Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers: 48 Easy-To-Follow Recipes to Fix Problem Photos and Create Amazing Effects

Cooking with Photoshop By Bakari Chavanu Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers by John Beardsworth O'Reilly Press ISBN 0-596-10020-5 176 pages US $[...] CAN $[...] [...] Amateur and professional photographers use Photoshop mainly to enhance their photographs. Anyone using this powerful program knows what magic it can do when simple features like color enhancement, increased saturation, cropping, and unsharp masking are applied to their images. It's hard to tell how most people use Photoshop, but I would say that many of its layer blending modes are rarely used non-professionals unless you're lucky to have a deep creative streak within you that makes you wince at simple straight forward images that most photographers produce. Flip through any creative, cutting edge magazine or website and you'll discover what professional and crafty users of Photoshop are doing with photography. Up until flipping through John Beardsworth's Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers, I had little appreciation and knowledge for what could be done if you would only stretch the the use of Photoshop beyond the quick fixes and enhancements. Beadsworth's book is part of what seems to be a very good series of digital cookbooks that illustrate how to play around and deepen your use of Adobe Photopshop for retouching and photo effects. The book can be used with any version of Photoshop, but many of the recipes rely on the Hard Mix blending mode that was first introduced in Photoshop CS. Beardsworth explains that this mode "reduces an image to just eight pure colors" which basically brings about a very increased sharpening effect. Now if you're not an avid Photoshop user yet, don't let all the technical terms scare you away. The best way to use this book is to simply run into Photoshop's kitchen like a kid and mix stuff around. Whatever you don't like can be undone (Command-Z) or not saved. Whatever you create can simply be "Save-As", keeping your original photo intact and your new creation as a separate file. Nothing to waste here. All you need is time and an willingness to experiment. The heart of the blending modes can be found right in the Layer's Palette of Photoshop. There you'll find a list of blends that you typically apply after copying the original background of a selected image. Simply applying one or more these modes can get you cooking. My examples don't do justice the wealth of this book, but I just want to show what you can do in a few minutes of blending stuff together in Photoshop. A simple Color Halftone effect with Blur adjustment turned this photograph into what could be a more useful artistic image. If the above is little too much for you, how about something closer to home? Beardsworth includes numerous blend recipes for portrait shots. (Original) This Soft glow blend was done simply by making three layer copies of the original photo and adding darken and screen layers (again,

I don't know if you have noticed, but O'Reilly has been putting out some amazing Photoshop books lately. I'm quickly becoming a big fan of their Photoshop Cookbook series, of which this book is a part of. If you're unfamiliar with blending in Photoshop, it's basically the process of combining multiple layers in different ways (of usually the same photograph) to produce aesthetically pleasing results. It's surprising how combining an image with itself can potentially produce so many varied results. I'm certainly no Photoshop expert, and maybe that's why I really enjoyed this book. Blending is a subject where I have a lot of trouble, and this book did an excellent job of showing a "Before" picture, shows how to perform the specific blend (e.g. reduce digital artifacts), and then shows the "After" picture. This type of step-by-step process with pictures (especially for Photoshop) really helps and makes the various "recipes" very intuitive and easy to follow. This is a great book for giving some of your digital photos that extra help they might need. This book certainly gave me some ideas for improving some of my photos-and I think that was the author's point.

This was the second book I purchased in this series. Like the filter effects book, this one does an excellent job of showing each blending mode and how it works. Blending modes are probably one of the least utilized features of Photoshop. Through the combination of explaining each mode and then showing examples of ways they can be used, the book makes it easy for anyone to use them all, not just the lightening and darkening ones that are most often used. I would have liked to have seen them apply different modes to the same photo like they did for the filter effects book, rather than using so many photos. But, overall this book is so useful that I can overlook that. It will definitely be kept in easy reach for reference, and I now plan on picking up the other two books in the series.

Of all the tools available to photographers to manipulate their pictures in Photoshop, one of the least used sets is the blending modes. (Blending is the method by which a color overlaid on another combines. Blending modes generally deal with the way the colors in two layers are combined. Blending of layers is controlled by the little window in the upper left-hand corner of the Photoshop layers palette.) This book aims at training photographers how to use these modes. The book is divided into three main sections. The first is a general section called "Getting Started with Blending Modes". The next section, "Blending Modes in Detail", describes each of the modes. Finally the cookbook recipes are presented, with an illustration of effects and the steps necessary to achieve those effects. Like most cookbooks, the recipes don't explain what each step does, but the reader can easily refer to the first two sections to understand what is happening. A typical recipe is one called "Woodworm". It creates an image which looks like an old woodblock with tints from the original photograph. The process of creating the image involves inverting two duplicate layers of the original picture and combining them using the "hard mix" and "pin light' modes". The recipes presented fall into two camps. In the first very subtle changes are made to a picture to improve it, such as softening too hard a light in a portrait, or cooling down skin tones. Most users of Photoshop will find these recipes helpful. Usually, Photoshop offers some other tool that can achieve similar results. Most of the images created by using the recipes in the second camp are so different from the originals and so stylized that I don't know if they can be referred to as photographs. There is no doubt that using these recipes can create unique images. The author clearly shows the before and after, with several variations, of each of the latter recipes. However, it's my guess that most photographers will find it hard to visualize most of the results that can be achieved on their own photographs using the recipes provided by the author. On the other hand followers of Freeman Patterson, Andre Gallant or other impressionistic photographers will certainly be interested in these techniques. Beardsworth's presentation is clear and experienced Photoshop users will have no difficulty in following these recipes. On the other hand, whether you want to achieve many of the results that can be reached by using blending modes in many of the ways that the author presents will depend on the individual photographer. Anyone interesting in developing their Photoshop skills will certainly benefit from exploring blending modes.

I recently got O'Reilly's suite of Photoshop books and I must say that I have been really impressed. The first of these books that I have read/used is "Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook" by John Beardsworth. For any Photoshop book, I would expect lots of big, vibrant color photos, and easy to follow steps, carefully detailing out how to achieve the effects that I would be interested in and tons of before and after images so I could easily understand what to expect from the effect that I trying to use. This book is extremely easy to follow, and makes learning blending modes a snap!! Highly recommended for all Photoshop users, along with all the other books in this series. ***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED