Product Description

Have you ever considered using Photoshop to create fine art?

Photoshop is usually used for enhancing photos, but this extremely powerful software package is capable of so much more. Every feature, from brushes to background, can be customised and optimised for artistic effect. With a little guidance from a pro, your photoshop results can go from competent retouching of images to visually stunning re-interpretations of them, turning everyday pictures into breathtaking works of art.

In this beautiful and inspiring book, acclaimed artist, author and lecturer Susan Bloom shows you how to do just that. Starting with the fundamentals: creating your own artistic brushes and textured papers virtually, she goes on to demonstrate how to create a variety of classic artistic styles in Photoshop, with chapters on watercolours, pastels, charcoal and oil. Further chapters cover illustration techniques in photoshop, and using third-party software to create painterly effects.

While the results are highly polished and realistic, this is not a book written specifically for artists. The techniques are aimed squarely at the Photoshop user looking to broaden their pallette, with emphasis on altering photographs to create artwork, rather than creating artwork from scratch.

Beautifully written, clearly laid out, and guaranteeing inspiring results, this book is a must-have for every Photoshop user.

* Guide to using Photoshop to create fine art from photographs, covering many different artistic styles
* Highly visual, inspiring content with clear step-by-step instructions and hundreds of screenshots
* Backwards compatible approach: author has taken care to ensure that this fully up-to-date title also applies to previous editions of Photoshop

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28653 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780240811147
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Susan Ruddick Bloom is a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at McDaniel College in Maryland. She has a BFA and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is well known for both her traditional wet darkroom alternative processes and her digital darkroom work. Sue has been teaching digital classes since the beginning of Photoshop and has used a Mac from the very first one on the market (128K, with a screen the size of an index card). Trained in drawing, painting, and printmaking, she was at one time a courtroom artist for television and newspapers. Her painterly skills enhance her photographic ones, and her images frequently combine techniques. Sue's work has been exhibited and collected widely.

Customer Reviews

Now this is a COOL book!
OK, so this is COOL! I traditionally though of PhotoShop as a photographic imaging program and when I wanted to get a little 'artsy' with it I'd drop down a filter and run it against the image. I figured the most adjustments I had to it was to use masking, selections and opacity with various blends. This book has really brought me familiar with the brush within Photoshop. So many Photoshop books use the brush as a controlled and localized selection to apply effects. This book really shows you how to use it as a digital version of an actual brush. It is amazing how you can take a typical portrait and turn it into something special.

If you are a pro photographer you will really like how some of the effects can take a wedding portrait that has a good scene but horrible exposure or color and turn it into an artistic work of art that captures the essence of the moment. It really becomes more than just the image and should call for more profits.

if you are a photographer looking to get more artistic with your images or an artist trying to leverage some of the advanced functionality of Photoshop, I would recommend you pick up this book.

Good introduction to the artistic possibilities
This book's intended audience is Photoshop users who have never explored the brushes and painting tools in Photoshop. It's not, however, really about "Digital Painting." The book introduces you (by way of 50 pages of screenshots of the brushes PS ships with) to brushes. Then it shows how to use a single technique, with variations, to achieve photo manipulations resembling watecolor, oils, and other traditional media. The technique, by the way, is not at all new, and you may already know it: duplicate the background layer, run a filter on it, add a layer mask, and then paint on the layer mask to reveal the filtered image. This is a far cry from just running the Watercolor filter and calling it a painting, but it is also not what I consider digital painting. This is a Photoshop cookbook, and it's a pretty good one. The text never references the figure numbers on the screenshots, which makes it hard to follow in many places. There's also a few places where the author neglects to mention how she got from here to there, which will leave beginners frustrated.

Bloom assumes her audience knows layer masks, blending modes, and layers, so her coverage of these subjects is scant. If you are familiar with layers, though, you may find this book is just the ticket to help you release your "inner artist." If you're a photographer, it'll give you some easy methods for artistically enhancing your portraits and landscapes.

A better book, which covers many more techniques, and is more clearly-written, is Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook: 61 Easy-to-Follow Recipes for Digital Photographers, Designers, and Artists by Tim Shelbourne.

A labor of love
To be fair to the author, Ms. Bloom, her heart is clearly in the right place and I can see that this book is a labor of love. It's easy to see that Ms. Bloom has a passion and love of art, which prompted her to write this book, which is about exploring art through the tools provided in Photoshop.

The reason I didn't give this book a higher rating is that I think that it could be improved upon.

There's a big assumption that people reading this book are familiar with Photoshop, Layers, Layer Stacks, and Masks. I've been using Photoshop for years, so I knew what the author was talking about. I just found it odd that so many pages were devoted to explaining brushes in all their varieties, and yet there was nil on Layers, Layer Stacks, and Masking. If a section was added to this book devoted to this topic (and the naming of layers to ease working with them), I think this would be a much stronger book.

That being said, I enjoyed the book and the various techniques and approaches it took towards producing art from photographs. My favorite was the Watercolor section, which has produced some very nice results for me.

I'd also like to make one final point. Though it was mentioned in the book briefly, producing the type of work being done in this book leans towards using a Wacom Tablet with Photoshop. You can do everything here without a Wacom Tablet, but having one would sure make most of the processes described within much easier.