Advanced Photoshop users who desire to emulate effects created by renowned professionals.
Aspirant graphic artists who seek inspiration from the world's top Photoshop designers.
Anyone interested in seeing what Photoshop can do when pushed to its limits by the best in the business.
What does the Book cover?
friends of ED scours the world for the leading exponents of Photoshop technique in their field. This book is a showcase of cutting-edge Photoshop practice and theory, backed with essays on the influences and inspirations that lie behind the sharpest digital art and explorations of the philosophy and ethics of image manipulation in today's media saturated world. The book deconstructs sophisticated and complex Photoshop graphics, providing motivation, skills and inspiration in equal parts.
Adobe Photoshop is the only complete image-editing tool for both web and print graphics.
Covers wide range of Photoshop techniques, including:
Vector shape handling
Improved text handling
PDF workflow management
Web optimization
Layer effects
Reviews
CGI Magazine
February 2002
Now this really is a 'graphics' book. Not just a book about graphics, it's a work of art in itself. It's dedicated to the work of 19 Photoshoppers who represent the leading edge of digital image production. Each artist gets his or her own chapter and each chapter focuses on how these artists use Photoshop to achieve their own artistic visions.
This is usually illustrated with respect to a particular image, detailing its creation as a walkthrough, but each chapter is also constructed as a manifesto for the artist and the page lay out and style constantly changes to reflect this. This is ultimately, a Photoshop textbook and all the files are included on the accompanying CD-ROM. However, it doesn't look or read like a textbook, and this is the key to its success. In a market overflowing with Photoshop how-to's it's becoming increasingly difficult for publishers to differentiate their products, but in producing something that looks like an arthouse coffee-table book while still conveying heaps of relevant information, Friends of ED and 'content architect' Jon Hill have been extraordinarily successful.
Computer Arts
5 star review
December 2001
This book is an awesome showcase of cutting-edge design currently taking place on and offline, featuring the work of many designers and illustrators whose images regularly adorn the pages of Computer Arts. You'll see the designs excellently reproduced in full colour, alongside the artists explaining the techniques behind each project.
If you liked Flash Web Design by Hillman Curtis, you'll love this book. It's not only an insight into the minds of the designers, it's also a Photoshop masterclass. The CD-ROM contains, audio, video and textual interviews with the authors, as well as unflattened Photoshop files that can be dissected to reveal the hidden structure of various images. If you use Photoshop and want to progress your skills, this book will open your eyes.
www.pixelsurgeon.com
9 out of 10
Review by Brett Archibald
For Friends Of Ed to be publishing a book on Photoshop may come as a surprise to a few people, because they only do Flash books, right? Wrong. They may have garnered their extremely excellent, and well-deserved reputation from their first few books on Flash, but since then have produced several other books dealing with other applications such as Director, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion, as well as books on writing PHP and XML. But admittedly, one thing all these books have in common is that they deal with the scripting side of the design business, and in particular, the web side of things.
So how does Friends Of Ed fare when it comes to tackling Photoshop, an application that has been around for a very, very long time, and that arguably every graphic designer in the world, of every skill level, and in every field of design already uses on a daily basis? Photoshop is a very different horse, aimed at the digital artist, not the programmer. There is no complex scripting involved. You start with a blank canvas or an existing image and you play around with it, altering it until you feel it's finished. Unlike design that involves scripting, there's no right way or wrong way to use Photoshop. It's an art.
With scripting, if you take a wrong turn somewhere, your project isn't going to work, full-stop. In Photoshop, if you go left when you should be going right, you may end up with something completely different to what you were expecting, but it's still an image, right? You can still export it as a JPEG and stick it up on your website if you like the look of it. So can Friends Of Ed really tell you anything you didn't already know? You bet they can. Because, like their New Masters Of Flash books, this book is written by, and consists of contributions by people from all walks of design-life from around the globe, all masters in their field: some are known as artists, some are known as photographers, some are known as web designers, and some are known as simply designers in general. But they all have one thing in common: they are all masters of Photoshop, and I guarantee they can teach you a thing or two, no matter how much you thought you already knew. After all, Photoshop really is one of those programmes where you're still discovering neat things every time you use it.
