Customer Reviews

Photo Retouching with Photoshop: A Designer's Notebook

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

 

 

Being a professional (10+ Years Experience) I am constantly looking at new Photoshop books. The software is so extensive that one may never really master it completely.
This very thin book, translated from French, presents eight (8) projects from start to finish. Unfortunately, there's a lot of overlap among them, primarily compositing images and retouching. Only a couple of the projects are interesting. Even more unfortunately, not all of the projects even make sense. (One project corrects intentional mistakes so severe that "a professional photographer would never get away with such grave errors." Why learn how to correct garbage that you'd re-shoot?) One project manually creates a panorama and includes an editor's note saying that you could more easily use the Photomerge option within Photoshop. Also, since this is a French translation it isn't very accurate and the American and European versions of PS aren't necessarily the same. The only positive note is that the design and layouts are nice to look at.

I've always been impressed to see what competent professionals can do with the same tools that are available to everyone else. Reading this short book, only about 90 pages of text is like looking over the shoulder of the best of the best photoshop jockies. They did things that I wouldn't have imagined possible if I didn't see the before and afters.

The most striking to me is the image of a girl jumping in the air. They didn't like the angle formed between her legs and torso so they cut the image through her tummy and then gave her a new tummy.

Then too ws the rather stock photograph of a church, green lawn, flower beds. The result was an image for a horror film: dark ominous clouds, rain, decayed crypts, damaged roof.

This is no beginners book, unless it's to show the level to which you can aspire.

Photography as artwork. That is one message from this book. It shows a French perspective on Photoshop usage. The books for which are dominated by American authors, whose examples are typically of photos of recent vintage. Taken from cameraphones, for example. Certainly nothing wrong with that.

But in this book, many examples are of much older photos. So much older that they often cry out for retouching; maybe extensively. The authors guide you through painstakingly detailed methods of doing so. Some examples, however, are much newer. Like enhancing a commercial photo shot of perfume bottles. Students of product design should appreciate that chapter.

All the chapters should be easily understandable if you are already facile in Photoshop. The book dives right into usage that assumes this experience.

"Photo Retouching with Photoshop: A Designer's Notebook" is a glossy, handsomely-produced book designed to inspire and instruct illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, and other professionals who create images. It is comprised of studio examples from eight French graphic professionals who provide explanations of the steps in the evolution of an original photo, illustration, or mere concept to a final stage usable by commercial professionals.

The eight examples are presented by professionals described as leading French artists and as translated from a 2003 French edition. They cover digitally restoring old images, improving holiday images, how to improve color renditions with a colorimeter, retouching facial and skin imagery, blending multiple images, and enhancing already existing images.

Among the examples, the reader will learn how these professionals review and imagine an initial project, how they collaborate with artistic directors and other parties involved in a commercial project, how they choose formats, and present an impression. Of course, the emphasis is on using Photoshop in creating commercial masterpieces from preliminary source material. I found it interesting that all but one of the experts used Apple Macintosh computers, but clearly the instruction, tips, and Photoshop-settings screenshots are not platform specific.

The level of presentation is clearly for imaging professionals and serious Photoshop users. Much of the workshops assume advanced graphic as well as Photoshop experience. None of the presentations is a real step-by-step instruction, but more "stage-by-stage". These stages are well-illustrated and screenshots of Photoshop settings windows are used extensively.

Some of the retouching examples are amazing. Chapter 2, entitled, "Digital Surgery", demonstrates how a professional figure model's bodily features and posture are altered for purposes of the commercial expression. The steps used to arch her back using Photoshop illustrate not only how powerful Photoshop is, but how clever highly-competent professionals can be.

Other workshops show how to enhance skin textures and color tonality, how to slice and dice unrelated photos to create a new one purporting to be realistic but is not, how to use colorization in creating multiple images in one illustration, how to create 4 x 13' panoramics, how to create photo images supplemented by special effects utilized in the film industry to create movie settings, and how flawless, spectacular product shots are made.


This is a nice little volume offering tips and inspiration about digital retouching for the graphic professional.

Actually 3.5 stars. This is a useful, attractive book. It is well printed with good layout. The authors describe imaginative thought processes for meeting their objectives and the subject matter is well chosen for relevance and representativeness of image editing situations. However: (1) the translation from French is not entirely on-target in places, so sometimes one needs to stop and think about the real meaning. (2) There is often not much detail in the explanation of the mechanics in Photoshop for accomplishing various image edits. While it may not have been the purpose of this book, more such information would have made the book that much more valuable.

