The Art of Photoshop for Digital Photographers [Paperback]

Daniel Giordan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2005

Experience the highly visual format of the Art of Photoshop: Digital Photography Workshop and learn how to take good source photos and transform them into display-quality digital works of art with visual effects used in Adobe Photoshop. Using the beauty of the Tuscan region of Italy as a backdrop, author and artist/photographer Daniel Giordan, will take you through the steps of how to capture good source materials, how to explore the artistic effect of those images, and how to turn those explorations into richly layered and visually complex artwork using the tools available in Photoshop. This is your chance to look over the author's shoulder as he guides you through a process of creative exploration through which he creates 10 artistic montages. 

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Experience the highly visual format of the Art of Photoshop: Digital Photography Workshop and learn how to take good source photos and transform them into display-quality digital works of art with visual effects used in Adobe Photoshop. Using the beauty of the Tuscan region of Italy as a backdrop, author and artist/photographer Daniel Giordan, will take you through the steps of how to capture good source materials, how to explore the artistic effect of those images, and how to turn those explorations into richly layered and visually complex artwork using the tools available in Photoshop. This is your chance to look over the author's shoulder as he guides you through a process of creative exploration through which he creates 10 artistic montages. 

About the Author

Daniel Giordan is an artist, photographer, and creative professional who takes pride in sharing his passion for digital design with those eager to create digital art. Trained as a traditional artist, Dan made the shift to digital art in 1995 and has worked since then to translate his organic, hands-on aesthetic to the digital domain. He has written three books for Que and Sams: Art of Photoshop, How to Use Photoshop 7, and How to Use Photoshop CS. When he isn't pushing pixels, Dan works as the Creative Director for AOL Web Properties directing the design efforts for such entities as Netscape, CompuServe, AIM, and others.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Sams (September 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672327139
• ISBN-13: 978-0672327131
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 7.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,332,197 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Going beyond digital photography, October 6, 2005

By 

David A. Huss (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Photoshop for Digital Photographers (Paperback)

I believe good photographers are simply artists who never learned how to paint with traditional media. As an author and a photographer who spends most of days looking for ways to make good photos into works of art I find this book to be a well spring of ideas and techniques. The author doesn't waste pages rehashing user guide tool descriptions or clutter the book with endless paragraphs of tongue in cheek blather. Instead the author choose to use his excellent photos as a visual baseline for teaching a variety of techniques to create dramatic and sometimes stunning effects using Photoshop. The book takes a well balanced approach for the reader in that doesn't assume you're a Photoshop expert but it also doesn't assume that this is the first time you have ever seen the program either. The publisher shows the respect that this work deserves by printing it on sumptuous quality paper with attention to color accuracy and a compelling layout. This book is a essential part of the library of any Photoshop user that wants to beyond ordinary digital photography.

A final word of advise for those that buy this book. Do the exercises! It is easy to just look at the book as a work of art and forget that you actually must sit done and do the tutorials to learn anything.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Split Personality, June 12, 2006

By 

Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Photoshop for Digital Photographers (Paperback)

I was really excited when I first looked at this book. I regularly complain that many ostensible photography manuals are really picture books that have had some language added to make them look like photography instruction books. Here was a book that had plenty of beautiful pictures of Tuscany that were really used as a framework for instruction. Then I discovered the book's split personality.

The first part of the book is aimed at beginning to intermediate serious photographers. Using the author's own digital pictures, Giordan explained the basics of photography, including exposure, focus and composition. The pictures were not only lovely, but they were tied to the text so that they illuminated the teaching points. Giordan has a tendency to photograph details rather than the big picture, but perhaps that's also a useful lesson to learn. He also seems willing to tolerate over-exposed skies to get shadow details. But he passed my litmus test for any book maintaining it's about digital photography by explaining the use of the histogram, blinkies and even the zone system.

Unfortunately, he also put out some wrong information. For example, he states that digital cameras achieve exposure compensation by adjusting ISO ratings and so one should shoot in manual mode if one expected to compensate exposure. But that's certainly not true of the Nikon D2H, which Giordan used for the pictures in this book, or any other digital camera I know. Most digital cameras compensate with the aperture when you are in shutter mode and the shutter speed when you are in aperture mode. Moreover, while the author acknowledges that an important role of lenses of different focal lengths is to adjust perspective, he also preserves the old myth that depth of field is a function of focal length.

Still, even with inaccuracies like that, this book looked like a four-star book. Then the second section came along. It deals with the use of Photoshop and is aimed at very experienced users of the software rather than the beginning to intermediate audience of the first section. Here was an ideal opportunity to use the photographs of Tuscany to show how to control exposure, lighting and color with the basics of Photoshop. Instead he chose to use some very advanced techniques to create pictures that were far removed from the basics of digital processing. For example, in a chapter telling how to use Photoshop while preserving the photographic nature of the image, he shows how to simulate twilight or do the equivalent of hand coloring of photographs.

In the following chapter he explains how to modify images so they look like paintings or drawings. He finishes up with detailed descriptions of how he manipulated certain photographs to make them look like they weren't photographs.

I tried to put aside the philosophy that one should capitalize on the nature of photography when using Photoshop. I downloaded images from the companion website and tried to follow along with the author's description of how he was manipulating the pictures. I consider myself an experienced Photoshop user, but often the instructions were too sketchy or ambiguous for me to follow on a first try, and sometimes after several tries, I still couldn't follow Giordan's instructions.

This book had the potential to be really effective by taking a different approach to photography instruction. Unfortunately, the first part is filled with a few landmines and the second part is only for the most experienced Photoshop users for whom the first part might prove too simplistic.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An inspiring and beautiful book, May 26, 2006

By 

John Mark (Hollywood 28, Calif.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Photoshop for Digital Photographers (Paperback)

This book includes how-to, but it is so much more than that. This is a lovely book to turn to again and again, just for inspiration. I agree with the other reviewers - do the exercises. This one I will keep because it is not tied to a particular camera though it does focus on photoshop CS and later. If you are struggling with making your photography interesting, or if you are just looking for inspiration, this is one you should pick up.