I’D BEEN USING PHOTOSHOP for many years when a student in a class I was teaching suggested I write a book about it. I thought little more about it, until a letter arrived from a publisher saying that one of their other authors suggested I might be interested in writing a Photoshop book for them.
And so How to Cheat in Photoshop came into existence. What I hadn’t expected was how much I would learn from writing it. When you undertake any task in a field in which you’re competent, you work largely by instinct. Whether it’s image manipulation, or woodwork, or ceramics, or – I don’t know – even brain surgery, possibly, you repeat methods and techniques that you know will be effective.
But when you write it all down, it forces you to rationalise your actions. Why do I do it this way, rather than that way? What alternative approaches could I use? What makes me choose one method rather than another, when both will achieve the same goal?
When you explain a process to someone else, you’re also forcing yourself to really understand what you’re doing, perhaps for the first time. It’s not until you teach a subject that you really make sense of what you’re doing.
