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Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks
The following sample recipes are taken from the Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks and are courtesy of O'Reilly Media.

Photoshop Fine Art Effects - Cross-Processing
Cross-processing is developing color print or slide film in the wrong chemicals — for example, color negative film in slide chemicals ("C-41 as E-6") or slide film by the color negative process ("E-6 as C-41"). Not surprisingly, this causes wild color and contrast shifts and requires lots of trial and error. But for a period in the 1980s and 1990s, cross-processed images were very much the vogue, with Nick Knight's fashion and studio work being arguably the most influential.

With many possible permutations of film stock and processing technique, there is no single, identifiable, cross-processed appearance. The most common combination is C-41 as E-6, in which slide chemistry is used to process color negative film, and it's a quick job to imitate it in Photoshop. Image contrast is usually high with blown-out highlights, while the shadows tend toward dense shades of blue. Reds tend to be magenta, lips almost purple, and highlights normally have a yellow-green color cast.

Whitening Teeth & Eyes
Whenever the need arises to make a natural element white or whiter, it's tempting to set the foreground color to white and reach for the airbrush. This works if applied with care, but it's easier to achieve a more realistic effect using other Photoshop tools. Here, a small amount of whitening applied to the model's teeth and eyes will lift the whole image.

The first technique successfully whitens your teeth without placing demands on your brushwork. As with most retouching tasks, it's best to work on a duplicate layer in case you make a mistake.

Creating Black And White From Color
Black-and-white photography is as powerful today as it was when color photography was just a distant dream. A different set of skills is required when working with black and white, as the absence of color means the interplay of shape and contrast must work harder to tell the story or set the mood, but when it works, it's very effective.

Some cameras have a dedicated black-and-white mode, but even if yours doesn't, you can still work in black and white. In fact, it often works better to shoot in color and convert later on. Photoshop offers a breathtaking array of techniques for converting color to black and white (or more correctly, grayscale), and these enable you to control the process with a degree of finesse that would be difficult to match in the field.

Andy Warhol Pop Art Silkscreen Effect
Almost synonymous with Pop Art, Andy Warhol was a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and publisher. In the mid-20th century he produced iconic silkscreen paintings of subjects as mundane as soup cans and as glamorous as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. These remain hugely popular, and have sparked countless imitations. Creating your own Pop Art-inspired images with Photoshop is easy, and great fun, too.

The silkscreen technique forces paint onto canvas through a high-contrast negative stencil attached to the fabric. The resulting image features strong blacks from the photograph, which can be simulated using Photoshop’s Threshold adjustment. In Warhol’s hands, crude blocks of garish, striking color were added to selected areas, and images were often duplicated with alternative color schemes.

Scraped Polaroid Picture Effect
In the 1970s, the photographer Les Krims produced a set of images on Polaroid instant film on which the wet emulsion had been scraped and distorted. First known as the Krimsograph, and widely known after its use on the album cover of Peter Gabriel’s 3, the technique is now more commonly called “SX-70 manipulation,” after the camera favored by many enthusiasts. After using a camera, enlarger, or printer to expose the film, you have a few hours to use all sorts of sticks, spikes, and scrapers to push the wet chemicals around to produce striking results.

When you look closely at a scraped or manipulated Polaroid, you will usually notice strong, colorful patterns where the artist has drawn and dragged the emulsion layers. To mimic this effect, you’ll have to imitate this physical and highly individual process in addition to adding an uneven, light-colored mottling where the film’s background sometimes shows through. The film’s blues can be especially vivid and its yellows somewhat weak, so portraits tend to be less popular than bright scenes with skies and fluffy clouds. But anything goes. Scraped Polaroids also tend to be small, glossy, and borderless.

Van Gogh Effect - Van Gogh's Sunflowers
In the late 1880s, Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh created his most famous works in a brief period while living in Arles, in southern France. These included Provençal landscapes, indoor scenes, and vases of sunflowers.

Influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as by Japanese art, Van Gogh’s style is distinct and instantly recognizable. His work is characterized by thick swirls of solid color, as can be seen in many of his skies, but he also painted poplar trees and fields of waving crops.

