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.

Anyone who uses Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for image management, editing, and workflow knows it is great software, and it has only gotten better with each new version. But there comes a time in every Lightroom user’s life when they want to do something...and they just can’t do it. While Lightroom covers the vast majority of a photographer’s needs–many say it covers roughly 80% of a professional imaging workflow–it just can’t do everything a shooter needs to put the final touches on a great image. Scott Kelby, the #1 bestselling author of photography books, wrote Photoshop for Lightroom Users exactly for those Lightroom users who have recognized that they need Photoshop for the other 20% of their workflow, which will take their images to the next level. There is already a substantial audience for this book, and of course Adobe’s brand-new offering of a Lightroom and Photoshop Creative Cloud bundle for $9.99/month will certainly help grow this Lightroom-and-Photoshop audience very quickly in the coming months. These users don’t need to know everything about Photoshop. They just need to know the essentials edits, techniques, retouching tutorials, and tweaks that they can’t perform in Lightroom, but which will take their images up a notch. Scott covers everything from compositing to adding text over an image to retouching to creating a book cover to advanced sharpening techniques. With Photoshop for Lightroom Users, readers will learn all they need to know in order to fold Photoshop into their imaging workflow with Lightroom.

An architecture portfolio designed by Alex Hogrefe describing 4 original projects with a focus on unique representational techniques and styles.

Artists today use digital tools that allow them to work as naturally and spontaneously as if they were using traditional artist tools such as pastels, watercolors, oil media, and gouache. With the recent growth of the tablet market, there are more tools and more sophisticated features available now than ever before and an increased desire by artists to learn how to use them. As much art book as guide, The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book uses traditional drawing and painting theory exercises, coupled with reallife projects, to show readers how they can use Painter and Photoshop with pressure-sensitive tablets for beautiful results. Award-winning artist and author Cher Threinen-Pendarvis takes readers through a variety of projects designed to improve their drawing, composition, and conceptual thought processes while exploring different uses of the many brushes available in Painter and Photoshop. Among many valuable concepts and techniques you’ll learn to: Create tonal, gestural, and contour drawings with a pressure-sensitive tablet and stylus Use the iPad for sketching out ideas and use related software including Brushes, ArtStudio, Sketchbook Pro, Procreate, Adobe Ideas, and Adobe PS Touch Translate traditional color theory to digital color tools Incorporate scanned artwork into digital paintings and use photos as a reference for illustrations

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.