Customer Reviews

Creating Photomontages with Photoshop: A Designer's Notebook

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The creation of a photomontage is one of the most creative and distinctive forms of digital art. Most photographers use Adobe Photoshop to edit and enhance their photographs and creating photomontages with Photoshop is a natural evolution.

As with all books in the O'Relly Designer's Notebook Series, the eight professional artists featured in this book discuss in detail, with full color examples, how he or she created their digital art. These artists represent a wide range in subject matter and creative techniques; from a beautiful and baroque-styled photomontage of an angel bathed in candlelight to a fun and playful photomontage of a frog drenched in a rainstorm. Each artist discusses the techniques he or she used to obtain their individual style; from setup, lighting and photographing the scene to the finishing touches in Photoshop.

The photomontage starring the frog, entitled On The Web Rain or Shine, was created by Bernard Rossi. He shared his technique for superimposing three separate photographs of the same scene of the frog; one dry, one wet and one with falling raindrops. Of course, he accomplished this using layers in Photoshop.

Another featured artist, Patrick Collandre, created a photomontage entitled Exotic Products which represented the interrelationship between software applications. Collandre began by discussing the special challenge in photographing live fish and a uniquely shaped aquarium. Next, certain sections of each photograph were isolated, masked and blended together using layers in Photoshop.

My favorite was the beautiful photomontage of a candlelit angel entitled From Woman To angel. Texture was the secret ingredient that the artist, Odile Pascal, used to eliminate the symmetry that gives most digital art that "computer generated" look. He discussed in detail the filter effects and the stacking order of the layers that he used to create his textured, timeworn look with Photoshop.

The eight artists featured in this book are Patrick Collandre, Didier Crete, Guillaume Daveau, Lamia Dhib, Tai-Marc Le Thanh, Eric Mahe, Odile Pascal and Bernard Rossi. The book was translated by William Rodarmor from the original, Photomontages creatifs avec Photoshop - Les cahiers des Designers 04.

The book takes nine projects from ordinary pictures to artistic presentations. Each project follows a different artist's design and thought processes, which is really pretty cool - it is effectively nine different authors rolled into one book.

This is not so much a tutorial as it is an artistic guide. Unlike the traditional "how to" books which tell you how to get from point A to B, this book seems more geared toward the artistic elements and how to use Photoshop (among other digital tools) to realize your goal.

Ever wonder how to compose a funky digital montage? Perhaps like those you see so often in magazines. Well, Photoshop has many ways for you to accomplish this, as demonstrated here. Other simpler books invariably show how you can include various image files into a Photoshop document and then do some elementary special effects. Trouble is, such efforts often yield crude results.

By contrast, artists in this book explain far more graceful techniques. Such that, collectively, a final image may reasonably be regarded as artwork in its own right.

The nine example chapters let you see different methods and together they demonstrate not a single correct way, but a spectrum of approaches. Which may encourage you to experiment. In this sense, the book is open ended, if you adopt this attitude.

I wasn't too happy with the others designer's notebooks, but this one is excellent. This book has detailed walkthroughs of the creation of nine different compound images. The first, second and fifth are excellent. The other six are fine as well. If you are a photoshop user and you are looking for some new ideas and techniques this is a good place to start.

The book is not bad ,but the sample is too simple...but it has detailed walkthroughs of the creation ..so maybe it's very useful for the people who just begin to learning photoshop.

I was excited to receive this book - I love learning about how other users master the techniques of Photoshop. Boy was I disappointed! I've seen these illustrations before - rehashed and rehashed - and if you're using Photoshop CS or CS2, don't waste your time. If you're still working with Photoshop 4 and have never done a collage, I guess you should buy this book. although you'll learn more on Adobe's tutorial website than you'll learn from this book!

The book is a collections of various graphic artist's works that use photoshop to montage. If you do model work and/or work in advertising, you might find it useful. I was underwhelmed especially when I realized that the one artist's piece I identified with was used for the cover and nothing else was like it.

This book provides great insight into the process behind the work. It is especially interesting to see how the artists found inspiration in unusual places, such as the use of a stone wall for the texture on the cover work that looks like parchment. It does not go into the microsop details of how each piece was built, but it is a great introduction to the style and shows how to accomplish a lot.

A couple of the pieces are mediocre at best, but better than I could have done, so they are still interesting and educational.

You wouldn't think you would want to make a photomontage but once you know how to make a good one I seem to make alot of them. Photoshop is an amazing program that alows the creation of almost anything. Having so many uses makes it hard to be pro at all of them so books like this one make it easy to learn and master one of the many uses of this software. I recommend this book for all people useing Photoshop.

I liked the projects in this book, as they really showed you how to use Photoshop to achieve professional results. Anyone who wants to learn how to combine many different images into one slick final presentation should check out this helpful guide.