Customer Reviews

Artistic Techniques with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter: A Guide for Photographers

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

In film photography there are a lot of things you can do in the darkroom to change the resulting picture quite dramatically. With digital photography and the powerful digital image processing tools that have become available you have even more capabilities in your 'digital darkroom' inside the computer. You can literally go in and change a single pixel in the image.

This book is on processing digital photographs to convert them from a picture into fine art. This book promises to teach you everything you want to know from how to buy a computer through the production of fine-art. And it sort of does do that. She says your windows computer should have 'at the very least 256 MB of RAM.' RAM is cheap, 256 MB simply isn't enough, get 512 at the very least and a gigabyte is preferred. They go buy a separate introductory book on Photoshop and Painter, maybe two books.

Use this book, not as a how to use the software book, use it instead as an indication of what can be done. The concepts and techniques she uses illustrate what can be done to make ordinary pictures suitable for posters, free standing illustrations and more.

Her last chapter on selling and marketing your fine-art piece is worth the cost of the book by itself. One point I would add here is, go sell to other photographers. A lot of photography shops have been around for a long time, and are just now changing to digital. You could well find yourself foing some of the kinds of things shown in this book for them.

Finally, while we all want to make money, note the last image in the book. Here is an image of an infant who was not expected to live being held by his mother, still a child herself. The image was displayed at the infant's funeral just a week later.

Corel Painter and Photoshop complement each other, with each having particular strengths that the other does not. This book shows you how to combine the natural media and artistic effects possible with Painter with the retouching and color correction features of Photoshop. You'll find lots of useful techniques, along with step-by-step instructions on how to achieve them.

I was quite disappointed with this book. None of the techniques covered are in any way different from the basics of using filters in Photoshop or cloning in Painter that would be covered in a basic manual. If you want inspiration and instruction in the creative use of these two programs, "Digital Collage and Painting Using Photoshop and Painter to Create Fine Art" by Susan Ruddick Bloom is a much better choice in every way.

It's filled with lovely images & the basic steps she uses. You are expected to have knowledge of Painter & Photoshop. What I found lacking was precise details on the retouching with examples of the size brushes she uses & the before and after examples. For instance she has a cottage that she added roses to, but doesn't show you how to do it. She touches up faces to look like a china doll, but not the details of just one stroke or clone. She tells you what she used, not really how. A little disappointing that her best secrets remain secret.

If you want to learn how to take a wedding picture and show the bride and groom in color while keeping everyone else in black-and-white, or if you are interested in composing a collage that has a faded-yet-boring b/w picture of (again) a bride partially covered by three non-faded-yet-still-boring smaller b/w pictures of the same bride - with a drop-shadow (!) - then this book is for you. But if you are looking for anything that even remotely resembles art, if you want any kind of inspiration, if you want to learn anything new - look elsewhere. All you'll get from this book is "framing techniques for more marketable images" (quote from the back cover) - not very intriguing indeed.

I was expecting more from this book. It brings to mind the saying "Jack of all trades, and master of none". The author tries to cram so much stuff into this book, that each subject is not gone into in any depth. It has very little if any meat.

Refining photographs in Photoshop and then using them as a canvas in Corel Painter to create a unique artform is the main focal point here. The techniques in doing so are cleverly orchestrated and simplified. There is as much fun using this new found knowledge to transform images as there is in photographing them. Numerous demonstrations of the possibilities afforded by these programs are illustrated. Equipment and software considerations are also outlined. An indispensable book for the subject it covers.

Deborah Ferro has created an easy-to-read, comprehensive guide to enhancing your images using Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop.

Written from a photographer's point of view, it teaches you what you need to know without a lot of extraneous and unnecessary technical information. This is a must read for today's portrait and wedding photographer.

The images used throughout the book are just sensational.

I just recently purchased and have not had a change to work with the details in this book yet. I will say that I am impressed with the information provided for working with both of these programs and your photographs. Author covers pallates, hand coloring, posterization, collages, filters, drawings, effects, retouching, etc. This looks to be a good addition whether you are new or experienced.

I agree with the above comments...all one sees is a black cover. The book looks/sounds interesting, but there is no table of contents or example of what is inside the book. This book needs to present more information if you expect one to buy.