Travel to Latin America

Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook: 62 Easy-To-Follow Recipes for Creating the Classic Styles of Great Artists & Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio)

Format: Paperback
Author: John Beardsworth
ReleaseDate: 21 February, 2006
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Great recipes, easy steps, wonderful results.
Not surprisingly, you'll find yourself learning more than you originally expected to about Photoshop. This book puts you on the fast track to grafting the styles of famous artists into your own work through more than five dozen easy-to-follow recipes.

not-so-fast ...
Unfortunately, the newer publication is less useful. Earlier this year I reviewed what many will see as the companion volume to this book ("Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers"), written by the same author. It seems to have been written on a pretext that it's clever to be able to duplicate what traditional artists can do. This seems - from my own personal viewpoint - to be greatly undervaluing the power of Photoshop (and similar software). Practitioners of digital fine art should (really, constructively) be looking to explore what the principles of prior and traditional art can mean within a new domain.

Plus, the book gets off to a definitely poor start. The second and longer of two introductory sections is titled "The Tricks of the Trade". Well it would be better if just some of the "tricks" had been explained in full and more accurately. Say, how to make a selection in Photoshop from the best available precursor (a black-and-white alpha channel). Or say again, how to make tonal corrections to the original photograph using a luminance mask. Then again, the first (and shorter) of the introductory chapters, titled "The Artist's Eye", is just a teaser. This topic - pre-visualizing what can be achieved as an output image when composing the original photographic input - could have benefited from a much more detailed explanation/argument. Indeed, it could even merit an expansive concluding chapter (but the book doesn't have one of those at all . . . . ). This is, after all, at the very core of what the user could harness to any given artistic objective.

Additionally, I think that it's strange that a book such as this simply makes no reference at all to what could be printed from the recipes it contains. Some of the finished (output) images might look quite intriguing as 3 by 5 inch reproductions in the book - but does the methodology hold up if you're targeting a 20 by 36 inch output (say) on a large format printer? And what to do if that's not the case? Finally, and in common with the earlier companion volume, this book suffers from strange and inconsistent layouts of screenshots and text, plus all sorts of technical and editing omissions/errors (which include, for example, having the wrong screenshot in the wrong recipe - see p. 108).

Excellent!
The recipes in this book truly are easy to reproduce. Wonderful effects for the artistically inclined. You can apply these techniques to any of your digital photos.

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