Customer Reviews

Photoshop Retouching Cookbook for Digital Photographers: 113 Easy-to-Follow Recipes to Improve Your Photos and Create Special Effects (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I saw that O'Reilly would be coming out with a series of "Cookbooks" related to the digital arts, I was intrigued. This book did not disappoint. It is 10 inches wide - wide enough to display lots of photos, which are plentiful.

It really is set up like a cookbook. There are 113 recipes divided into 11 groupings with names like: Exposure Correction, Color Correction, Focus Manipulation, Lighting Effects, Photo Restoration, Traditional Darkroom Techniques and Photo compositing Techniques. Each of the groupings contains some recipes.

The Retouching Landscapes grouping has recipes for Interesting Skies, Removing Unwanted Objects, Correcting Perspective, etc. Traditional Darkroom Techniques has the most recipes, with 9. There are recipes for Creating Film Grain, Hand-tinting, Cross-processing, Reticulation effects and more.

I was impressed with the multiple techniques for Correcting Perspective (page 84) and Replacing Color (page 92). The recipes for Revitalizing Faded Photographs (page 150) and Recreating Damaged Areas are worth the price of the book alone. We all have those old faded and damaged photos needing repair. And I will be using the recipes for emulating Starburst Filters (page 97) soon.

The book is ok for what it is. One to two pages of how to do different tecniques to your photos...but if you have any training in basic photoshop you will know most of this stuff. Changing contrast? Making a picture dark enough to look like it is at night? Using layers to import one picture into another and masking out other parts? Using the clone tool to copy from one area and cover up another area? getting rid of red eye using the 'red eye tool'? Very simplistic stuff...and I am only a novice at photoshop. They do cover a section on using raw pictures from your digital camera... I think that covers about 10 pages. For the cost you could find great books on using photography and photoshop. Although visually filled with information with big pictures and small amounts of print...it is great in that area of display...but for the money I would suggest you get "Photoshop CS2 - One On One" by Deke (it will teach you all these tecniques (and comes with a CD of the artwork so you can work with what you are learning) plus teach you how to use PhotoShop. If you want to get a good book on Photo Retouching with Photoshop... I would reccomend "Commercial Photoshop Retouching - In the Studio" by Glenn Honiball. He has been doing Phtoo Retouching for 20+ years and teaches you to use tried but true tecniques that moset every professional uses without all the bells and whistles (you can use just about any photoshop program for these) These two books are a better bang for your buck.

This is an excellent cookbook that follows the traditional format. Recipes are logically grouped into easy-to-understand categories, e.g. Strengthening Color, Saturating Color and Working with Color Casts (getting rid of those tints) are covered under the Color Correction category.

The categories cover a wide gamut including; Retouching Portraits, Retouching Landscapes, Exposure Correction, Color Effects and Photo Restoration.

The recipes for more common photo re-touching problems describe a spectrum of ways to fix the problem using different Photoshop tools, generally ranging from light re-touching to methods for fixing larger problems.

One of the main reasons I really liked this book is the selection of recipes covers just about everything I've ever wanted to fix in my own digital photos. I'm not a professional photographer but I have been using digital cameras for several years. I've bought a number of books on using Photoshop to retouch images. None of them are as complete as this one. All of the ways (that I remember) in which I've either screwed up a picture or wanted to touch one up are covered in the book.

These include; Removing red eye & changing eye color, Enhancing lips, Removing skin blemishes and wrinkles, Removing unwanted objects, Removing dust and scratches (from old photos), to a large number of exposure and color related problems.

This book does not cover how to use Photoshop, but if you're slightly familiar with Photoshop you should be fine. I would recommend this book to anyone has taken a digital picture that would be perfect "if only I could fix that one ..."

I really liked the approach in this book, which presented several methods for achieving a desired result. Not only does this allow you to enhance your knowledge of a variety of tools, but you get to pick the one that achieves the best results. Or, pick the one that was the easiest to replicate using your own photos.

I didn't try out all 113 recipes (as the cover calls them), but of the techniques I tried on my own photos, most "worked" and the rest were either my photoshop ignorance or I otherwise couldn't get the results I wanted following the steps in the book. The toughest ones (i.e. the ones I just couldn't get to work to my satisfaction) were the photo compositing techniques - if it wasn't the color, it was the lighting or the edges just weren't quite right. The bonus was I got more practice at it. The recipes I found that worked the best were in the photo restoration and photo retouching sections.

The text and descriptions are easy enough to understand. Neither a plus or nor minus, but the font is pretty small and occasionally got lost between the pictures. I did like the many over-sized pictures that went along with the text, so if I were to choose between larger font but smaller pictures, I'd leave it the way it is.

This is not really a "learn Photoshop" book, but I would recommend the book to someone who is comfortable with Photoshop.

At last! This is the book I've been waiting for! I've been on the hunt for a book that goes over practical photo editing with Photoshop-you know, how to alter colors, fix over/under exposure, remove distractions, etc. Most books I've come across are either designed for the Photoshop professional (meaning they leave out all the steps between A and Z), or they're too basic. This book is it-a step-by-step guide to Photoshop editing for the casual Photoshop user.

