Photoshop Retouching Cookbook for Digital Photographers (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

~ Barry Huggins (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

With the introduction of affordable and easy-to use digital cameras, people are taking

photographs like never before. While the digital medium greatly simplifies the

photographic process, it also offers photographers unprecedented opportunities to

manipulate their images on their personal computers.

"Photoshop Retouching Cookbook for Digital Photographers" tells you everything you need to know to use Adobe Photoshop CS2 to adjust, correct, retouch, and manipulate your photographs-without making you first learn everything there is to know about the application. These straightforward, easy-to-follow recipes give you specific directions so you can quickly and easily:

Fix exposure, focus, and color problems

Add special effects like motion blurs, lens effects, and surface textures

Improve portraits by removing red eye, wrinkles, and blemishes

Add and remove objects from photos seamlessly

Use lighting effects to create more dramatic images

Restore faded and damaged photos

Give new shots a vintage, old-fashioned look

Create posterized and hand-tinted images

Assemble and fine-tune composite photos

Correct perspectives

The book tackles each real-life project in full color, with a hands-on approach. The fully illustrated recipes produce reliable and immediate results, and include "at a glance" panels and tip boxes that cover key techniques in detail.

Barry Huggins, the author of "Photoshop Retouching Cookbook for Digital Photographers," has created the only recipe-format manual on photographic retouching targeted specifically to digital photographers. Founder of a highly successful multimedia training and consulting company, Hugginsis uniquely qualified to deliver step-by-step instruction in digital retouching methodology, with easy-to-follow recipes that address specific problems and teach "best practices" techniques. This is his fifth book on digital imaging and graphics software.

From the Publisher

About O'Reilly Media For over 25 years, O'Reilly Media has illuminated the spaces where innovation, creativity, and technology converge. Nowhere is this more exciting than in the rapidly expanding sphere of creative media, specifically digital photography, graphics, video, audio, and illustration. From in-depth tutorials and comprehensive references to techniques cookbooks and creative guides, O'Reilly connects you to the technologies--and the leading experts--in print, online, and in person. Visit digitalmedia.oreilly.com.

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O'Reilly is a registered trademark of O'Reilly Media, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 174 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596100302
• ISBN-13: 978-0596100308
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 9.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,075 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Cookbook Approach to Photoshop, October 28, 2005

By	V. Maciulski - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Cookbook for Common Photo Retouching Needs, November 20, 2005

By	Don R. Hanson II (Beaverton, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 ..."

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware of the Dark Side, November 27, 2005

By	Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.