Designed to dazzle and inspire but not leave you in the dust, this beautifully designed volume lets you follow along as it dissects real-world projects from some of today's top Illustrator artists. In the process it teaches you how to use Illustrator in ever more creative ways for your own projects. Best-selling author and award-winning artist Sharon Steuer uses four-color pictures of real Illustrator projects to show what's possible and then employs simple, step-by-step instructions to explain the techniques that will produce those effects. You'll find comprehensive ground-up coverage of all of Illustrator CS' most important capabilities. Veteran users will be grateful to explore Illustrator CS' new features: powerful new tools for creating 3D graphics on the fly, a new Scribble Effect that lets you add a loose, hand-drawn look to your artwork, a redesigned text engine, enhanced PDF support, and more. On the CD, you'll find artwork from the book, technical documents, third-party software, clip art, and more.

For decades, Sharon Steuer and her international WOW! team have been showcasing the world’s best artists and designers working in Illustrator. In this expanded edition of the best-selling and award-winning Illustrator WOW! Book, you’ll find hundreds of tips, tricks, and techniques derived from actual projects from top Illustrator artists. You’ll learn to use new features, discover exciting ways to create complex effects, and find fresh ways to use venerable old tools and¿speed up your workflow. This edition includes coverage of the 2014 release and is loaded with and lessons with stunning new artwork that feature: Painting and generating objects with raster brushes Harnessing Live Corners, Live Rectangles, and new ways to reshape paths Manipulating live type characters with the Touch Type tool Creating airbrush and neon effects with gradients on strokes Building complex styles with multiple lines, fills, and effects Composing complex repeating patterns Auto-generating corners for pattern brushes Incorporating transparency into mesh and gradients Building and modifying scenes in perspective and 3D Transforming raster art to Illustrator vectors Preparing artwork for animation and the web Integrating Illustrator with Photoshop and other apps Creating photorealism in Illustrator WOW! ONLINE Register the book at peachpit.com/register to access artwork to pick apart and special PDFs from artists to you. Keep up with tips on the latest Illustrator features at WOWartist.com.

This edition of Real World Photoshop is more tightly focused for the needs and demands of the professional digital photographers. From acquiring images to using an efficient processing workflow to maintaining image quality and final output quality all within the powerful feature set of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4. Coverage of new features includes: live, non-destructive corrections in the Adjustments panel, re-editable, feathered, density controlled masks, enhanced auto-align, auto blend, 360 degree panoramas, and more. The book's new focus helps readers understand the core workflow tasks, main print and web output options as well as the commercial printing information necessary to hand off images for prepress. Essentials information on file formats, color settings, image adjustment fundamentals, sharpness, detail, noise reduction, and image storage and output is also included. Photoshop Extended is covered where it relates specifically to photographers.

Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book is updated to help intermediate through advanced students get up to speed on the more creative features of Illustrator and efficiently integrate workflow updates and improvements. With its practical, yet beautiful examples, this book focuses on real-world tips, tricks, and techniques extracted from the artwork of many of the world's best Illustrator artists. This 14th edition of the book will help students harness the most powerful creative features of Adobe Illustrator CS6 and CC (including the latest 2014 release), from painting and generating objects with raster brushes, to creating complex repeating patterns, and inserting Illustrator objects into an editable 3D perspective grid. They'll learn how to incorporate the vast array of feature enhancements designed to improve object and text creation and editing, including Live Corners, Live Rectangles, the new Path Reshaping functions, and the Touch Type tool. In addition, they'll discover how to add automatic corners to pattern brushes, apply gradients to strokes, prepare artwork for animation and the web, and use Image Trace to transform raster art to vectors. Through real-world step-by-step lessons and stunning artwork, students will be inspired to master even the most challenging aspects of Adobe Illustrator.

Annotation Many designers and photographers own the entire suite of Adobe creative products, but they manage to learn only one or two of the applications really well. This volume includes many individual exercises designed specifically to teach the tools and features in Illustrator that designers (as opposed to illustrators) need to use.

This book breaks new ground by doing something for digital photographers that’s never been done before—it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly “how to do it.” It’s not a bunch of theory; it doesn’t challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure things out on your own. Instead, it does something that virtually no other Elements book has ever done—it tells you flat-out which settings to use, when to use them, and why. If you’re looking for one of those “tell-me-everything-about-the-Unsharp-Mask-filter” books, this isn’t it. You can grab any other Elements book on the shelf, because they all do that. Instead, this book gives you the inside tips and tricks of the trade for organizing, correcting, editing, sharpening, retouching, and printing your photos like a pro. You’ll be absolutely amazed at how easy and effective these techniques are—once you know the secrets. LEARN HOW THE PROS DO IT Each year we train thousands of digital photographers and, almost without exception, they have the same questions and face the same problems—that’s exactly what we cover in this book. You’ll learn: The real secrets of how the pros retouch portraits How to color correct any photo without breaking a sweat (you’ll be amazed at how the pros do it!) How to use Camera Raw for processing not only RAW photos, but JPEGs and TIFFs, too! (And you’ll learn why so many pros like it best—because it’s faster and easier) The sharpening techniques the pros really use (there’s an entire chapter just on this!) How to deal with common digital camera image problems, including removing noise and avoiding halos The most requested photographic special effects, and much more! THE BOOK’S SECRET WEAPON Although Elements 10 offers some digital photography features that Photoshop CS5 doesn’t offer, there are plenty of features that Photoshop CS5 has that Elements 10 still doesn’t have (things like paths, Channel Mixer, etc.). But in this book, you’ll learn some slick workarounds, cheats, and some fairly ingenious ways to replicate many of those Photoshop features from right within Elements. Plus, since this book is designed for photographers, it doesn’t waste your time talking about how to frame a shot, set your exposure, etc., and there’s no talk about which camera or printer to buy. It’s all Elements, step by step, cover to cover, in the only book of its kind, and you’re gonna love it!

Adobe InDesign is the clear software of choice for designers in desktop publishing and typesetting. With it, designers create professional, eye-catching posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books, and ebooks. Because it has so much power and depth, sometimes the things you need are…well…kinda hidden or not really obvious. There will be a lot of times when you need to get something done in InDesign, but you have no idea where Adobe hid that feature, or what the “secret handshake” is to do that thing you need now so you can get back to working. That’s why this book was created: to get you to the technique, the shortcut, or exactly the right setting, right now. Here's how it works: When you need to know how to do a particular thing, you turn to the chapter where it would be found, find the thing you need to do (it’s easy—each page covers just one single topic), and designer and author Dave Clayton tells you exactly how to do it just like he was sitting there beside you, using the same casual style as if he were telling a friend. That way, you get back to working in InDesign fast.< This isn’t a book of theory, full of confusing jargon and detailed multi-step concepts. This is a book on which button to click, which setting to use, and exactly how and when to use it, so you’re never “stuck” in InDesign again. This will be your “go to” book that sits within reach any time you’re working in InDesign, and you are going to love having this type of help right at your fingertips.