Customer Reviews

Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I cannot believe a retoucher of twelve years said in his reveiw that he was afraid the contents of this book would become common knowledge! HELLO, It is common knowledge. I visited Glenn honiball"s wed site and found him to be an enormously talented retoucher. Does he share that expertise here? Not even close! He will tell (not show) you how to lay down a drop shadow. And in another chapter apply blush with the History Brush. Oh, and let"s not forget how to use the Clone Tool! But wait, there's more! Let's change the color of that car.But if you really want to get high tech let's make steam or motion blur!! My first photoshop class showed me how to do motion blur with a golf swing, this book will show you with a hammer.
Maybe, if you want some prepress advice this book might be helpful, but if retouching is your goal, Katrin Eismann"s "Restoration and Retouching' and"Masking and Compositing" is the best books out there!

Title: Commercial Photoshop Retouching in the Studio - A Guide to Professional Photo Retouching and Compositing
Author: Glenn Honiball
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-59-00849-X
Reviewer: Bruce Frank
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Whether you're a seasoned Photoshop pro or a casual user attempting to revitalize the family photo album (or somewhere in between), this book will be an invaluable resource. Beware, however, that there are no quick fixes to some of the more serious retouch challenges.

For example, Honiball states that the best option for sharpening image details in a particularly fuzzy image is to "painstakingly draw in paths around the troublesome area." Those of us who have been using Photoshop for a while have unfortunately discovered this phenomenon - it can frequently take hours to achieve a satisfactory result when attempting to enhance a problem image.

Taking, in effect, the opposite approach to Scott Kelby, whose shoot-from-the-hip writing and Photoshop-user style gets right to the point in rapid fashion, Honiball exhaustively details the steps it takes to achieve a specific effect or correction. Although at times didactic, he nevertheless creates a thorough and informative textbook, rather than the educational comic that Kelby or Russell Brown might offer (not that there's anything wrong with that!, to put Jerry Seinfeld's immortal words in a different context).

"Commercial Photoshop Retouching in the Studio" is illustrated throughout with well-chosen color screenshots, most of which are presented in cinematic fashion - a true step-by-step approach which is extremely effective. It's like watching a video you can pause or continue at the flip of a page.

If you need to know how to prepare artwork for a printer, retouch photos like a pro, or create photo-illustrations for the commercial marketplace, you can't do better than Glenn Honiball's book. However, when using this book to guide you through your own projects on a computer, I would advise keeping one hand on your mouse, and one on a Mocha Cappuccino Grande.

Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio is an excellent resource for anybody who already has basic experience in the Adobe Photoshop program and has an interest in post production work with photographs. The author has an impressive online portfolio consisting of 83 images which showcase his skills with photoshop and post production work.
The book is for the most part very easy to follow and I believe that a reader who is somewhat familiar with Photoshop should be able to understand and follow the topics covered in the book. The author tends to be general in his reference of commands rather than list a specific key command. This behavior has both positive and negative effects. I can understand the desire to remain somewhat general since it allows the book to be more easily applied both older versions of Photoshop - such as version 7 - and likely to new versions of Photoshop released after the book is published. In fact a few of the places that key commands are directly referenced, I found that they didn't behave as expected. The negative effect of this generalization is that some people might be left with this book on one knee and the Photoshop manual on the other. But of course the title of the book does contain the word `commercial', not `do it yourself.'
I enjoyed the book hugely because it gave me better ways to achieve many of the effects that I regularly apply to photos and taught me new tricks that I'd never even thought of. That said, there were times when I wished that the book had come with one of the companion discs so often found on the back cover of computer texts. When trying to get a feel for how well a process was outlined, I often took more time searching images.google.com to find an image that was similar enough to the one that the author had used than I did actually following the explanation. I would have been enormously appreciative of a disc containing high resolution copies of the images that the author uses for his examples.
When working on the same files that the author used, it would be much easier to compare my final product to his and better bench my progress. When working with different files that were hastily harvested from the internet it can be like comparing apples and oranges.
I also found that a reader needs to carefully read a section of text start to finish to understand it, which is contrary to the style that is often found in books which are geared toward a `Commercial' audience. When reading a section I like it to be outlined as well as described, that way a user with extensive Photoshop experience is able to skim through the steps and only have to read the accompanying material corresponding steps that are not immediately understood.
All said and done, I enjoyed this book very much. I would not recommend it to a brand new Photoshop user since it depends on already having an understanding of basic Photoshop use, but I think that it would be an irreplaceable guide for a reader with established Photoshop skills who wants to add photograph retouching skills to their repertoire.

p.s. I should also mention that I tried many of the exercises from the book with the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) with good success. Based on that success I would guess that the book may also be usable by reader with whose experience is with Macromedia Fireworks.