In his sunflower paintings, Van Gogh limited his palette to golds, mustards, and contrasting blues, and he tended to compose the images within tight framing in order to focus the eye. The thick swirls form a backdrop for the slightly scruffy, withered petals of his flowers, outlined in prominent black lines.

Daguerreotypes - The Louis Daguerre Effect
The world’s first photographic process was announced in Paris in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. It used a silver-plated copper sheet that was sensitized with iodine, exposed, and then developed in mercury vapor. Early images were of architectural subjects or landscapes, but soon the process was also used for portraiture, and it became particularly popular in France and America.

Daguerreotypes were positive images, one-offs, and the process was obsolete within a decade, as soon as new techniques allowed multiple photographs to be printed from negatives. But if you ever get the opportunity to compare early photographs in museums or exhibitions, it would be surprising if you didn’t find the Daguerreotypes to be some of the most magical objects on display.

Early Daguerreotype exposure times were long, so moving subjects such as water and people usually appeared blurred. Photoshop’s Motion Blur filter is ideal for simulating this, but requires a little care in its application because Daguerreotypes recorded other, static objects in fine detail.

Selective Coloring — Remove Color From An Image
Color has great power when it comes to conveying emotion and attracting attention. This power is multiplied exponentially when color is used as an accent in an otherwise monochrome image. By using selective coloring, we can draw the viewer's eye to the key areas of an image, with the colored areas adopting a jewel-like quality amid an expanse of gray.

The effect ranges from the subtle to the extreme. We can tint an image with just a hint of color, or apply an exciting splash of color to a specific area. Layer masks are an essential tool here, offering us the ability to restore color to the area of our choice, which can be controlled and restrained with the accuracy only a brush can provide.

Photoshop Fine Art Effects - Create A Cubist Look
Over a period of seven years leading up to 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, Cubism marked a decisive break from representative painting, reflecting a radical fissure in politics, art, and culture. Led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Cubist painters pursued an abstract, geometric approach.

Cubist paintings often look as if the subject has been constructed from a hundred or more snapshots, all taken from different angles. Where people are represented, they are sharply angular and feature masks that strongly suggest an African influence.

Autochrome - Color Process Effect
In 1907, the Lumière brothers introduced “autochrome,” the first commercially successful color process. Glass was coated in a fine mosaic of red, green, and blue dyed potato starches which acted as a filter over a light-sensitive emulsion.

During development, the emulsion layer became a black-and-white positive image, and the autochrome could then be projected or held up to the light, like an early version of a color slide or transparency. The process was enthusiastically received, and many photographers experimented with it, some of the best-known being Léon Gimpel in France and Frank Eugene and Alfred Stieglitz in the United States. Production of autochrome glass plates continued until the 1930s, when color film and printing first became available.

How To Create A High-Contrast Sketch
Combining the Find Edges filter and the Overlay blending mode can produce a high-contrast sketch effect that works with many types of images. This recipe includes multiple Overlay layers, which boost contrast, so the recipe works particularly well with low-contrast images. In the recipe, I use three Overlay layers—you can use more or fewer, though more than three can produce excessive contrast. Another variation, if the result is too harsh, is to add some Gaussian Blur.

Powder Pastels — Hand-coloring Image Tips
This recipe replaces the colors of the original image with powdery pastels. Apart from being great on its own, this recipe can be a great shortcut for hand-coloring an image.

In "Reversed Color" where colored areas are very dark, they will become grayscale. In "Subtle Colors" shadows and midtones turn grayscale, pure blues become yellows, reds come out cyan, and greens go lilac. In "Color Midtones" you reduce the Pin Light layer's fill opacity to restore some pastel colors in the midtones.

Hand Tinting — Tips For Photo Coloring Effects
Before the age of color film, when black-and-white photography was the only option, it was common practice for photographers to tint a black-and-white image with colored dyes to mimic real-life colors. Although we now have all the advantages of stunning color photography, we can still use Photoshop to replicate this technique, and add great charm to black-and-white images.

