Photoshop Cosmetic Surgery: A Comprehensive Guide to Portrait Retouching and Body Transforming (A Lark Photography Book) [Paperback]

Barry Jackson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Lark Books (April 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579908004
• ISBN-13: 978-1579908003
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Basic retouching techniques, February 12, 2007

By 

D. Junden "Jgraph Designs" (Sweden) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Photoshop Cosmetic Surgery: A Comprehensive Guide to Portrait Retouching and Body Transforming (A Lark Photography Book) (Paperback)

Well, as a photo retoucher with some experience on a more advanced intermediate level, there was very little in this book to actaully learn something new or groundbreaking.
How it is layed out and how the examples work is already described by Michal Stukow and I have nothing more to add to that.
In my opinion it seems a bit too "gimmicy" to use for more serious retouching work and some of the operation results are far too exaggerated and obvious to pass as is.
Never the less, as a basic book for starting out with retouching it quickly introduce some of the useful techniques one can refine and take many steps further, but if you are looking for a more comprehensive volume on the subject there are far more better ones.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some nice examples for beginers, August 17, 2006

By 

Michal Stukow (Poland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Photoshop Cosmetic Surgery: A Comprehensive Guide to Portrait Retouching and Body Transforming (A Lark Photography Book) (Paperback)

The book contains several examples of basic correction techniques. The examples are well documented, each example consists of before/after and some itermidiate photos. Apart from the photos the book consits of instruction lines like 'set the brush to ...' etc. The week point is that there is hardly any deeper explenation of what is going on.

So this is a nice book if you are learning Photoshop and want to see some baisic Photoshop tools in action. But if you are more serious Photoshop user, I recomend Katrin Eismann 'Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching' which is far more interesting and complete.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fun guide to Photoshop, July 28, 2008

By 

Methylviolet - See all my reviews

This review is from: Photoshop Cosmetic Surgery: A Comprehensive Guide to Portrait Retouching and Body Transforming (A Lark Photography Book) (Paperback)

I bought this book not because I want to give my friends Photoshop boob jobs or change their hair color -- but because it is an excellent guide to Photoshop's features, both for beginners and as a reference for more intermediate users.

As people, we are wired to notice facial details. What is the difference between blur and smudge? When would you use the healing brush instead of the patch tool? And what is the good of all of those blending modes? When you see these effects applied to a person's face, it is very easy to understand the function of Photoshop's tools, and the sometimes subtle differences between them.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has found more conventional Photoshop tutorials dauntingly ... boring, or who has found himself saying, "OK, the sponge tool does this -- but what *good* is it?" This book has enabled me to use a much wider range of tools in my own work -- industrial documention -- and so has made me a far more effective Photoshopper. And I have never yet performed Photoshop liposuction.