Customer Reviews

AdobePhotoshopCS2: The Art of Photographing Women

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This books is based on the old saying, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime." It teaches you how you can make changes to your 'raw' pictures into works of art. It emphasized the concept that can actually be applied to any type of photography. Personally, I like to take Portrait, Street Life, and Candid. This book really hope me to think more of how and what I want to have as my final result from the pictures I take. I used to think that postproduction of a picture is pointless but the more I learned from this book. It became more evident that that is not the case. It is an essential part of digital photography. Now, I can make the pictures I take to come out exactly the way I intended it to be.

It's Great! Kevin is a first class author and the information is invaluable. Many many topics, methods and real life situations. This is a color rich, thick and useful book while the price is surprisingly low. I have both CS and CS2 versions.

When I first got Photoshop a year ago, my reaction was "now what?". I purchsed "The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby (also a great book) and started learning. While it helped me start understanding Camera RAW and how to use Photoshop, the term "workflow" was still a mystery to me. Then I found Kevin's CS book. I finally got it!

This book was a valuable resource in esablishing what have now become my workflow processes. Not only the processes, but Kevin teaches you how to put them into actions, and how to establish an archiving process. Huge time savings!

Since the book is about photographing women, there is a lot of information on Photoshop features that lend themselves to retouching glamour photos.

I have also attended Kevin's one-day seminar on Photoshop workflow, and while much of the information I already knew from his book, there was a lot of valuable information that I picked up, and many times "seeing" drives a point home better than "reading" ever could.

I highly recommend this book!

Very interesting book, with many description "how todo". The plus is to have the possibility to download the original files and try to do the same as Kevin, before trying on your own photography. Thanks for this great help.

This is an excellent book on photographing women. I have attended Kevin's classes at Photoshop World (the reason for buying the book), and he writes in the same easygoing style that he teaches.

This book is great. At times a little hard to follow from one task to the next but I find it to be very in-depth and useful. The book covers so many tricks I would never have thought of. Ordering books to be shipped to Australia can be very much hit and miss, but this book is a A+++ buy.

I really wanted a good book for people in general. This book had some positive reviews elsewhere so I gave it a shot. I was not disappointed. Most of the rules and examples provided could be used on anything: humans or animals. Its about using photoshop to make images look beautiful. The book's layout, format and illustrations are also top notch and help with the teaching.

A practical guide to understanding and using lighting to capture the image as well as many useful techniques for improving images of people, especially women.

This book is subtitled "The Art of Photographing Women."

It has nothing to do with photographing women.

It is a book on digital retouching *only*. I would suggest renaming it then "Photoshop CS2, The Art of Retouching Photographs of Women."

So that first beef out of the way, the first third of this book is filler devoted to basic file manipulation in Bridge and other nonsense.

The first actual full blown Photoshop tutorial involves a horrendous example of making a woman look like "Barbie" which is completely bizarre. Who on earth wants to take a photograph of a woman and make her look like plastic and unrealistic?

The internet is filled with bad photoshops, why is this book giving a step by step tutorial on creating a horrible image?

Not only is the concept incredibly flawed (of trying to create a Barbie) but the execution is pedestrian to the point of laughability. This is supposed to be some kind of accredited author?

Other before/after examples that the author has put together worked OK on his 24" monitor but when reduced to 1 inch wide, in print, side by side it's almost a "spot the differences" exercise. All his dramatic work is lost completely when shrunk down to this resolution and printed in a book rather than displayed in high res on a high quality monitor.

This book is really for people who have never encountered Photoshop or Bridge before.

It's not for people who are looking for advanced techniques about photographing women, and where the photography intersects with Photoshop. I'm pretty stunned that it even got into print.

If you have never touched Photoshop before, there are things here that you can learn, but there is nothing here that you can't google up and get a better, interactive, and free tutorial online complete with a video and a voiceover guiding you through it with far, far better results.

This author is far more interested in naming his models and the agencies they work for as some kind of stamp of approval for what he's accomplished in the field.

This book needs a serious rethink if it is to be updated for CS4 and beyond. For anyone with some knowledge already, there is nothing here to be gained.

I agree with the previous 2-star review; the typography in this edition is beyond atrocious. I can understand the decision to make the text so large--I'm sure a lot of people will want to set the book down somewhere on their desk while they follow along with the tutorials, and microscopic fonts would make that virtually impossible--but this is really sub-par. There are so many ridiculous flourishes and calligraphic captions that everything on the page is competing for your eye's attention, and unfortunately, the wrong element usually ends up winning (those oversized bluish brackets that adorn every single caption, callout and pull-quote for example). What's worse, whoever laid the thing out absolutely insisted upon using up every single millimeter of available space on the page, resulting in tangents a-plenty and margins of less than 1/16th of an inch in many cases. Have fun reading that.

Content-wise, it's OK. The information Mr. Ames provides is not bad by any means, but I wouldn't call it "groundbreaking", either. There should really be a lot more screenshots of the layers palette than there are words in most of the tutorials as it's easy to get lost in the text thanks to all the aforementioned typographical concerns, and his methods of building hair masks will prove difficult to apply to many situations his examples do not cover. I'm not a fan of his method of layer organization, either, but that's one of those deeply personal things everyone evolves on their own.

If you're just getting started in the retouching or fashion business, there are plenty of good pointers in here. If you've been using Photoshop for the last 15 years, don't expect to learn much you didn't already know. Mr. Ames is a fine retouch artist, but he's neither the magician nor the pioneer some would make him out to be. All of his methods predate him and he freely admits as much in the text. I would not recommend this to anyone but an absolute beginner, and even then I would feel guilty about it just because it's so darn horribly put together.