What we're looking for here is not truly lifelike color, but a decorative and subtle effect. Essentially, we can tint as little or as much of the image as we like, but the effect works best where areas of color are contrasted with the uncolored grayscale image.

Watercolor — Creating Artistic Painterly Effects
Watercolor has long been a defining Photoshop filter, though the crucial illusion of one color running into its neighbor is only partly achieved. Use the Smudge or Healing Brush tool to help the illusion. If you're looking to imitate gouache painting, however, search no further — the slight darkening around the edge of each patch of color perfectly reproduces the effect of this more opaque pigment.

Ink Outlines — How To Give An Image A Drawn Look
The Ink Outlines filter offers an interesting "drawn" line effect in combination with a background mottling that recalls the Sponge filter.

In "Using The Ink Outlines Filter" You learn how you can use Ink Outlines as a remedy to breathe some life into otherwise flat subjects. In "Fixing Color Cast With Ink Outlines" you'll read about another rescue mission that involves mitigating irreversible color casts.

Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks From O'Reilly

Photoshop is the digital artist and photographer's premier choice for editing and manipulating digital photos. And with the mounting interest in digital photography, the demand for practical guidance, expert techniques, tips and solutions — recipes for success if you will — continues to grow. It's exactly all of this and more that O'Reilly delivers in its beautifully designed and visually stunning new series, the "Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks."

Packed with hundreds of full color images, inspiring digital imagery, and authoritative information and advice, the books provide everything the reader needs to retouch, create effects, use blending modes, and filter effects, with professional results. With the books in this collection, the digital artist or photographer doesn't need to be a Photoshop expert to succeed. The "Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbook Series" includes the following:

Photoshop Retouching Cookbook for Digital Photographers (Amazon.com - save 34%)
Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook (Amazon.com - save 34%)
Photoshop Filter Effects Encyclopedia Cookbook (Amazon.com - save 34%)
Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook (Amazon.com - save 34%)
Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook (Amazon.com - save 34%)

Photoshop CS4 & Photoshop CS4 Extended - Best Deals From Adobe

Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended feature a newly refined, tab-based interface in a single, integrated window, with self-adjusting panels arranged in docked groups. Automatically keeping tools well organized and away from your work area means you get greater efficiency, less clutter, and better results, faster than before.

Delivering all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS4 software, including the new Adjustments and Masks panels, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended also provides breakthrough 3D editing and compositing power to paint directly on 3D models, create 3D animations, convert 2D images to 3D objects, and more; richer motion graphics editing; and more powerful and flexible image analysis and tracking. Learn more on our Photoshop CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Photoshop CS4 Free Trial Download Page.

Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom  |  Adobe Germany  |  Adobe France  |  Adobe Eastern Europe

Special Offer - Fluid Mask - Photoshop Masking Plugin

Fluid Mask is based on breakthrough segmentation technology inspired by the way the eye, optic nerve and brain perform visual processing. When an image is loaded, Fluid Mask's segmentation engine analyses the distribution of colors, finding the natural groups within the image. Together with information calculated about edges, gradients and textures, a model is constructed which divides the images into objects.

Vertus Software is offering Fluid Mask at the special 'friends and partner' discounted rate. This is an exclusive offer to visitors of PhotoshopSupport.com. To qualify, visit the Fluid Mask Discount Price page. Find out more about Fluid Mask on our special Fluid Mask Page.

SiteGrinder Photoshop Plugin - Create Websites Instantly

There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.

Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.

Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.

Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.

Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.

Photoshop CS3 Book - CS3 Essential Skills - By Mark Galer And Philip Andrews

Brimming with beautiful pictures, Photoshop CS3 Essential Skills guides you through a project-based, progressive curriculum so that you can build all the essential skills to enhance photographs creatively and professionally with Photoshop CS3. If you are an aspiring professional, enthusiastic amateur photographer, or a student learning photography, digital imaging, art and design, or design graphics, you'll be amazed at the stunning results you can achieve. A DVD is included free.