However, readers who wish to pursue these subjects in much more depth and detail, may also avail themselves of two other books from Amazon.com by Katrin Eismann: "Photoshop Restoring and Retouching" and "Photoshop Masking and Compositing". The Eismann and Designer's books are complementary rather than substitutes. While the "Designer's Notebook" is what it says it is - a designer's notebook, and useful to have - the Eismann books cater to those seeking comprehensive and detailed scope and depth on this subject matter.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading. Photo retouching and Adobe Photoshop is not a new idea. Photoshop has been the industry standard for photo editing for years. However, what I liked the most about this book is that it was about more than the basic photo retouching covered in most books on Photoshop.

That being said, Eric Mahe discusses his approach for turning a photo into an artistic statement as opposed to just retouching the original photo. First, he reworks the too-white sky by replacing it with a sky from a second photo. He then isolates and enhances the subject of the photo, a little girl's face, using the Photoshop Calculations command.

Gerard Niemetzky worked on restoring a 100 year old photo. In his workshop, he discusses the scanning technique he uses to maintain the embossed aspect of a photo within a frame when converting it to a digital image. He also discusses the sequence of steps and adjustment layers he uses to make this very faded photo look almost like new.

Starting from a photo of an old church and graveyard, Thibaut Granier worked on a matte painting destined to be a backdrop for a movie scene. To achieve a haunted, eerie effect, he first replaced and then subdued the sky in the photo. Next he used a montage approach to build up the graveyard with individual grave markers. Each marker was added one at a time to the foreground of the picture and then manipulated to blend into the atmosphere of the photo.

As with all books in the O'Reilly Designer's Notebook series, each professional artist shares his or her expertise and artistic approach in a step-by-step workshop with accompanying full color examples that show the progressive steps to the final result.

The nine French artists featured in this book are Gerard Niemetzky, Dominique Legrand and Antony Legrand, Eric Mahe, Vincent Risacher, Francois Quinio, Thibaut Granier, Poisson Rouge and Cyril Bruneau. The book was originally published in French and was translated by Marie-Laure Clech from the original entitled Retouches Photo avec Photoshop - Les cahiers des Designers 05.

Some books are just plain too short and this is one of them. It's around 90 pages, though it feels even shorter. It's a series of 8 examples, about 10 or so pages each. Each walks through a very well illustrated example of taking a photo and either fixing it's flaws or tweaking it to have a more arty effect. One example is about making a panorama, in what seems like a very tortured way.

The perspective of this book also bothered me. It's written from the perspective of someone who understands what needs to be done to a photo but doesn't understand how to get Photoshop to do it. If that's where you are, then you will like the book. But I think the majority of us need to start with analyzing an image to find out what needs to be done. And that's not in this book.

Book is alright but I mainly found one particular tutorial of interest and that's the Matte Painting of the church set in a graveyard. It has a little something for everyone, from advertising to matte painting for film to retouching old photos. Kind'a out of date but the theory and techniques are still used today.

The book is simply comprised of 8 examples of work done by 8 different people working independently. You will quickly come to the conclusion that the only thing that most of the 8 "authors" were trying to do was to impress the reader on how technically proficient they are in using Photoshop, not necessarily showing the reader how to accomplish something. If this wasn't bad enough, the examples used were mostly very lame at best. To make matters worse, whatever they accomplished is now completely out-of-date as all examples were done in Photoshop 6, 7, or CS.

You may ask me "Why in hell did you buy the book?" The answer is simply: one of the 8 examples in the book is Thibault Granier's "Bloody Mallory" - a matte painting of an eerie abandoned church done for a low budget movie.

Although his Bloody Mallory tutorial is available on-line, I wanted a hard copy. The price of the used book was worth it.

This book is not what the cover appears to indicate - although ording online, it was the title more than the cover that attracted me to it. Sure it has some sections on restoration - which to me indidcates retouching, but a lot of it is about photo illustration.

Very well explained and well put together, this small book shows a good representation of some of the ways one can integrate photos that result in something that is nigh impossible in one shot alone.

The book covers restoration, body manipulation, sky and contrast fiddling, montages, photo art and commercial artwork. The problem with this book is each chapter is different from the rest. I see no need to have all of these together, rather split them up into an expanded book for each section. I had no intrest in the artwork of a photo illustration of a woman in the sky, but was interested in the body manipulation and the photo restoration. But each of those chapters were not detailed enough. You will run into many different situations and one photo or example is not enough.

More please - so I can select the titles that pertian to me. Its like putting fine cabinetry and house framing and boat building in the same book because you want to appeal to those with a saw as a tool instead of Photoshop as a tool. Photoshop is used in many different facits and never to the breadth by one that this book would like one to believe.

Limited appeal until its broken out into a series and added with more depth.