Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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.

I own the first version of this book. It was the first Photoshop book that I bought and was simply amazing.

I bought the third version because there have been several upgrades to Photoshop since the first version was written. It is hard to believe that this version could be even better than the earlier one, but it is. It has been totally rewritten. All of the photos that are used as samples are different from those used before. The book is longer. The quality of information available in the book is stronger and deeper. It is worth every penny.

Almost everyone in the world has a digital camera now and lots of photos--not all of which are perfect, no matter how hard you tried to when you took the photo. Then there are those boxes and boxes of old photos, loose or in albums that constitute our family histories. Old photos fade, get scratched, bent and generally lose quality over time. This book is for those who want to preserve and enhance those photos.

The book is also a tutorial for users of Photoshop, beginning with a section called Photoshop Essentials. In this section, the author reviews Photoshop tools, keyboard shortcuts, how to navigate and use Photoshop efficiently, with the focus on the tools needed for restoration and retouching. It is not a primer for Photoshop. My Photoshop skills are not very high level and this section was a great help.

Not only does the author show you how to use Photoshop, but she also discusses how to set up your work area, what kind of lighting you should have, the workflow, equipment needed, with tips on how to proceed in a manner that allows you (or someone else) to come back and know what you have done.

One of the things that impressed me when I first glanced through the book is the large number of photos used to illustrate the principles being explained. In addition, the
explanations not only focus on the mechanics, but also on the reasons for making the needed changes. Learning the principles behind the changes will help you assess what needs to be done to your own photos.

The book is organized so that each section is almost independent of the other sections--at least once you have some basics down. This makes it possible to focus on areas that are of more interest to you or necessary for the work you want to do. This is especially true if you are already very familiar with Photoshop and able to identify the problems that need solving in your photos.

If you are not familiar with Photoshop, your time would be well spent to work through the exercises. I find that I can read about stuff forever, but when I actually use my hands and my brain together, I retain more information. You will be able better to identify what needs to be improved in your own photos by reviewing the samples and making the corrections.

I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to seriously undertake the preservation of photographs that are important for whatever reason--family history or historical significance or just to create better photos.

...into the complicated, sometimes inscrutable world of Photoshop. If you're aspiring to be a professional photographer or post-production assistant, probably the single best thing you can do for your career development -aside from practice, practice, practice- is make sure you own a copy of this book and Ms. Eismann's other work: "Photoshop Masking & Compositing". Study her techniques, apply them to your own images and re-apply them until you can look at an image and know right off which tools you're likely to use and how.

Far better than a reference type book (Photoshop Bible, et al), and more thorough than other lead-by-example PS books, these two clearly explain the different contexts for each tool, and show you -in relatively simple terms- how to use them to great effect. This book is also nicely illustrated and laid out, which makes it much easier to read through the examples without getting bored or frustrated. In short, as someone who works in this business professionally and also does some instruction, Katrin's books are the ones I recommend to those who are really serious / not just looking for a glossed over summary of Photoshop.

Highly recommended.

A very good way to judge a Photoshop manual is by how fast what you learn and apply from the book more than pays for itself. For me, and I'm a pretty savvy long time Photoshop user and now teacher, that took about 30 minutes.

Eismann is that rarest of people: a gifted doer with the eye of an artist, an excellent lecturer, and a fine writer to boot. And good God does she know her stuff! She has a dry sense of humor too and that really helps.

This book immediately earned a place on the very short bookshelf of essential digital imaging and Photoshop books and is one of the 3 or four best I've found in recent years.

While I'm not a Photoshop beginner, I certainly do not consider myself to be advanced. I've been struggling for several years to get my old slides to the point of just being okay.
I've spent a small fortune on DVDs and other tutorials and was beginning to think I'd never improve. Many so-called experts seem to try harder to be funny than to teach.
After working through the first four chapters of this book I can already see great improvement in my pictures. I'd give this book 5 stars.

i bought this book about 4 months ago. this book changed the way i worked in photoshop. i no longer look at all the options in photoshop and feel like i don't know what to do with them. if you are a beginner in ps and looking to move up to the intermediate level...this is definitely the book for you. I have worked through this book with people of all skill levels and there is something for everyone! Great book! Katrin definitely knows what she is talking about. I have recommended this book to lots of people.

This new version of "Adobe Photoshop Restoring & Retouching" is even better than the previous versions of this book. The author resisted to the easy path of cut and pasting the previous book and only write a few pages about Photoshop CS2 new features. All the techniques are reviewed to get new insights and improvements, keeping the book up to date with Katrin's latest "tricks" and techniques.