Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook: 62 Easy-To-Follow Recipes for Creating the Classic Styles of Great Artists & Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio)

Like the others I've read in this series, this book delivers just what it claims it will. Using this book, you can follow step by well explained step changing the look of your photos into variations of the old pictorial styles - but updated. Pictorial was a movement active starting about 120 years ago and lasting up to about the 1920's although some still practice it today. Frex, one may argue that Sally Mann is a pictorialist especially in her latest work using the wet plate processes. Pictorialsm promoted that photography should imitate the look of fine art painters. It was superseded more or less by the photography as pure photography promoted most famously by Ansel Adams and today practiced by masters such as Clyde Butcher. Taking a photograph and converting it to look like an impressionistic painting may go against the grain of some pure photographers but it's not only fun, but it can leave you with a darn good image. This book will give examples of how to convert a typical standard photo into one of over 60 fine art or pictorial styles. It's a lot easier than trying to figure this stuff out on your own. The book does better on taking modern digital or digitized photos and converting into other photo styles than it does in fine art painters, but it succeeds in both areas giving the reader either a complete recipe or at worst, a good stepping off place. The book adds one more valuable volume to this O'Reilly series. Well worth the purchase and a good reference read.

I would like to thank John Beardsworth for writing this book as it has given me much pleasure in replicating his creations and following his recipes are so easy. The quality of the printing of the book is superb.I look forward to hours of enjoyment making my own paintings.

Wonderful effects for the artistically inclined. The recipes in this book truly are easy to reproduce. You can apply these techniques to any of your digital photos.

"Photoshop Fine Arts Effects Cookbook" provides recipes for Photoshop users to manipulate their works to look like the styles of great photographers and artists from the past. The recipes include creating images that look like Daguerreotypes, or platinum prints, or the work of photographers like Ansel Adams and Jerry Uelsmann. Beardsworth also shows how to make one's photographs look like the work of Canaletto or Turner or one of the impressionists. Before turning to the book's merits, I have to offer an opinionated view. One of the first questions in my mind was why one might want to do this? I often suggest that photographers would benefit from considering the old masters but not to the extent of duplicating their styles precisely. Certainly I could understand if one had a client who said "I want a picture that looks like Van Gogh!" But I believe that serious photographers as well as other artists start with a vision of what they want their picture to accomplish. Their task then becomes to find the medium and techniques that best achieve this goal. Painters paint because that's the way they believe that they can capture their vision. Photographers take pictures instead of painting because they think photographs are the best way to get at their "truth". Now, there is nothing wrong with using any tool available to bring one's vision into the world. If you want to scratch the wet emulsion on a negative to create your image, that's okay with me. I might not understand your image, but that's a completely different story. Perhaps my question is not why one would want to imitate another art form or technology but rather how many artists want to do this? I immediately think of the work of painters like Gerhard Richter or Chuck Close who have painted works that are, at first glance, indistinguishable from photographs. Of course, this ambiguity may be exactly what these artists were aiming for. But generally speaking, it is the technique of the media that artists hope to use to lead to the discovery of the vision. There are plenty of photographers who are pushing at the edges of their medium, like Freeman Paterson and Tony Sweet. And there are plenty of photographers wanting to pay homage to the past. (I can remember standing at Tunnel View in Yosemite at sunset, tripod to tripod with nineteen other photographers, hoping for a gathering storm.) However, I'm not certain that there are many photographers who believe that adopting the techniques of painting is the way to express their vision (although perhaps there are some sitting out there just waiting to learn how it can be done.) Having said that, Beardsworth does an excellent job of providing us the recipes to recreate these works. I only tried a few recipes, but my Ansel Adams knockoff looked more like Adams then anything I had ever done. My impressionist photograph looked like it belonged in the Salon des Refuses. My Japanese woodblock photograph was less successful but th