Book Review: Kelby’s 7-Point System for Photoshop

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by Jamie

7-Point System

Note: This is book 3 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge.

Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 Featuring Scott Kelby by Scott Kelby with a special introduction by Scott Kelby is kind of what you’d expect based on a quick thumb-through. The author, Scott Kelby, lays out a seven-point system or workflow that he uses for finishing off digital photographs in post production using Photoshop CS3 (with or without the accompanying Lightroom program). Those steps are:

  1. Basic camera RAW adjustments
  2. Curves
  3. Shadow/highlight adjustments
  4. “Painting with light” (i.e., using layer masks and brush tools)
  5. Channels
  6. Layer blending
  7. Sharpening

Not every photo needs all 7 of those steps, but Kelby claims that after years of taking shots from out out of the camera rough to spit-shined and polished, this is his basic workflow. After this brief introduction, the rest of the book consists of many projects in which the author takes a “so-so” or even awful picture out of the camera (that is, before any post processing) and walks you step-by-step through the process of making it presentable or even fantastic. Each of these projects follows the 7-step process, though some of them omit unnecessary steps and some of them include “bonus tips” like cloning out flaws in a flower petal, adding in a fake sky, or other Photoshop wizardry.

In a way, this is kind of an odd way to write a book. The idea is apparently to lay out the 7 steps up front, then drill them into you by having you read and watch (by way of many, many full color photographs of each step along the way) their application over and over again so that at the end of each project you can marvel at the “before” and “after” versions of the picture when laid out side by side. Given that, this is not a book for beginners. If you don’t fundamentally understand a digital photo’s histogram or what curves are or how layer masks work, you should probably start with a more basic text and then come back to this.

But once armed with that foundation, I figured that the best way to work through this book was to occasionally download one of the source pictures from Kelby’s website and actually work along with him on that project, seeing for myself how sliders affected the picture and how to use layer masks in ways I hadn’t thought of in order to brighten, darken, or sharpen only the parts of the photo that I wanted to. Unfortunately Kelby’s website was borked and I couldn’t do this. But it was a good thought! So I worked on my own pictures.

Perhaps the best thing to do here is provide an illustration. Here’s a before and after comparison of my own, involving a picture that I processed with this 7-point system in mind:


I didn’t find much that I didn’t know about in theory, but the projects did do a good job of bringing it all together and presenting me with an order and workflow that I could use to approach my post processing in general. My only complaint is that this isn’t likely to make a very good reference book –its value is more akin to watching a video or live demonstration of a technique, and in fact this whole thing would probably work better in those media. Look for that product soon, I imagine.

Others doing the 52-in-52 challenge this week:

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Jamie