As I promised, here´s the review of scott kelbys “7-point system” book.

First of all, the “7-point system” is really easy written. Even if you´re not a native speaker (like me), you´ll have no problem to follow. But of cause you´re interested, if the content is worth the $32 you have to pay for it.

I would say – yes, it is. Why? Well, I´m convinced by the concept. Scott is presenting 21 lessons, each lesson explained step by step. You follow all these steps on your own with the original photo downloaded in advance.

The photo improvement usually starts with some basic adjustments in Camera Raw (remark – even if it´s a jpeg!), to go afterwards deeper into photoshop to get a classy picture.

It would be too difficult to indicate the major 7 steps, but roughly you´ll get a workflow like this:

• adjust temperatur in Camera Raw
• adjust exposure (+ / – depending from the original)
• add some blacks for better contrast
• create some layers e.g. “paint with light” (this was the key for me!!)
• pimp you colours in lab mode
• pimp your contrast (curves)
• sharpen your picture (with a nice trick – not only the unsharp mask!)

This is really very rough and there are much more steps and tipps, but after reading and working with the first 5 exercises my work immediately improved.

The cons for this book are maybe, that sometimes it´s too easy. For example you´ll get a tool how to automate the sharpening procedure in the very first lesson and afterwards you do it all the time manually again.

Another point is, that sometimes you can choose different ways to achieve a result. It´s not so clear everytime, why Scott choose one way and not the other. Also it might be complicate for some people to do the painting stuff without a graphic board. Personally, I don´t have one and it worked fine for me with a mouse…

Last thing is that of cause, Scott is a pro and has the view of a pro. So it might be not so easy for the rest of us to see what he saw and to indicate all the time the critical parts of a picture. But I guess this is nothing someone can explain or show you in a book. You´ll have to sharpen your eyes and your senses and you´ll have to look at a thousand of pictures to gain the view of a good photographer.

I like the book. It showed a lot of useful stuff to me and due to the fact that you immediately follow everything at the original picture, you´ll understand much better the effects and the “how-to”.

I prefer it to my 840 pages “Photoshop compendium”. It get´s to the point and shows the “main” stuff you really need.

Highly recommended!