The author does an excellent job in identifying all the Photoshop tools you should be familiar with right off the bat. This introductory material is a great crash-course in Photoshop tools. This basic material forms a foundation for successfully understanding the rest of the book's material.

While there are tools and editing methods the author did not identify, I felt satisfied that the most important tools were not only identified but demonstrated in action. In my own photo editing attempts, I felt like I should be using certain tools, but didn't know how. Using some very illustrative photographs, the author works his way through using the curves tool, the levels tool, masks, layers, etc. The author provides the reader with the tools s/he needs to successfully complete the most common photo editing assignments.

I would highly recommend this book for digital photographers. Huggins' book is now the favorite among my digital photography books.

There are dozens of books on the market that try to explain the use of Photoshop to photographers. One of the types of books is what I think of as the process type. This usually attempts to teach a photographer the process of moving from intake of a picture into Photoshop until some output like printing or the internet. Another type is the encyclopedia. This kind of book provides a detailed reference to individual Photoshop functions and is useful to the advanced user who wants to refresh his or her memory about a tool or even learn to use the tool to a greater degree. Still a third type of book is the cookbook. This type of book usually provides a recipe for solving a particular problem. It usually provides a list of steps in Photoshop without explaining what each step is doing. Photoshop Retouching Cookbook falls into this category. I don't recommend these books to beginners because I think understanding how Photoshop works will be more useful for meeting new challenges.

I also am a little queasy about using books that talk about retouching, because they suggest the dark side of Photoshop. By that, I mean the alteration of reality to suggest that something false is true. However, anyone who thinks about it knows that even putting a frame around some subject in the world has already altered reality. Photojournalists should be concerned about the truth. I'm not so certain about artists, commercial or fine. I have to acknowledge having removed a branch from in front of a beautiful bird and lessened the depth of a wrinkle on the face of a beautiful woman.

While this book does provide some basic discussion of things like exposure and color correction more of it is devoted to retouching portraits and landscapes, color and lighting effects, and compositing. Huggins generally will present a problem to be solved and then offer several different ways to approach a solution in Photoshop. Moreover, he often calls upon Photoshop tools that the average photographer would not use or discover in the simple process of converting a file into a print. For example among the filters that Photoshop provides is one called lens flare, which creates an effect similar to the effect that one would get if one was shooting in the sun. When combined with the effect resulting from converting day scenes to night scenes, a photographer can create quite an arresting image.

Huggins provides plenty of graphics along the way, including not just the original photograph and its subsequent iterations to the final picture, but also screen grabs of the appropriate menus and pallets. His writing is clear and succinct, without trying to be clever like some Photoshop authors. He does not go into great detail about easing those wrinkles (I got my technique from another cookbook) but he does show you how to clean up zits. No single cookbook seems to cover all the remedies but this book seems to cover as many as any of the ones I've read.

The best way to use this book is to read through it so that you can see the kind of problems that are covered, without trying to commit the individual steps to memory. Keep the book near at hand and when you encounter one of those unusual problems, open the book and then follow the steps suggested.

This is not the book for learning the Photoshop process. For that I would recommend something like Tim Grey's "Photoshop CS2 Workflow" or Barry Haynes "Photoshop Artistry". But if you are a competent Photoshop user and want to push past the basics, this is a good book to have around.

Its often been said that there are several ways to do the same thing in photoshop. This book just gives you a few ways of doing them. My biggest complaint is that it appears noone proofed the photos. Some photo are of poor quality on 1 page and then fine on another. Another photo of showing a whitening effect shows someone with pink teeth. O'reilly is the best usually when it comes to IT books but this effort is subpar.

O'Reilly hits another ball out of the park with this solid Photoshop book. I love the layout and paper chosen with this serious and the tutorials and examples are just as good!!

Employing a slick design, great writing, and nice, tight size, this book is useful for Photoshop users of all levels who want to learn how to take their images and photographs taken and make them shine!!

If you are a photographer on the level of a newbie/amateur or a seasoned pro, I highly recommend this guide so that you can learn how to make your pictures all the better for any purpose.

Wonderful book and easy to recommend!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is a good book for anyone looking for a reference showing a lot of "I need a fast way to do this" type goals. The author covers a large number of common commercial retouching scenarios in a quick manner and for the most part the results are good. There are a few instances where the results aren't that great though and look too "quick and dirty." Still, the techniques used are good for other things and there are many covered. Really, this book is best for digital camera enthusiasts who are looking at gaining some fast but not necessarily professional results since more professional approaches often require fundamentals that are overkill for people who just want to tinker. My only real gripes are that the layout can be confusing and cramped at times.

This is a great book! If you're like me and enjoy perfecting your digital photos but don't want to spend hours studying the manual -- you'll really love this book. And you'll REALLY love the cookbook format. The writing is concise and clear. And the technique descriptions are complimented by beautiful photo examples. Huggins really knows his stuff and does a fantastic job. Buy this book!