Customer Reviews

Digital Painting in Photoshop

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book's intended audience is Photoshop users who have never explored the brushes and painting tools in Photoshop. It's not, however, really about "Digital Painting." The book introduces you (by way of 50 pages of screenshots of the brushes PS ships with) to brushes. Then it shows how to use a single technique, with variations, to achieve photo manipulations resembling watecolor, oils, and other traditional media. The technique, by the way, is not at all new, and you may already know it: duplicate the background layer, run a filter on it, add a layer mask, and then paint on the layer mask to reveal the filtered image. This is a far cry from just running the Watercolor filter and calling it a painting, but it is also not what I consider digital painting. This is a Photoshop cookbook, and it's a pretty good one. The text never references the figure numbers on the screenshots, which makes it hard to follow in many places. There's also a few places where the author neglects to mention how she got from here to there, which will leave beginners frustrated.

Bloom assumes her audience knows layer masks, blending modes, and layers, so her coverage of these subjects is scant. If you are familiar with layers, though, you may find this book is just the ticket to help you release your "inner artist." If you're a photographer, it'll give you some easy methods for artistically enhancing your portraits and landscapes.

A better book, which covers many more techniques, and is more clearly-written, is Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook: 61 Easy-to-Follow Recipes for Digital Photographers, Designers, and Artists by Tim Shelbourne.

This book is a GREAT idea, yet it does need SOME improvements...

Benefits:

1) Provides a very nice introduction to many of the brushes and filters that you will find in Photoshop. The first 70 pages are basically "screenshots" that are dedicated to providing you with a quick, visual reference guide to the many of the brushes that Photoshop has. This does come in handy, especially if you are looking for a particular brush shape -- and don't want to take the time to manually search through Photoshop's large brush collection yourself. ;-)

2) Chapters 3 through 7 are dedicated to teaching the reader how to create various styles of artwork, such as how to produce a charcoal drawing, pastel artwork, work with watercolor, creating oil painting effects, using various artistic, illustration techniques, and even how to use some of the professional grade, 3rd-party plugins for Photoshop. The chapters are designed so that anyone who's had some moderate experience with Photoshop will know how to complete the various exercise. However, please note that this book is NOT designed for absolute beginners, as the author does expect that you have a working knowledge of many of Photoshop's program fundamentals, such as creating layers, desaturating a picture, working with filters, using layer masks, etc.

Disadvantages:

1) The book's title suggests that this book will teach you how to do "digital painting" in Photoshop. Unfortunately, it does NOT teach "digital painting", but instead, how to create similar artistic effects with your photos by using Photoshop's various filters and plugins. If you're looking for a book that teaches you how to paint, this is not it.

2) The instructions in this book seem to be a bit disorganized and confusing at times. The author really needs to stop, think out her thought process and then provide step-by-step directions for the reader. I found that several of the exercises tend to wander around as she tries a bit of this, and a dab of that with her artwork. Also, it seems that her artwork takes "magical leaps" between instructional steps, without any clear direction as how to achieve the same result as the author.

3) The author does not provide a CD (or a download option) for any of the exercises in the book. This makes it challenging, especially if you're not sure that you're doing a step correctly. The pictures used in the exercise should of been provided, so your readers could try it out themselves. ;-)

In summary, this book is very inspirational and provides a lot of powerful techniques for creating that artistic, painted look with your pictures. Yet, it does need some improvement...

OK, so this is COOL! I traditionally though of PhotoShop as a photographic imaging program and when I wanted to get a little 'artsy' with it I'd drop down a filter and run it against the image. I figured the most adjustments I had to it was to use masking, selections and opacity with various blends. This book has really brought me familiar with the brush within Photoshop. So many Photoshop books use the brush as a controlled and localized selection to apply effects. This book really shows you how to use it as a digital version of an actual brush. It is amazing how you can take a typical portrait and turn it into something special.

If you are a pro photographer you will really like how some of the effects can take a wedding portrait that has a good scene but horrible exposure or color and turn it into an artistic work of art that captures the essence of the moment. It really becomes more than just the image and should call for more profits.

if you are a photographer looking to get more artistic with your images or an artist trying to leverage some of the advanced functionality of Photoshop, I would recommend you pick up this book.

If you're expecting a book that will help you learn to paint in photoshop (as the title suggests) this isn't it. It's just glorified photomanipulation, to make photos look like paintings. It's good for what it is, but I feel mislead and highly disappointed.

When I opened the book, I was disappointed by how little real content was in the 236 pages. All illustrations are virtually unedited screen captures. Fourteen pages are taken up to show the brush libraries which are just as easily seen in Photoshop itself. Some pallets are so small, compared to images in progress, that they are illegible. Illustrations take up 50% of the pages, text takes up 20%, and there is a lot of white space.