It's a very good Book, why ?
Read it and enjoy !

Old-school "savoir-faire" we can really appreciate. How shadows work, how to improve your workflow, how to clone perspective row of bricks, how to creating great smoke, how to make a hi-res picture with a low-res picture, how to work with spot colors...etc.

It's a really interesting book, because Glenn with his mouse (yeah, a simple mouse) show how to improve pictures, re-create reflexions.
So, to finish, i say that you must buy this book to understand what we can really do with Photoshop. This book and Glenn's work tell us that we must observe around us. How reflexions, shadow work for example.

A good part of this book explain how to work, with Offset print i mean. With GCR, dot gain etc.

So, what are you waiting for ?

Honiball has chosen a collection of useful advanced techniques to present that every serious Photoshop user should take the time to learn and add to their arsenal. Though definitely designed for the advanced user, anyone comfortable in Photoshop can appreciate and understand guides.

I did find the instructional guides to be written in a somewhat unfamiliar fashion when compared to most how-to books. Rather than exhaustive instructions outlining (both textually and with screen shots) every step required to get to your goal, the major highlights are presented in paragraph form, assuming you have some ability to know what is going on. There are ample and well-chosen screen shots to show the progress along the way, just skipping the unnecessary page fillers you find in titles targeting beginners.

Though I found most of the techniques and samples presented very practical, the real power is the underlying ability the reader picks up along the way. I particularly enjoyed the coverage on shadowing, including both the theory and application for different perspectives. A few of the pre-press techniques would be used by a fairly limited audience, but again this title brings to light some advanced and practical tools for business professionals.

If I were to summarize what you pick up from this title, it would be how to take original photos, then enhance and combine them into a stunning production. I highly recommend adding this book to your library if you fall in the intended audience. Though not a reference book you would pull out for how to use specific tools, this is a title I plan to re-read once a year or so as a great reminder on some great techniques.

I enjoy what I have read in the book so far, however I really have a problem with book that illustrate techniques, yet do not supply the images to work on (either a CD or Download).I end up spending more time searching for similar images to try the techniques on, than learning what's in the book.

Title: Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio -
A Guide to Professional Photo Retouching and Compositing
Author: Glenn Honiball
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-59-00849-X
Reviewer: Bruce Frank
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Whether you're a seasoned Photoshop pro or a casual user attempting to revitalize the family photo album (or somewhere in between), this book will be an invaluable resource. Beware, however, that there are no quick fixes to some of the more serious retouch challenges.

For example, Honiball states that the best option for sharpening image details in a particularly fuzzy image is to "painstakingly draw in paths around the troublesome area." Those of us who have been using Photoshop for a while have unfortunately discovered this phenomenon - it can frequently take hours to achieve a satisfactory result when attempting to enhance a problem image.

Taking, in effect, the opposite approach to Scott Kelby, whose shoot-from-the-hip writing and Photoshop-user style gets right to the point in rapid fashion, Honiball exhaustively details the steps it takes to achieve a specific effect or correction. Although at times didactic, he nevertheless creates a thorough and informative textbook, rather than the educational comic that Kelby or Russell Brown might offer (not that there's anything wrong with that!, to put Jerry Seinfeld's immortal words in a different context).

"Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio" is illustrated throughout with well-chosen color screenshots, most of which are presented in cinematic fashion - a true step-by-step approach which is extremely effective. It's like watching a video you can pause or continue at the flip of a page.

If you need to know how to prepare artwork for a printer, retouch photos like a pro, or create photo-illustrations for the commercial marketplace, you can't do better than Glenn Honiball's book. However, when using this book to guide you through your own projects on a computer, I would advise keeping one hand on your mouse, and one on a Mocha Cappuccino Grande.