Photoshop® Retouching Handbook [Paperback]

Carol Braverman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

A tutorial on Photoshop, providing explanations, demonstrations and practice exercises. It encourages methods of experimentation that allow for mistakes and discoveries, providing instruction in the art of retouching. The emphasis of the book is on readers gaining hands-on experience. The CD-ROM therefore contains real photographs, which the reader can manipulate.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

By concentrating on the art of retouching photos, Carol Braverman presents a highly valuable guide to some of the greatest strengths of--and toughest features in--Adobe Photoshop. The book is organized into three sections, all designed to take you from looking at a picture critically to changing it just enough to make it look exactly the way you want. Braverman targets readers who frequently alter photos within strict artistic and/or corporate constraints, as opposed to those who just want to create funky-looking images.

From the beginning, you explore such core considerations as making selections, using color-correction techniques, fine-tuning gamma settings, and creating good output. But the projects, which build upon one another, do become more complex as you move along. They range from fixing up simple blemishes and correcting color to removing entire elements and creating composite images. You gradually learn how to assess the elements of a photograph for artistic understanding and, in some of the toughest projects, you learn to keep such elements as texture, focus, color, and value in mind.

The full-color book has plenty of helpful pictures as well as technical tips and hands-on advice. You work through the book's projects by using files on the included CD-ROM, which also has trial versions of Photoshop 5 for Windows and Macintosh. --Kathleen Caster

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc (Computers) (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558285997
• ISBN-13: 978-1558285996
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,435,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Photoshop for photographers! Just what I'd been looking for!, December 12, 1999

By 

C E ELLIOTT (North Wales, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Photoshop® Retouching Handbook (Paperback)

The reviews I read on this page before buying it left me wondering: was it too basic to justify the purchase or was it exactly what I needed - a book to take me from printing my own slides in the darkroom (something I started with Cibachrome years ago) to printing my own slides with computer and printer instead (I've been 'computer literate' for some years)? Having taken the plunge, I believe it's fair to say that this book will be really helpful to someone moving from traditional into digital photography and enjoying the possibilities for `retouching' in ways that can't be achieved in the darkroom. Having suffered the frustration of looking at Photoshop books in bookshops and tutorials on the Web dealing with fancy text effects etc, I was beginning to despair of finding something to help me just with photographs. (I'm not knocking special effects - they're class - but not what I was after!) This is exactly what I was after! To take only one example: the number of worked exercises (decent resolution files provided) involving the Rubber Stamp tool, looking at the various parameters of size and softness in relation to retouching many different types of images so as to retain or increase image texture and quality, is an example of the author's thorough and informative approach. The book is elegantly written and there is one (often more) full colour photograph or Photoshop dialog box related to the exercise on nearly every page of the book! Excellent!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book you can find about professional retouching, September 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Photoshop® Retouching Handbook (Paperback)

I am a photographer and I've recently switched to digital, so this book was of enormous help. It is very educational! More than that, it is aimed at professional level. There are tones of literature written on PhotoShop, but most of it is aimed at semi-amateur level. Although they explain PhotoShop's tools, they don't explain the method of digital retouching the way this book does.

My specialization is fine-art conceptual photography. I am a painter from the start, so the impossibility to alter or paint photographs the way I wanted has been always frustrating me. Thanks to the digital technology and, to an even greater degree, thanks to this book, I've finally resolved this creative problem. This book has greatly improved my retouching skills.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best book on retouching...the *only* book on retouching!, November 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Photoshop® Retouching Handbook (Paperback)

Photoshop Retouching Handbook is a highly specialized book. It deals with retouching images and that's about it. No fancy effects, no regurgitation of Photoshop's menus and commands. It's intended for a intermediate-level user and there's little discussion of elementary issues. You'll find no invocation of filters for quick whiz-bang effects here, because this book is about one thing and one thing only: the fine art of retouching. But it covers that subject in great depth, and it covers it beautifully.

Want to know more about this book? Read the full, detailed review of this book (and about 100 other Photoshop books in case you're interested) at PhotoBooks, the ultimate source for information on books about Adobe Photoshop and web graphics.