Advanced Photoshop CS2 Trickery & FX [With CDROM]

Finally, a book on photoshop that not only instructs on what the interface does, but also shows you what you can do with those tools! It takes you past the basic 'cut' and 'paste' you've encountered in every other photoshop book, either basic or advanced. It walked me through several advanced subjects utilizing creative ideas instead of just the usual technical jargon that puts you to sleep. This is THE book for artists who want to further their skills in the digital art world. Steven Burns talks to the artist in all of us and then shows us how to achieve our artistic vision with clear instruction on the latest and greatest that Photoshop CS2 has to offer.

More advanced Photoshop user will relish Stephen Burns' ADVANCED PHOTOSHOP CS2 TRICKERY & FX which focuses on the artistic side of Photoshop in chapters which tell how to blend artistic objectives with its tools. A basic skill level is assumed and builds upon these basics with chapters which tell how to use such advanced, enhanced features as the Camera Raw interface, exposure merge program, and special effects. Chapters are packed with photos in full color showing before-and-after touchup examples and demos of Photoshop CS2's amazing new features.

Have you ever wondered how to create great Sci-fi digital art? Did you ever want to create a human with animal features, flying spaceships with glowing exhaust or tornados with swirling debris? This book by Stephen Burns will show you how to create this type of digital art with Adobe Photoshop CS2. The first two chapters cover the Photoshop CS2 interface and the techniques you will use in the tutorials that follow. You will learn how to create animated brushes, use layer blend modes to create composition images, advanced selection techniques and layer masks, and the new Photoshop HDR 32-bit High Dynamic Range merge techniques. You will also use third party filters such as nik Multimedia Color Efex Pro (on CD) for adding visual FX effects to your compositions. Photo compositions and Sci-fi filter effects is the theme throughout this book and the step-by-step project tutorials in each chapter give you hands-on practice using techniques for manipulating your digital photos. The projects I enjoyed the most were the night scene of a futuristic architecture, Sci-fi droid in a nature setting, and non-human textures and features added to human subjects. Stephen Burns has been a photographer for over 25 years and a digital artist for 10 years. He also works in 3D animation and digital video. He teaches beginner to advanced workshops on his Photoshop digital manipulating techniques and has written the previous version of this book. He has won the Seybold International Digital Arts contest and is the president of the San Diego Photoshop Users Group.

Note the word 'Advanced' in the title of this book. This is the second book by the same author and it is on things that the experienced Photoshopper can do above and beyond the normal retouching efforts covered in the standard introductory books. In this book the author is doing things to images to convert them from standard photographs of things that exist to something more artful. And he takes images of things that never existed, such as space ships and adds things to them to make them suitable for use as book covers or other uses. In doing this, the book shows what can be done to convert a photograph into something you or your customer wants. The things he is doing with photoshop require the use of tools that come with Photoshop, but which may not be used on a regular basis, and may not be covered anywhere near this depth in other, more general purpose Photoshop books. The CD supplied with the book contains all the files needed to do the projects described in this book along with a demo of Photoshop CS 2, nik Multimedia Color Efex Pro, and nik Sharpener Pro. This book contains information that isn't commonly seen, and covers it in a very well written manner.