Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio [Paperback]

Glenn Honiball (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 2005

For both Mac and Windows PC users, Photoshop CS2 is the market leader and industry standard for commercial bitmap image manipulation. Also known as the "digital dark room," Photoshop is the unparalleled tool of choice among graphics professionals and hobby photographers alike.

Written by 20-year photo retouching veteran Glenn Honiball, Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio is the only book to deliver advice for the photographer and artist working with Photoshop CS 2 in a real world commercial environment. Honiball offers incomparable technical and artistic guidance for professionals, graphic artists, photographers, and just about anyone involved in creating and manipulating digital images.

Production artists face unrealistically tight deadlines and heavy workloads that leave little time for trial and error. Photo retouchers need practical, immediate Photoshop solutions to help them produce quality images with minimal effort and in a short amount of time. All the tools, techniques, and skills you need to achieve consistent, professional results with Photoshop CS2 can be found in Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio.

Anyone with intermediate-to-advanced Photoshop skills--whether you want to explore photo retouching personally or as an imaging professional or student--can use Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio to produce sharp, expert, extraordinary photos that don't look retouched.

Under Honibell's seasoned direction, you'll be able to tackle your greatest photo-retouching challenges with ease, precision and efficiency. He guides you through Photoshop CS2's new and innovative features; explains advanced capabilities; shows you how to adapt and custom-fit the software to meet your needs; offers time-saving tips for accelerating your workflow; and delivers advice and inspiration for exercising your own creative genius.

Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio is the ideal resource for any digital artist who wants to develop and perfect professional-level retouching using Photoshop CS 2. With this book, you will bring photo correction and manipulation to a whole new level.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Despite the rather serious moniker, a cursory flick through the 260-odd full-colour pages reveals an approachable, engaging and, above all, entertaining guide to professional retouching techniques. Illustrated throughout with great visual examples of the many techniques outlined, this is a fantastic resource for every aspiring professional retoucher." Advanced Photoshop, Jan/Feb 2006

About the Author

Glenn Honiball comes from a long line of artistic family members. His grandfather was a cartoonist and a painter, and his father was a very talented artist involved in advertising. In 1985, Glenn started in the pre-press industry and was trained on the million-dollar HELL Chromacom system (which, along with Scitex, was the only proprietary retouching system around) and worked on it for nine years. He also worked on a Silicon Graphics machine running Barco Creator and Alias Eclipse retouching software. Glenn migrated to Photoshop after considerable experience on high-end systems coupled with a good pre-press background. He has worked with several versions of Photoshop and found them easy to learn, having come from a background where string commands were the norm.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059600849X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596008499
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #596,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Glenn Honiball has been retouching since 1985 and has a masters eye for
understanding light and knowing where the shadows should fall. Coming from a
family of commercial artists, he has spent the last 20 years developing both an
eye for subtle detail and style that is so natural the images don't appear to
have been retouched at all. Combining skillful use of basic Photoshop tools
with an intuitive understanding, he can transform an image into a client's
vision in almost less time than it would take for the client to explain what
needs to be done, producing high-end quality image work.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take Your Photoshop Retouching To The Next Level, October 28, 2005

By 

V. Maciulski - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio (Paperback)

I have read a few Photoshop books on retouching and restoration and a lot of books which included sections on retouching. Many of them cover the same issues over and over. They are very good, but this title is in a different league. It truly is for retouching and printing at the commercial, professional level!

This one covers issues I don't recall seeing before, such as how to trap color so it doesn't shift during printing (page 140), how to simulate a newspaper press (page 208), improving a file to help it survive magnification (page 187), tips to make the Vanishing Point feature work better (page 113), adding shadows and correcting them on multiplied layers (page 20), and a great section on "Shining Things Up" (page 114).

There is a great segment on Creating Touch Plates. I haven't seen this topic in any previous Photoshop book that I have reviewed. A Touch Plate adds a special color to an existing CMYK color of a particular item in an image, making it appear richer in color. Glenn Honiball gives you two different methods for doing this.

Everything in the book is well explained and accompanied by all of the photos and illustrations you need. This book is not for beginners, but anyone who is an intermediate user or above will find it can help you take your Photoshop work to the next level.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Technique Tutorial, September 1, 2005

By 

Eric Wuehler (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio (Paperback)

This book focuses more on techniques for retouching photos rather than a guide to Photoshop. With the focus on technique, I found that this book was really easy to follow along with my own pictures. There is very little Photoshop-ish "select Tool X, click here, then use Tool Y and click there" language in the book. As another reviewer pointed out, even if you're using other image manipulation applications such as GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, etc, the techniques still apply. That said, some of it is Photoshop-specific and all the example are taken using Photoshop CS2 on the Mac.

Personally, I really liked the sections on changing image colors - which I find myself doing (or wanting to do) a lot lately. A lot of what I discovered while reading this book centers around "retouching is subtle".

If you are considering making a career or a profitable hobby out of photo retouching, I would highly recommend this book. Along with the techniques, it also contains advice from the author on professional retouching as well as information on preparing images for newsprint and other printed media. While I won't be sending any pictures to the professional print media any time soon, I will definitely be using this book as a guide for retouching my own photographs.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short and Sweet, September 14, 2006

By 

CMOS (US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio (Paperback)

As someone who is lucky enough to work with Adobe as a beta tester, and who has read through many a Photoshop book, I can recommend this title to anyone who is an amateur photographer or serious hobbyist (or even a graphic designer who is into photography and retouching). While it won't teach you everything, there are many valuable techniques to be found here.

Bear in mind what this book isn't. It is not a Photoshop reference, and by that I mean it's not the right book -for example- if you're unsure how layers work or how to use channels. It's not a way to understand and learn the tools for the first time, but rather a way to use those tools in the specific context of retouching images. IOW, it will teach you a better way to skin the cat. (note: I like cats, it's just an expression).

The examples used are mostly relevant to real world usage and they are easy to understand and follow. Probably this is not the best book for learning special effects or the kinds of compositing you might see in product advertisements where graphical elements are blended with photographic ones. There are gigantic books dedicated to stuff like that, and so if that's what you're after, better to use one of those.

But if you want to learn useful ways of touching up skin tones and faces, adding a mood to a photograph by manipulating tonality across the canvas, etc. This is a good place to start.