Extreme Photoshop CS

by Matt Kloskowski

Book Overview

Following a renowned fifteen-year history, Photoshop CS emerges as the newest edition to the Adobe family. This dynamic version allows you to create myriad styles--ranging from pixel, to vector, to 3D, and more. But what about proper instruction and guidance? Enter: Extreme Photoshop CS. This in-depth, versatile book will help you make the jump from Photoshop user, to professional designer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590594282
• ISBN13: 9781590594285
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 401 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic

I love all the Photoshop books that walk you through step by step and you don't have to use the authors graphics on their CD. I like that I can learn the technique step by step and use my own designs. I recommend to any one that likes the Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby to get this book too.

Wonderful and inspirational!

Photoshop has been known for years as one of the most capable and powerful software packages available. Each iteration to the present Photoshop CS version has gotten more and more powerful and feature-rich. For many people, Photoshop is frighteningly hard to learn and use beyond mere photo editing - tonal and color adjustment, cropping, retouching, and the like. However, for those who know how to take advantage of its power, it is an amazing tool for creating original images. Matt Kloskowski, the author of "Extreme Photoshop CS", is one such knowledgeable person. In the small handful of creative exercises contained in the book, he demonstrates how creative and efficient one can be with Photoshop in producing original realistic and photo-realistic images. There are nearly a dozen extended-length exercises in this handsomely-produced, well-illustrated, full-color book of 401 pages (including index). Each exercise is a step-by-step demonstration of the use of some of Photoshop's many tools and features by a master creative artist to make realistic and cartoon and comic book-style images. The book's text and illustrations about Photoshop CS will make sense for both PC and Mac users. Make no mistake about it, even thorough and expert knowledge of Photoshop itself is insufficient to create such images. Software tools, even great ones, cannot substitute for the "artist's eye" and artistic talent. In one exercise early in the book, the author shows step-by-step how to create a photo-realistic image of a fishbowl illuminated by natural light from a blank canvas using Photoshop tools requiring a bare minimum of what we conventionally think of as artist's skills - drawing, brushing, and texturing. There are 49 steps in creating the finished fish bowl, and even for novice Photoshop users like myself, each and every one seems fairly simple to duplicate. No special manual or advanced graphic software talent seems required. However, taking a step back and comparing the blank canvas starting point to the finished product produces a sense of wonderment. There is no way a novice user like myself could create such a finished product without the actual step-by-step guidance of an accomplished artist. The untrained or unskilled artist-wannabe could hardly perceive, artistically, the structural perspectives, lighting patterns, reflections, refractions, and more - much less produce realistic results even with Photoshop's wonderful tools. Kloskowski is an established illustrator and graphic designer and an Adobe-certified expert. He has written several design-related books, as well as written columns for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Mac Design, and other publications. In this book, he shows how Photoshop can aid those already blessed with an innate or trained "artist's eye" to produce high quality images quickly and efficiently. This book is not meant to be a traditional user's manual on Photoshop. Although a fair number of tools and fea