What is the best book or books to buy to learn PS7?

Also........Imagine this if you will... I have a shape or a picture of something and I want to change ... a horses half body I want to change it to a American flag but I want to keep the shape of the horses body.. Do you know of a tutorial for that?

Thank you in advance

LL

If you are a serious professional user, the best book I could recomend is the Photoshop7 Bible, written by Deke McCelland. Can't go wrong with that:)

If you just want to learn PS, and get a grasp around some of the "cooler" concepts in PS, check out the Photoshop WOW series. They are by Jack Davis. (Who is a great presenter, if you ever get a chance to go to one of his conferences.) After your done with that book, a more advanced book that gets into some more "practical" applications would be "Real World Photoshop 7". The name of the authors escapes me right now for some reason, I'm not at my desk. A combination of the two, with basic stuff aimed more at real world application would be the Visual Quickstart series. I can't remember that auther either. Oh yeah, The Photoshop 7 Bible is a great book as well, but I use it more of a reference as it is kind of advanced.

Welcome to the forum "loo".

There are a whole lot of great PS books out there, and there are some "not-so-great" ones too. I guess to give you the best answer, i'd have to ask, "What do you want to do in Photoshop?" The answer can help us direct you to the best books for that purpose.

Some of the members here use PS for photomontage and photo-manipulation, for that i'd recommend:
Adobe Photoshop Master Class
or
Photoshop 7 Artistry: Mastering the Digital Image

Still other members are looking more towards design, web graphics... for that i'd recommend:
Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Studio Techniques by Ben Willmore, (one of my favorite "PS guru" authors)
another would be
Photoshop WOW (as stated above) by Jack Davis (another favorite "PS guru" author)

I can give you the "names" of some PS authors that have consistently put out extremely useful books and they are:

Ben Willmore
Jack Davis and Linnea Dayton
Scott Kelby
Deke McClelland

these guys maintain a large area of my bookshelf...

see ya' around.
:)
retrocity

ps. did you want to discuss your "horse" concept??

I like to manipulate stuff. I like to make pictures and graphics into things I want for webpages and just for fun. For instance in this post I asked how to take an ordinary picture and fill it with what I want...... A friend of mine did this but he dosent have PS so its hard for him to help. I did duplicate it but it came out b/w and Im not sure how I did it at all.

Hi loo, the reason it came out B/W was because the horse image you were pasteing the flag into was probably still "bitmap" or "greyscale". You'll need to change the color mode to "RGB". Just go to IMAGE --> MODE --> RGB, ignore the message that pops-up stateing: "Changing modes will affect layer compositing. Flatten image before mode change?" (or something like that...) don't flatten your image.

There are a couple of ways to do your example above. One quick in is to "paste into" your first image. This creates a quick mask that lets you move/adjust your image.

I'll do a quick screen cap as some as i get another cup of Java...

be right back...

:)
retrocity

first, make sure your files are RGB (if you want them in colour)

next, select the "magic wand tool" (w) and click somewhere in the solid black area (you can increase the Tolerance to get more of the area and also have Contiguous checked)

then open your second image (this will be what gets pasted into the area you just selected in image 1)

finally, go to EDIT --> PASTE INTO (shift-control-v) and you'll see you can select and move the second image around to get the best possible positioning...

If you have the checkbox selected for "Auto Select Layer", you'll be able to just click right in the image2 and move it directly.

give it a try...

see ya' round
:)
retrocity

well this is the finished product... Thank you for the help...