Very short list:

Katrin Eismann and Wayne Palmer’s Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter).

If you know your way around Photoshop and are looking for an excellent book on retouching with Photoshop, this is it. . .

I can’t think of a better book than this one for improving your Photoshop skills. It is not a book for absolute beginners. You do need to understand the basics of Photoshop. The techniques are mostly intermediate to advanced. It is for people who are willing to spend some time to get excellent results. It is not a book of shortcuts. You won’t learn how (as I once read from an ill informed source) “to retouch a face in 3 minutes or less”.

This book isn’t a cookbook where you jump ahead to the recipe for removing trees. The book is progressive. Later chapters build on the skills learned in earlier chapters.

Most of the photos that are used as illustations in the book can be downloaded from a web site so you can work on the photo on your computer while you follow along in the book. It is as close as you can come to taking one of Eismann’s excellent workshops without actually going to a workshop.

This book deserves every rave review that it has received.

Katrin Eismann is a wonder. She is the kind of person that gets paid to spend 8 hours retouching a single photo for the cover of some big name magazine. She is meticulous as you would guess from her motto: “Every pixel, every pore.”