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81 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the Few Books Covering Restpration, January 7, 2006
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
Photograph retouching has long been a process where a picture has been improved to remove the background, clean up a bad light reflection or other faults with the picture. And this book does an excellent job of telling you how to retouch such pictures.
More important, though is the sections in this book on photo restoration. How do you take the old picture of that Civil War ancestor, or that snapshot of Grandmother when she was a young girl and make it look like a portrait that just came out of the camera today.
Although the book is very good on retouching, there simply aren't that many books on restoration. And Ms. Eisman is a master at restoring old images. In this book there are full-color, step-by-step examples of rescuing heirloom originals suffering from mold, cracks, torn edges, scratches. There is even a section on restoring missing parts of an image. Such as using a person's right arm to replace the left that had been torn off.
Besides the coverage of areas not usually seen, this book further has a writing style that clearly and succinctly explains each step in the process. This book is highly recommended.
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58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a must-have in your Photoshop library, January 12, 2007
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
Whether you plan to do any retouching or restoration of photos in Photoshop is immaterial: you still should have this book in your Photoshop library.
Why?
Because Katrin Eismann is not only a true master of Photoshop, but she is that rarity of rarities: a teacher who can teach through the written word - and in this case, a ton of illustrations.
This is truly a Photoshop master's class between covers. It is not for the beginner - Eismann wisely leaves that for others. You should definitely know the basics of Photoshop for cracking this book open.
But once you begin, you are in for a treat: ten chapters that cover everything you need to know about retouching and restoration in detail. Best of all, every technique Eismann teaches in this book will make you a more proficient Photoshop user, no matter what you use the program for.
Unlike other authors, Eismann doesn't simply get you going and then leave you hanging. Her lessons are complete. And Eismann - happily - doesn't try to be a comedian like Scott Kelby, Deke McClelland and Russell Brown. Her writing style is clear, concise and natural and a delight to read.
Buy this and her book on masking and compositing along with Lee Varis's book called "Skin" and Steve Caplain's book on photo montage and you'll have the basis for a truly fine education in the art of Photoshop.
Jerry
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39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Start.... Embarassing finish, December 27, 2005
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
I've been using Pshop for years now for photo restoration, and was impressed with this book. This book starts out with some great methods for retouching images, some of which I had never thought of using. I can't wait to try some of them out on some images I wasn't able to fix.
I would have really liked to see a table with some "start here" type ideas, like if your picture is high key, start with a levels adjustment layer, or if your image is badly faded, start with a curves adjustment. As it is, you basically have to flip through the pages until to you see a picture that resembles yours to find ideas for restoring it.
Step by step instructions are provided for Mac and PC versions of Pshop CS2, but all the screen captures are Mac. Keyboard shortcuts are always provided, but the instructions on how to traverse through the dialog boxes are not, making this book inappropriate for the beginning Photoshop user.
I use Photoshop CS instead of CS2 and the instructions and screen captures were not so significantly different that I couldn't find my way around. When a feature is new to CS2, the author states so in the text, which also makes it easier for those of us using older versions of Pshop.
Because the book assumes a intermediate or better knowledge of Photoshop, I would not recommend it for a beginner or a person who just wants to fix one faded photo of Great Grandma.
I do have one complaint tho -- after the brilliant beginning, the back half of the book features the work of "Art" who does some of the worst photoshopping I've ever seen. It seriously looks like a Woot contest. The height of awfulness is reached when a deceased woman's arm is cloned and Transformed (Rotated/Scaled) onto her opposite side making her look like a hunchback. The correct method would have been to rotate and use Free Transform, Skew, or Perspective, and then heal or smudge some of the wrinkles in the blouse so the arm didn't look so obviously copied. And worse, the cloned arm, which is farther away from the camera is placed in front of the original arm, resulting in an Escher-esque mind bender.
Other than the bad Art art :) at the end, I'm satisfied with the purchase.
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