Learning Photoshop from a CD-ROM

David Kilpatrick tried out an interactive CD-ROM which teaches Photoshop techniques using a movie window with voiceover, and allows Photoshop to be run simultaneously

Warning: this feature uses full, life-size screen shots including 17" screen displays. You may find yourself trying to pick up the cursor...

The product's 'splash screen' is a visual pun...

Software demonstrations at trade shows are insufferable; there's always some pratt there asking power questions, which are not questions at all but an attempt to show that the pratt knows more about the program than the demonstrator. As this is often the case, pratts have great fun at trade shows.

Training days are even less fun; in groups, they cost around £250-500 per day (in the UK), and the lecturer always has to pace back to the lowest common denominator, who turns out never to have used a mouse. One-to-one training is expensive and involves watching someone with their back to you monopolise the Mac while you attempt to see a screen which they have determinedly set to face them and not you.

All this being the case, IÕve never learned to use many bits of Photoshop ("I use Macs - I donÕt read manuals!", famous last words). Then Marrutt Ltd sent through a training CD-ROM they have produced in conjunction with Quay 2 Multimedia Ltd and my eyes were finally opened.

The mask tool demonstrated. I never really grasped how to use it before seeing this CD, although I have been using Frisk mask for years on real photos.

I spent an hour looking at the bits I never really understood - using masks, layers and image calculations - and I can now do those me-too floaty blended montages which every power Photoshop user rates so highly.

The screen is not taken over by the program, and you can launch Photoshop next to the confusingly-real tutorial window. This is the start of a tutorial on photo restoration.

The CD-ROM is cleverly designed. Most CD-ROM presentations use a movie player which takes over your entire Mac or Windows screen, removing all the clutter, and presents a single window centrally. Photoshop 3.0 Training on CD doesn't.

The movie shows how heirarchical menus are used

It leaves your desktop alone, and puts movable floating windows on top. You can run the tutorial windows next to your own genuine Photoshop document, open at the same time, and the only confusing aspect is that the tutorials are real-time, same-size screen-shot movies so you may try to click their scroll bars instead of your 'real' ones!

The tutorial replays a Photoshop session, using all the tools, in movie form. Here, you watch an enlarged area as cloning is used to repair small details.

The commentary over the actions is comfortable (that is, if you like a Northern English accent - I place this man somewhere around Leeds or Bradford) and reads just like someone talking to you while demonstrating. Unlike the live one-to-one demo, you can turn him off, rewind, freeze a frame, and he doesn't take over your mouse and keyboard or sit right in front of the image you are supposed to be studying.

The final result is not perhaps what a museum restorer would expect to achieve, but it shows a very quick route to removing both the cracks and the color cast

In all, the CD would take six hours to 'read'. It is worth the £99.99 price for the tutorial on restoring old photos alone - though the method shown is slightly rough and ready, it's highly productive and perfect for commercial jobs (not for museum archivists aiming to exactly reproduce the original with flaws removed, though).

If you recognise any of these plug-ins, you've probably crashed a Power PC already...

Criticisms must be limited to the provision of some shareware or free Photoshop plug-ins which are frankly ancient and not suited either to Photoshop 3.0 or to current Macs - the first one I tried crashed the entire system. If you own a pre-Quadra Mac and Photoshop 2.5.1, however, they will come as a welcome bonus. The criticism could be removed if new read-me files clearly identified the compatibility of these items.

This CD-ROM runs very smoothly and quickly. It is capable of replaying a full 14" screen movie window in 256 colors with no jerking or pauses, with natural recorded voiceover. The word-search feature for topics is useful but doesn't open the help files directly, and some parts of the Glossary and Reference sections are a bit dead-end.

The movies also end with a blank white frame, which is slightly disconcerting. However, in production and compatability terms (tested in Macs from IIfx to 8100/110) this CD-ROM beats most of them hollow. It doesn't even bring up a 'not enough memory' message the way that 90% of all Macromind player files seem to...

The CD-ROM is available in the UK for Mac or PC for £99.99 plus £7.50 carriage charge and VAT, from Marrutt Ltd, Belbrook Industrial Estate, Uckfield, Sussex TN22 1QL, telephone (+44) 1825 764057, fax (+44) 1825 768841.