is not just reading about how a photographer does his post processing and his method for figuring out what needs to be done to what part of the image. It is a book with step-by-step tutorials and it even comes with a CD that has all of the images he uses in the tutorials so you can follow along.

I know Photoshop pretty well and even I learned a couple of useful and cool tips and tricks. To be honest however, I don’t think I have ever had to do the kind of extensive edits to any of my images that the author does. But, it is nice to know that I now have a book that can help me do it. And, I have already implemented some of his techniques in to my workflow.

Chapters:

Chapter 1: The Tao of Dynamic Workflow

Chapter 2: Image Harvesting

Chapter 3: The Unwitting Ally

Chapter 4: Classic Studio Lighting

Chapter 5: Creating a Black - and - White Image from an RGB File.

Chapter 6: Its About Time

Don’t let the above chapter titles fool you, this books covers doing everything in Photoshop. The fourth chapter on “Classic Studio Lighting” for example shows you how to achieve in Photoshop lighting that if you had had the equipment would have been done with studio lights. You won’t use a single studio light in the entire chapter.

Welcome to Oz is a full color book with as I said step-by-step instructions. It is easy to read, easy to follow and very nicely done. If you are looking for an image editing book for Photoshop but want something different from all of the other books on Photoshop image editing this is it. I have never seen another book that approaches image editing and correction like this book does. Welcome to Oz is a classic in the making.