Yippie! I am thrilled that you picked up this book because it’s loaded with 100 creative and innovative ideas to help jumpstart your creativity and teach you to do more with your designs and photographs, faster and better, with Photoshop. Aft er fl ipping through the pages, you’ll soon discover how valuable an addition this book will be to your art and design library.

What makes this particular tutorial book special is that it’s a reference guide designed to let you jump from chapter to chapter so you can read and learn about the things that interest you as the need arises. Th ink of each of these 100 chapters as their own little reference zones where you’ll learn about how to perform specifi c tasks using a variety of tools, fi lters, styles, adjustment layers, and more, to achieve your specifi c goals.

Everything you fi nd in this book is written simply and clearly, so you don’t have to wade through complicated technical help fi les or have to commit anything to memory. In each chapter, you’ll fi nd detailed, step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions, along with helpful tips and links to pages on SmashingMagazine.com and other websites where you can download special custom brushes, patterns, fonts, and textures. As you work through the chapters, you’ll learn new ways to do familiar things like accessing commands, tools, and keyboard shortcuts, as well as gain new insight about how the program works to enhance your personal creative workfl ow.

Photoshop is the number one image-editing soft ware tool available today and with good reason. On February 19th, 2010, Adobe Photoshop celebrated its 20th anniversary and throughout that entire time it has remained on the cutting edge of technology and creative innovation. I’ve personally been a Photoshop user since early 1990, and over the years I’ve witnessed fi rsthand how this amazing soft ware has helped to change not only how we think about photography and design, but how we work. Today, Photoshop is used worldwide by professional web designers, graphic designers, video designers, digital artists, photographers, and artists, as well art students, amateur photographers, videographers, and budding creative types.

Whatever your particular creative interest is in using Photoshop, this book is for you. Th e bottom line is that I want to make you comfortable with performing tasks in Photoshop in the hopes that you’ll turn to this book oft en as a springboard for sparking new ideas and gaining inspiration for all your projects.