Photo Retouching with Photoshop : A Designer's Notebook

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring volume for professionals
Review:
"Photo Retouching with Photoshop: A Designer's Notebook" is a glossy, handsomely-produced book designed to inspire and instruct illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, and other professionals who create images. It is comprised of studio examples from eight French graphic professionals who provide explanations of the steps in the evolution of an original photo, illustration, or mere concept to a final stage usable by commercial professionals.

The eight examples are presented by professionals described as leading French artists and as translated from a 2003 French edition. They cover digitally restoring old images, improving holiday images, how to improve color renditions with a colorimeter, retouching facial and skin imagery, blending multiple images, and enhancing already existing images.

Among the examples, the reader will learn how these professionals review and imagine an initial project, how they collaborate with artistic directors and other parties involved in a commercial project, how they choose formats, and present an impression. Of course, the emphasis is on using Photoshop in creating commercial masterpieces from preliminary source material. I found it interesting that all but one of the experts used Apple Macintosh computers, but clearly the instruction, tips, and Photoshop-settings screenshots are not platform specific.

The level of presentation is clearly for imaging professionals and serious Photoshop users. Much of the workshops assume advanced graphic as well as Photoshop experience. None of the presentations is a real step-by-step instruction, but more "stage-by-stage". These stages are well-illustrated and screenshots of Photoshop settings windows are used extensively.

Some of the retouching examples are amazing. Chapter 2, entitled, "Digital Surgery", demonstrates how a professional figure model's bodily features and posture are altered for purposes of the commercial expression. The steps used to arch her back using Photoshop illustrate not only how powerful Photoshop is, but how clever highly-competent professionals can be.

Other workshops show how to enhance skin textures and color tonality, how to slice and dice unrelated photos to create a new one purporting to be realistic but is not, how to use colorization in creating multiple images in one illustration, how to create 4 x 13' panoramics, how to create photo images supplemented by special effects utilized in the film industry to create movie settings, and how flawless, spectacular product shots are made.


This is a nice little volume offering tips and inspiration about digital retouching for the graphic professional.

Rating:
Summary: understandable to existing users
Review: Photography as artwork. That is one message from this book. It shows a French perspective on Photoshop usage. The books for which are dominated by American authors, whose examples are typically of photos of recent vintage. Taken from cameraphones, for example. Certainly nothing wrong with that.

But in this book, many examples are of much older photos. So much older that they often cry out for retouching; maybe extensively. The authors guide you through painstakingly detailed methods of doing so. Some examples, however, are much newer. Like enhancing a commercial photo shot of perfume bottles. Students of product design should appreciate that chapter.

All the chapters should be easily understandable if you are already facile in Photoshop. The book dives right into usage that assumes this experience.

Rating:
Summary: Informative but short
Review: Some books are just plain too short and this is one of them. It's around 90 pages, though it feels even shorter. It's a series of 8 examples, about 10 or so pages each. Each walks through a very well illustrated example of taking a photo and either fixing it's flaws or tweaking it to have a more arty effect. One example is about making a panorama, in what seems like a very tortured way.

The perspective of this book also bothered me. It's written from the perspective of someone who understands what needs to be done to a photo but doesn't understand how to get Photoshop to do it. If that's where you are, then you will like the book. But I think the majority of us need to start with analyzing an image to find out what needs to be done. And that's not in this book.