The author writes as an artist experimenting to see how Photoshop can most closely simulate traditional art and the the process used to produce it. She works empirically and gives someone familiar with Photoshop little understanding of why she chooses to use one tool over another.

The book attempts to document each step in a particular project. However, some steps lack a clear context and can be confusing. This book could clearly have profited from being tested more fully with users.

As a result of the book, I have applied new approaches to my work in this area, and found myself experimenting to see their value.

I would have been far happier if this had been titled "Making Photos look like Paintings in Photoshop", because it does a very good job of that. But actually using Photoshop as a painting tool is only barely touched upon.

While the techniques do usually start with filters, it is a far more sophisticated (and succesful) approach to turning photos into painting-like work in Photoshop than I have ever seen elsewhere. Change the title, and I'll give it 5 stars.

But I wanted a book about digital *painting*.

This book definitely crosses over into the realm of Photoshop as an artform, instead the Photoshop cool tricks (boring!) arena.

This book is perfect for educators like me, as well as traditional illustrators who find their clients can't always pay for the time for traditional media illustrations. I have found after 7 years of teaching digital art, that screenshots are extremely effective. Most young people are very visual, and of couse, all artists are. I think all the screenshots in this book are genius. I spend lots of extra hours creating screenshots for my students after realizing how effective they are as a teaching tool.

If you are an artist dipping your toes into painting with Photoshop, this book is a great start if you already understand basic Photoshop. It is much better than searching for online tutorials, which half the time are not clearly explained, and the physical book makes for a great reference to keep going back to.

The techniques described are not what you would find just by applying a filter or two. The author spent many hours experimenting with techniques that now you don't have to spend hours figuring out yourself. Whether or not you think all the finished examples are inspiring works of art doesn't matter. These techniques are very useful and I plan on teaching several to my students.

I also enjoyed the respectful discussions of traditional media. I for one would always prefer to use real pastels...when I have a lot of time, but, as a traditional media artist who also teaches digital media, it would be a huge mistake to not address this digital art form. After all, it still takes an artist to turn these techniques into exciting works of art.

Don't worry, if you are a well-trained artist, your finished products will not look like you were a non-artist who thought Photoshop turned you into an artist.

I selected to review this book because I like to play with photoshop and always am looking to better my knowledge of the program. It's important to understand that this book is 100% focused towards digital painting in photoshop like the title says.

The book goes into great detail, and honestly it goes to far into detail on the various brushes and touchup techniques and tools that are available. As others have said the book is long, but mostly taken by screenshots. It is full of redundancy which I didn't particularly care for and overall I found it a bit boring to read as I was progressing through it.

I suppose if I wanted a digital painting only book then this might be an option. But with so many other books on photoshop that cover all the basis this book leaves a lot of photoshop tools and techniques to be desired. It doesn't give a great overall view of all the capabilities of the program and to me is why I rated it 3 out of 5 stars. this book really can not be used on it's own and would need to be used in conjunction with another book that covers the basics and advanced tools.

Photoshop really is a very powerful program and this book really in my honest opinion doesn't do it for me as a stand alone book for digital painting techniques.

If you want to turn photos into digital "paintings", the book exhaustively covers techniques to get you pretty much any look you want, whether it's oil paint, watercolor, or charcoal. I will agree with some of the negative reviews that too much space is wasted with screen shots of brush libraries. If you don't know how to view these in Photoshop, you won't get far with these techniques. I highly doubt you would be referring back to the book to see these when you have the program open in front of you. Likewise the texture libraries. Still, the actual content does walk you through the process and show you the results. Overall it's a narrow topic covered in detail. Not of use to most Photoshop users, but if you want to get this type of effect, this is probably the most thorough resource out there.

I'm not exactly a beginner with PhotoShop; I have the software, have been using it for years, but have never felt inclined to spent the $$$ taking a class on how to use it! I've discovered quite a bit with my hit and miss self taught style, but a book like this is still very helpful. For instance, it never occured to me to use "layers" or "neon glow" in the way Ms. Bloom describes. Ms. Bloom is an artist and an art professor first, techie second; as an artist and former art student myself, I appreciate her personable delivery, and the fine arts back story she inserts throughout. It's like having your favorite art teacher helping you, rather than the science class nerd! The chapters are color coded for easy reference, and the beautiful photos of Ms. Bloom's working examples are inspiring; you can use these techniques to make very special "fine art" portraits for family and friends, create your own greeting and Christmas cards, whatever strikes your fancy!