The premise for the book is not ambitious. "The stated goal," writes author Bront Davis, "is to make you not only proficient in the basics of Photoshop, but to create a learning environment in which you feel comfortable enough to experiment, test and develop your own tips, tricks, and, ultimately skills." Having spent 14 days with the book, I came to the conclusion that the authors, and ultimately Hayden Books, should have spent an extra 14 days just checking their facts because this book not only fails to meet the goal, but also contains some rather serious inaccuracies and omissions.

This book gets into trouble within the first 14 pages. In the Photoshop Basics chapter-Day 1- the authors waltz through the basics and then make a common "rookie error" when talking about memory. "The larger you make your image," they write, "the more memory it requires (both in RAM to have it open, and on your hard disk to save)." Pardon me? Since when is a hard drive regarded as "memory"?

On the second day of Photoshop you learn how to make selections and how to edit and manipulate images. Well, not really. In fact, this is where the first huge omission rears its ugly head. (Then again, if you are new to the application, you won't miss it.) The main exercise here is to use Photoshop's lasso tool to select a water lily. They show you how to do it with a 10-pixel "Granny" feather. (Scan an old back and white picture of Granny. Fix and colourize the scan. Select the oval tool. Give the tool a 10-pixel feather. Select Granny. Copy and paste into a new document. Instant family heirloom.) Just the suggestion of such a large feather strains the bounds of credibility. They completely lose it when they don't show you how to make an accurate selection with a one or two-pixel feather through the use of the modifier keys that add to or subtract from a selection.

The authors also seem to have a fixation on using the menus. Hot keys and short-cuts are after-thoughts. Selecting palettes, filling selections with colour and so on can be accessed through menu commands, but using the keyboard becomes almost second nature to any Photoshop user in a very short order. Why these are relegated to the back of the book or treated as footnotes is mystifying. In fact, the authors omitted an entire set of keyboard commands in the Appendix. Using the F-keys to manipulate selections and choose palettes is one of the many useful Photoshop features that were omitted or, even worse, ignored. The biggest omission is more personal than general. I am a Mac user and, for the life of me, I couldn't find the words "command" or "option" or the phrase "Apple Key" anywhere in the book, even though the book clearly states it covers through Version 4 for Windows and Macintosh.