Digital Effects

I will keep it short. The book has a basic foundationu kodak l for photoshop and other image editing software. The information in this book is the equivalent of ten Imaging books in one. The benefit that can be derived from this book is that it shows what alotof the filters do. I masterd it and then had my pictures printed At Kellards Photo(www.kellards.com)and got beautiful Kodak prints for only .29 cents.

This book showed me how I could use Photoshop to manipulate my digital photographs to remove errors, enhance quality, and make creative composites.Photoshop was hard for me to learn and this book's examples helped me get over the threshold. I used Jim's techniques and found that I really could do "digital darkroom" fixes. I cut a butterfly from an uninteresting background, pasted it onto a palmetto frond, and made my first "realistic" composite. Then I increased the color saturation and it's a knockout image! I printed an 8x10 and even my wife thinks it looks great.From the book's examples, I can see there are lots of other ways to improve photographs. Now that I have passed the Photoshop threshold, I plan to experiment to see what works best for me. I'm also going to be taking new kinds of photographs, such as "background" shots, that I wouldn't have considered before. The book also has sections on creative photography, to make composite images that are surrealistic. Examples show how to turn a normal photograph into what looks like a painting, or combine multiple photographs to create an imaginary scene. Some of the results are beautiful, such as the mosaic portrait on page 113. I plan to play with these ideas and incorporate some into my personal style.Other books I have looked at try to explain the functions of Photoshop. This book showed me how to use Photoshop in very specific ways to improve my photographs. It made it easy for me to get started. The examples showed why I might want to use a certain Photoshop function and how to do it.When I started digital photography it amazed me, first because it was so fast and then because the printouts were of such high quality. Now I can see a whole new creative possibility in my hobby.Great book!

As someone who has worked with Photoshop a bit, I found the techniques the author uses to be a good idea starter for my own work. The book has a number of beautiful photos and is fun to flip through. There are plenty of other manuals out there if you want to learn the basics of Photoshop. This will not do that. What it can do, and what it did for me, is help you develop a keener eye for recognizing the possibilities in image enhancement--how to realistically insert subjects between background and foreground, outline delicate items like whiskers, and merge subjects that have different perspectives. It also shows work in other software programs like Kai's Power Tools, Color Efex Pro and Knockout.