Description:
This slick, full-color book teaches you how to produce professional-looking graphics in Photoshop 4.0 for Macintosh and Windows. The author covers special effects as well as photo retouching techniques and Web animations. Though the book will be more approachable if you know Photoshop well, even beginners can make their way through the carefully written step-by-step instructions. The first chapter, in fact, provides an overview of Photoshop's interface and tools. Subsequent chapters refer you to this if you need to review basic functions. The chapters, divided into the type of effects you'll be producing, cover stained-glass effects, water-reflection effects, vignettes and backgrounds, artificial perspective, photo restoration, rain, snow, and light. Other chapters teach you how to create compelling composite images by weaving a ribbon through an image (a yellow arc running through the label of a box of baking soda), creating a fantasy image (a drowning statue of Neptune), and working with a central theme (water pouring out of a high-definition television set). You also learn how to produce an animated Web graphic (a set of moving gears). While tackling these projects, you delve into some pretty tricky parts of Photoshop, including layer masks, feathered selections, and channels, and the writer makes all of this easy to handle, thanks to his clear-cut descriptions. The companion CD-ROM includes project files and templates as well as GIF utilities.
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