If you're primarily interested in finishing touches--the million creative ways you can use your favorite software to improve, polish, and add pizzazz to your images--this is the book for you! The first book devoted exclusively to the topic, Finishing Touches for Photoshop CS2 offers a treasure chest of creative finishing techniques. With chapters on frames and border effects, color and artistic effects, presentation, sharpening, and printing, this full-color guide covers everything from creative cropping to dramatic lighting, stock photos, collage ideas, combining black-and-white and color, selective blurring, storybook layouts, PDF presentation, and more. Each technique is a stand-alone tutorial, so you can jump in at any point without weeding through a lot of info that's not relevant to the task at hand. Even better, author Dave Cross' two-column format--with simple instructions in one column and lavish, full-color photos and artwork running alongside--makes the techniques instantly accessible. You'll also find several variations for most techniques as well as instructions for creating reusable templates.

The author shares the techniques he uses to elevate an image from the everyday to the extraordinary, showing you how to make seemingly impossible scenarios come to life. Starting with an overview of the Adobe Photoshop interface that focuses on the hidden tools you need to know to create stunning composite imagery, this informative guide walks through all the necessary stages, from the first planning sketches to the final finishing touches, of making all kinds of unique creations. Beyond the orientation of tools, layers, adjustments and more, Bret uses step-by-step tutorials to break down a wide variety of his Photoshop artworks. Additional detailed project walkthroughs offer tips on everything from creating a superhuman to compositing an epic fantasy landscape. And interviews and spreads featuring various established and emerging artists provide a range of inspirational imagery, creative insight, and professional know-how.

Each year, Scott Kelby, Editor-in-Chief of Photoshop User magazine and the #1 best-selling Photoshop author, trains literally thousands of photographers on how to retouch portraits using Photoshop through his live seminars, online classes, DVDs, and standing-room only workshops at the Photoshop World Conference & Expo. Now you can learn the same techniques he uses in his own retouching workflow, in the only book of its kind–one written expressly for photographers who do their own retouching. As a pro photographer himself, Scott understands that photographers make their living shooting, not retouching. But, delivering fully retouched images is now expected by clients. That’s why Scott put together this amazing resource for teaching photographers the quickest, easiest, and most effective ways to create professional-looking, retouched final images without spending hours grinding away at painstaking, detailed techniques. LEARN HOW THE PROS DO IT It’s all here–the step-by-step methods for fixing, enhancing, and finishing your portraits in Photoshop. Using the techniques in this book, you’ll create images that will absolutely wow your clients. You’ll learn: • How to soften skin and still retain detail and texture • The best tricks for beautifully enhancing eyes, eyebrows, and eyelashes • How to selectively sharpen portraits without complicated masking • How to create gorgeous-looking lips • How to remove blemishes fast and keep the most detail • The pros’ tricks for body sculpting • How to make your subject’s hair look fabulous • How to give your retouches that natural look that sets them apart • Plus, you get Scott’s complete 5-minute, 15-minute, and 30-minute start-to-finish workflows If you’re ready to learn the “tricks of the trade”–the same ones that today’s leading pro photographers use to retouch, tuck, tighten, and tone their images for that pro-retouched look–you’re holding the book that will do exactly that. It will radically change the way you retouch your portraits from here on out, and give you the best-looking, most natural retouches you’ve ever done.

Adobe Photoshop for Mac and Windows, featuring graphics and graphics design, photo editing, and digital techniques.

Provides instructions for blending traditional drawing and painting skills with technological advances to create digital art.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques has been completely updated to cover the new features in CS4. In a friendly, easy-going style that's long on information and short on techno-babble, Photoshop Hall-of-Famer Ben Willmore and photographer Dan Ablan guide you through the concepts and features that will truly make a difference in how you use Photoshop every day. They'll take you from blindly following step-by-step instructions to an in-depth understanding of how Photoshop works, cutting through the fat to focus on what they consider to be Photoshop's essential features. This full-color book delivers the content in three easily digestible sections: Working Foundations, Production Essentials, and Creative Explorations. Streamlined for this new edition, the book will distill Photoshop's vast capabilities down to what you need to know for a full understanding of the program, while simultaneously focusing more directly on best practices for the photographer. Beginning with a quick "refresher course" on the working foundations of Photoshop, you'll move on to real-world production techniques. Finally, you'll get to fully explore Photoshop's creative potential by blending and enhancing images, creating collages, retouching photographs, colorizing, and working with filters and layer masks. By the time you finish this book, your creativity and efficiency levels will soar and you'll feel like you finally "get" Photoshop.

The digital photographer's workflow is divided into two distinct parts - the Production Workflow and the Creative Workflow. The Production workflow is used to import and organize large numbers of images, and prepare them for presentation via proof printing, Web, or slideshow. Increasingly, photographers are turning to Adobe's acclaimed new Lightroom software to manage this part of the workflow. After the best images are identified, photographers move to the second part of the workflow, the Creative Workflow, to fine-tune special images using a variety of advanced digital tools so that the creative vision is realized. An overwhelming majority of digital photographers use Photoshop for this advanced editing. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom & Photoshop Workflow Bible effectively guides digital photographers through both parts of this process. Author Mark Fitzgerald, an Adobe Certified Expert and Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop CS3 offers readers a clear path to using both Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3 to create a complete digital workflow. Fitzgerald uses tips, tricks, and step-by-step directions to demonstrate how to integrate these two powerful programs to optimize image management and create stunning images. The first part of this book is dedicated to offering an overview of the complete workflow, clearly defining the purpose of both Photoshop and Lightroom within a photographer’s workflow and explaining the basics of image files and how to organize them. The second part delves into using Lightroom to manage the Production Workflow. It begins with an in-depth look at the Lightroom workspace and how images are imported into it. Photographers are then guided through organizing images within Lightroom, processing photos, sharing photos with others in a variety of formats and creating files to use outside of Lightroom. Finally, the workflow is put into action by demonstrating how a wildlife photographer used Lightroom in the field while photographing migrating polar bears in the arctic. The third part focuses on Photoshop and the Creative Workflow, starting with opening files in Photoshop as well as suggesting when and how photographers should be utilizing Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. A review of the Photoshop workspace is followed by information on adjusting tonality and color with a wide variety of tools, and working with layers. Part four moves into more advanced Photoshop tools and techniques, such as selections, layer masks and using Photoshop’s retouching tools. There is also a discussion on the nuances of using Photoshop and Lightroom together and how to use Photoshop actions in Lightroom. Part five focuses on putting all of the pieces together to create the complete Creative Workflow with Photoshop. It begins with a discussion for creating strategies for success. The author then moves on to how to solve special portrait retouching problems and how to add creative finishing touches. Then Fitzgerald demonstrates the entire process with a downloadable practice file so you can follow along and practice your newly learned skills.