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How to Cheat in Photoshop CS3: The art of creating photorealistic montages (How to Cheat in)
by Steve Caplin
List Price: $39.95
Our Price: $26.37
You Save: $13.58 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 0240520629
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2007-05-28
Publisher: Focal Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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With his in-depth knowledge of the little-known secrets used by the pros to produce awardwinning illustrations, Steve is THE go-to guru for professional designers, graphic artists, illustrators, retouchers and students of design media and illustration who want to create photorealistic effects using Photoshop. Updated for Photoshop CS3, this must-have resource unlocks your creativity and helps you save time in the software so you can spend more time creatively. The book is also relevant to any version of Photoshop. * Create convincing smoke effects and make effective explosions the simple way * Take years off someone's appearance * Turn a photograph of someone looking straight into the camera into a different perspective with the entire head (not just the eyes) * Modify a statue so it looks like a living person or paint hair directly on any surface * Produce the perfect cutout in the shortest time with Photoshop CS3's new Quick Selection tool... and more
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Featured Customer Reviews:
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Great book, but.....
I thought I had enough understanding of Photoshop, after completing Adobe's 'Classroom in a Book for Photoshop' to be able to work through Steve Caplin's book, 'How to Cheat in Photoshop', but I got stuck on too many pages. Steve assumes that you know how to achieve the steps to accomplish his projects. It took me hours hunting through help and photoshop bible to sometimes perform the simplest task. I think this book is going to be awesome, but I have temporarily set it aside and I am working through Derek Lea's book, 'Creative Photoshop' which is more helpful at the moment. I think I will be able to start again on 'How to Cheat...' and then be able to truly appreciate how cool this book is.
This is not a book about "photorealism"
The good:
This book has a lot of useful information, tricks and little gems in regards to compositing and to some extent building photografic elements from scratch. Its well layouted and the author clearly is building on a lot of first hand, commercial experience.
The Bad:
This is NOT a book about "creating photorealistic montages" - at least not according to my definition of "photorealistic". This is a book about "quickly whipping up photoillustrations for newspapers and magazines". And as such is delivers.
As professional compositor and retouch expert who, among other things, makes my living creating compositions that you really can't tell apart from an original exposure, I was sorely disappointed with the contents of this book. Granted, I'm a advanced professional and this book certainly has something to offer for beginners starting out making compositing, but the title is grossly misleading IMHO, and only deals with the most basic techinques for making illustrations - NOT "photorealistic" images.
The "how to" part gets a bit thin as the book progresses
This book starts out with excellent descriptions of how to accomplish the effects (assuming some knowledge of how PS works). I enjoyed using the techniques on my photos. And then about halfway through he seemed to get tired of pesky details of instruction and simply says "do this, then this" with not even a hint or menu illustration for clarification. Some end results include his notes that "I did this to add realism" with no instruction whatsoever. The first half of the book--great. The second half, more like his showing off his prowess with PS. However, simply the knowledge that some of the later stuff *can* be done is inspiring enough to induce me to spend hours figuring out just how.
Cheating at Photoshop CS3
This book reminds me of having cliff notes during high school. It takes you to the point without confusion. It covers a vast number of things that interest me in my photography business.
Serendipitous
I knew from the title that this book had a lot of cool special effects, and it does. What I wasn't expecting was the very pragmatic tutorial on artistic communication: how to tell a story by the relative placement of objects/people in a picture, or the slant of the eyes, etc. And, yes, you can actually turn a people's eyes (or their entire heads!) with some neat, easy, amazing tricks. I just didn't know some of this stuff was even possible. Definitely not a book full of stuff you've seen already.
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