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Windows Graphics & PrePress by Steve Rimmer

ISBN: 0-201-62205-X       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 320pp+DISK       Price: £27-47

Categories:   MS Windows     graphics

Reviewed by Michael Wild in C Vu 9-1 (Nov 1996)

Chapter one seems to be aimed at the graphics worker wanting to buy a PC. It explains the basics of PCs and Windows, paying more than average attention to graphics-relevant issues like large removable media and PostScript. It ends with a brief excursion into graphics formats. Chapter two gives an overview of prepress work and for me this was the most interesting and useful part of the book. For a non-expert it seemed to cover all the important areas.

Chapter three is back to graphics formats, using the 'Graphic Workshop' program (on the disc, registration $40) to illustrate the features of various formats and the issues involved in converting between them. This was interesting, but for serious graphics work the lack of detailed guidance would be frustrating. It would have been much more valuable if many more test images had been supplied with the tutorial, using them to illustrate the effect of the various transformations.

Chapters four and five are tutorials on Corel Draw and Corel Paint, which are _not_ on the disc. At this point I felt cheated--a book such as this should be stand-alone. I didn't go out and buy Corel, but my impression was that the treatment was similar to that of Graphic Workshop--not enough tutorial walk-through examples for the serious learner.

Chapter six is about finding and using clip-art and as with chapter two I found it useful and interesting. A final positive point is that the author offers his email address to explain anything in the book you don't understand--a welcome sign of personal commitment.

The book is a bit of a curate's egg--some good material, but mediocre tutorials further marred by the need to register or purchase additional software to get the best from them. So I cannot really recommend it. If you want coverage of this area, an alternative not tied to specific software is Emil & Sybil Ihrig's 'Preparing Digital Images for Print' (favourably reviewed in C Vu Vol 8 No 5) and its companion volume 'Scanning the Professional Way'. The pair will cost you little more than this book.