Product Description

How would you like to create your own impressionist landscape, a van Gogh still life, or a surrealist Salvador Dali dream world? Or perhaps a classic Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite or an authentic-looking 19th century Daguerrotype? You can do all of that and more with Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook.

The book tells you all you need to know to turn your original digital photographs into images that mimic the styles of great photographers and painters. From advice on how to develop an eye for appropriate subject matter to 62 detailed recipes that demonstrate exactly how to create an "original" van Gogh, Vermeer, Edward Weston, or Andy Warhol (among others), this book is an authentic guide to understanding and simulating the work of great artists-and a whole lot of fun.

• Analyzing the styles of great artists: format, composition, angles of view, color palettes, and image textures
• Shooting for digital manipulation, working non-destructively, making your own brushes and patterns
• Creating Daguerrotypes, cyanotypes, stop-motion photographs, cross-processed images, Polaroid transfers, and infrared effects
• Mimicking photographic styles from the pre-Raphaelites and the Naturalists to Jerry Uelsmann and David Hockney
• Exploring painting and printmaking techniques from Rembrandt to Warhol: Dutch portraits, 18th century landscape painting, Japanese woodblocks, Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Pop Art

Packed with step-by-step instructions, an inspirational selection of full-color digital imagery, and authoritative information and advice, Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook is the ultimate guide to creating convincing digital masterpieces in the styles of many of the world's greatest artists.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #180598 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Publisher
Don't Miss Out!! The O'Reilly Photoshop Cook-Off Contest Deadline is August 15--No Entry Fee, Great Prizes!

O'Reilly's 2006 Photoshop Cook-Off Contest is an opportunity flex your imagination and ingenuity, have lots of fun, and win great prizes--like a Pentax K100D Digital SLR and DA 18 - 55 mm Lens Kit or an Epson Stylus Photo R2400 printer. The Grand Prize winner will receive a prize package worth more than $9,600. Five category winners will receive packages worth more than $3,000 each. The total value of all prizes exceeds $27,000.

It's easy to participate. Just take up to three of your own photos and manipulate them with Adobe Photoshop, using recipes from any of O'Reilly's five Photoshop Cookbooks Starting with an original photograph, choose an appropriate recipe (or two) and cook up a masterpiece, adapting the recipes as necessary for your creative vision. On the online entry form, you'll list the recipes you used, and submit both your original digital image and the "cooked" image you've created. The submission process is a snap, there's no entry fee, and anyone over the age of 14 can enter. Deadline for entry is August 15, 2006. Prizes will be awarded on November 2, 2006 at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York.

Cook-Off Sponsors include: Adobe, Creative Pro, "Digital Photo Pro," Epson, ExpoImaging, Flickr, Friesen's: The Yearbook Company, Graphics.com, Gretag Macbeth, iView Multimedia, Imaginginfo.com, Imaging Resource, iStock Photo, Lensbabies, Lowepro, Lynda.com, Nik Software, "Outdoor Photographer," Pantone, "PC Photo," Pentax, Pexagon Technology, Photos.com, Photoshopsupport.com, "Photo Trade News," "Professional Photographer," "Rangefinder," Silicon Power, Shutterstock, Software Cinema, "Studio Photography," Total Training, Wetzel & Company.

Don't miss out--O'Reilly's 2006 Photoshop Cook-Off is a great way to cultivate your creative genius, showcase your talent, and take home fabulous prizes. Fire up Adobe Photoshop and get cooking now!

Other important details:

-Deadline for entries is August 15, 2006. No entry fee.

-All entries must be created using recipes from one or more of the five O'Reilly Photoshop Cookbooks: "Photoshop Retouching Cookbook for Digital Photographers," "Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers," "Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook," "Photoshop Filter Effects Encyclopedia," and/or "Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook."

-Winners will be announced on November 2, at a special awards ceremony to be held at Photo Plus Expo in New York.

-Legal U.S. residents only.

About O'Reilly Media For over 25 years, O'Reilly Media has illuminated the spaces where innovation, creativity, and technology converge. Nowhere is this more exciting than in the rapidly expanding sphere of creative media, specifically digital photography, graphics, video, audio, and illustration. From in-depth tutorials and comprehensive references to techniques cookbooks and creative guides, O'Reilly connects you to the technologies--and the leading experts--in print, online, and in person. Visit digitalmedia.oreilly.com.

