Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook: 61 Easy-To-Follow Recipes for Digital Photographers, Designers, and Artists

by Tim Shelbourne

Adobe Photoshop CS2 offers professional and amateur photographers, artists, and designers unprecedented opportunities to manipulate images on their personal computers, but it's a complex application... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596100221
• ISBN13: 9780596100223
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.3" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Next Level of Photoshop Artistic Quality

I have been Fooling around with Photoshop-CS2 for years, i have been able to produce Amazing Effects. Many of my greatest Photoshops were done by Accident, because i wasn't sure were to start or in what direction to go in. I got this book and right away i saw some i have done but wasn't sure how i did it. Plus they have Tons of other effects you can do, by the time your done you will have Museam Quality Photos. Most people will ask you to do Photos for them to hang up in there house as a Center Piece.

I am having fun with this book

There are hundreds of third party books for Photoshop, but this is one of the most gorgeous looking I have seen. It is in full color and the Photoshop artwork is inspiring. There are 61 step-by-step projects designed to teach you how to achieve interesting effects from photos. Flipping through the pages makes you just want to start right in and try some. To use the book, you can download the project files from a web link you find inside the book. The download is about 29MBs, but contains most of the original photos needed. The first project I tried out is one where you use a photo of the head of a horse and place it unto a textured wood background and you end up with something that could be a wine label or a poster. I did run into one problem where the wooden background was missing from the project's files. I was able to create one myself and still follow the project. My final product didn't look exactly like the one in the book, but it was darn close. Close enough that I was rather pleased with it. Adobe Photoshop CS2 is covered in this book, so I am not sure how well these projects would all work using an older version which may not have all the features used. I then proceeded to do a project that turns photos into watercolor paintings. I used my own photo, then tried it again on another photo. After a couple of tries, I almost have the steps memorized. Other projects show how to add a starry sky and a full moon to a photo of what looks like London Bridge at night, and adding reflections to objects, turning a figure to stone, or turning a photo into what looks like a painting. I have done a lot of dabbling in Photoshop just trying different effects but this book showed me a lot of tricks I never would have figured out on my own. This is as much fun as eating candy. You might even want to print some of your results out and frame them.

Well worth it

Despite the fact that this book features many of the same cliched effects you've seen in other Photoshop books, I'm giving this book 5 stars. Shelbourne's chapter on graphic art effects (oil painting, pencil sketch and watercolor) alone is worth the price of admission. I lurk regularly at Photoshop-based forums at the DPReview.com and RetouchPro.com, looking for new effects to try on my photos. Shelbourne, in a handful of pages, has given me plenty to savor for quite some time.

Great for consulting

This book is very very good because it shows you all of the photo effects in photoshop and how they will look like and how you can use them, I mean it shows you which kind of photo you can use to have the best of the effect. It is very visual and easy to follow. You can surprise a lot when you start using "correctly" the effects and you also will feel more secure in using them and make great things with you pics. I would say it is good to have this kind of books where you can find visually all of the photo effects.