The photoshop CS6 book for digital photographers

The Adobe Photoshop CS6 book (for digital photographers) by Scott Kelby has been a worthwhile treat for me.  I like it's step-by-step cookbook approach to showing me all the ways that I can improve my pictures.  Having just cracked it, it's already inspired me to rework an older photo, removing chromatic aberration, dodging and burning, fixing the sky, and removing unwanted features.

Here's an old picture of Stewart Hall that I took in November 2009, using the EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens on my old Canon Rebel XSi. Because of the image size in this picture, you're not going to notice the chromatic aberration where the building meets the sky, but trust me, it's there.  Notice the telephone pole in the center with wires stretching away to the right of the building.  There's also a guy pushing a lawnmower to the right of the pole. 

Below is the same picture after I applied a few techniques from Kelby's book: 

• Fixing Chromatic Aberrations -- Chapter 3,
• Removing Stuff Using Content-Aware Fill -- Chapter 8 (goodbye telephone pole, wires and lawnmower dude),
• Automatically Fixing Lens Problems -- Chapter 3,
• Fixing Skies (and other stuff) with the Graduated Filter -- Chapter 4,
• Dodging, Burning, and Adjusting Individual Areas of Your Photo -- Chapter 4,
• Photo Toning Effects -- Chapter 9, where I added a warmer autumn cast to the color palette

Admittedly, I already knew how to do some of these tricks.  However, it was great to have the book to remind me of these techniques as well as showing me better ways of doing them.

I see more good things to come as I make my way through this book.