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O'Reilly is a registered trademark of O'Reilly Media, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

About the Author
John Beardsworth (www.beardsworth.co.uk) is a writer, photographer, IT consultant, and the author of several books on Photoshop and digital photography. He currently resides in London, England.

Customer Reviews

Simulate classic art styles with Photoshop
This book is in many ways an extension of the recently published "Photoshop Photo Effects", also by O'Reilly and Associates. However, that book was more about photorealistic effects, where this book shows 62 recipes to make a photograph look like a work of art in one of the classic styles. Plus, it manages to double as a short applied book on art history. For each of the 62 recipes, the book first has a few paragraphs about the history of this particular artistic technique and which artists used this style. Next, there is a photograph of something that might have made an interesting subject for one of the artists that used this technique. The author then includes numbered steps as to what you need to do in Photoshop to create each effect along with the resulting intermediate images. The final image that you have might not exactly match what the author shows, because the instructions talk about a range of values on each filter and brush used, not an exact number or setting. I found this book very interesting, but it will take some effort on the reader's part to get good results since you are trying to produce an artistic effect, and that is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. The table of contents, not shown by Amazon, is as follows:
INTRODUCTION

THE ARTIST'S EYE - Subject matter; Composition and the angle of view; Color pallettes and tonal balance

TRICKS OF THE TRADE - Shooting for digital manipulation; digital workflow; Layers and working non-destructively; Using the selection tools; Fine-tuning colors; Filters; Making your own brushes and patterns; Making frames and borders

PHOTOGRAPHERS- Daguerrotypes; Calotypes and salted paper prints; Cartes de visite; Ambrotypes and tintypes; Wet-plate collodion; Cyanotypes; Stop-motion photography; High art and the Pre-Raphaelites; The Naturalists; Platinum paper; Gum bichromate; Autochrome color images; American avant-garde; The Surrealists; Abstract cityscapes; Modernism and the natural form; The Depression Era; Art Deco flowers; The black-and-white landscape; Powerful portraits; Maximizing the mundane; The age of jazz; Photojournalism of the 1960's and 1970's; Surreal photomontage; Tranquil landscapes; Fine art flowers; The kitsch and the quirky; Color landscapes; Lith printing; Split-toning; Infrared black and white; The scraped Polaroid; Polaroid image transfers; Polaroid emulsion lift; The joiner; Cross-processing

PAINTERS AND PRINTMAKERS- Intaglio; The Dutch portrait; The Italian landscape; The 18th century vignette; The luminous landscape; The romantic landscape; Japanese printmaking; The Impressionist landscape; Seurat and the Pointillists; Van Gogh's sunflowers; Nocturnes; Fauve scenes; Klimt and Art Nouveau; Catalan Art Nouveau; Cubism; Expressionism; Classical echoes; The Futurists; Surrealism; Escher-style portraits; The abstract watercolor; Studies of flowers; The Naive Landscape; Silkscreen style; The pop-art comic strip; Swimming pools

Very good but some results feel canned
As a digital artist/retoucher that comes from a painting and drawing background, I was excited about this title. Achieving realistic effects like mezzotint, oil painting, etc are not easy if you intend to achieve true realism. For the most part, the photo-oriented end results in this book are very convincing (cross processing, Ansel Adams-style landscape, gum bichromate being some examples) but most of the painting and artist ones feel very quick and dirty, without the extra work needed to actually make the results feel painted. Perhaps the fault is with the form: getting the buttery depth of a Van Gogh or the layered overprinting tones of a Hokusai is probably not something you can explain in a one page spread. At worst, the things like the mock Dali and Klimt feel perfunctorily executed and come off as cheeky. If you are a photo hobbyist looking for something easy to whip up the "close enough" feel of a art style without doing it justice, then this title is fine but if you're looking for the techniques a real professional would use to truly imitate art, then you're going to have to look elsewhere for the full picture.

not-so-fast ...
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. Unfortunately, the newer publication is less useful. 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).