For those who don't already know, in this book, as with other F.O.E. books, each contributor is allocated one chapter each, divided into two main sections: in the first half of their chapter, they tell you a little about themselves, why they do what they do, who their influences are... Nothing extraneous, it all makes for a very interesting opener to the tutorial you're about to be guided through.
We begin with the familiar "Step one, create a new file" phrase, and are then taken through every step of how to re-create the contributor's piece. As always, you don't necessarily have to follow the tutorials to the letter, producing an exact replica of the image in the example (although you can if you wish, even using the exact same source image files as the author; as the accompanying CD contains all the source imagery, and the unflattened PSD files as well as audio, video, and written interviews with the authors) but rather, the book aims to demonstrate how these amazing images actually consist of a series of fairly simple procedures, and how you can use these same procedures to create similar effects of your own. Tools and features you've yet to use will suddenly become an invaluable and everyday part of your working process.
Although this book is a Masters tome, it deals with the 'art' of using Photoshop as opposed to the 'science' of using the application (now there's a contradiction in terms) and it doesn't matter what skill level you are currently at, you can just dive straight in - everything is meticulously explained and is thoroughly easy to understand. If there's a step in the process that you're not particularly comfortable with, skip it. You'll end up with a slightly different end result that still works a treat. Try leaving a line out of your code in a Flash file, and see if you still end up with a satisfactory result!
Referring to the walkthroughs in this book as tutorials may actually be quite misleading, as that may imply that you should sit down in front of your computer with the book open in front of you, and a blank Photoshop canvas on your screen. Personally, the whole time I was reading this book I was as far away from a computer as I could possibly be. I read the book over a few days travelling on the Tube / Subway / Metro (depending on which country you're reading this in), and just soaked it all in. I did a lot of "ooh-ing" and "aah-ing" and "so THAT'S how it's done" to myself whilst reading, and stuck Post-it notes on several pages, making a note of things to try out at home; but generally, because there are no absolute, specific, un-swerving, hard-and-fast rules to follow when using Photoshop, the whole chapter, as opposed to each individual step, is what really counts.
The only downside to all this is that what constitutes good art or good design, as opposed to good construction, is in the eye of the beholder, and some of the finished pieces may not be to your taste. Although it would be impossible to gather together nineteen graphic artists whose styles appealed to absolutely everyone, F.O.E. have done a damn fine job of presenting an extremely diverse range of walkthroughs. No matter what you do or don't like, there's plenty in here to suit you. I won't deny that there were one or two pieces of work in here that I wouldn't ordinarily give a second glance, but that's beside the point. These chapters still make for very interesting reading, and even if any given final image is not to your taste, there's always something in the designer's method of working that will teach you something. There's always something you can pick up that you hadn't thought of before.
But actually, having said that, I am a little confused by the methods of one particular contributor. This person, who may have a well-deserved reputation as an artist, does not appear to be a particularly great master of Photoshop. He starts off with a low-resolution (72dpi) image, and imports this image into Flash before exporting it back out again at a far higher resolution (at 16X the physical area size, at 1200dpi). The reason being, he says, is because Flash is a vector-based application, and the "outlines of shapes within the image are defined by vectors". He "proves" this by zooming in on the 72dpi image within Flash, showing that previously blocky pixels are all smoothed out (and I thought it was just because he had the 'allow smoothing' box checked in the Bitmap Properties window). We're then told to compare the 'before export' and 'after export' pictures and see the difference, showing that the pixels are "far less obvious" in the 'after' picture, never mind that we would see the exact same difference had we re-sized the image in Photoshop alone.
Am I missing something? I re-read that chapter several times, but I'm still pretty sure of some strange goings-on there. I'd be more than happy to eat my words if someone can make some sense out of that one for me.
Aside from that, there was not a single chapter that didn't teach me something, and I can't wait to see if Friends Of Ed is going to follow this up with more Photoshop books. New Masters of Photoshop will appeal to all who already know how good Friends Of Ed's books are, those who had previously ignored F.O.E. because they didn't do web or Flash design, and newcomers alike. It truly is an all-rounder, with something for everyone, no matter who you are or what you do, no matter whether you're a 72dpi RGB person, or a 300dpi CMYK person. This book is a tempting, friendly design gigolo, and will do absolutely anything you ask of it for just shy of 50 Quid!
BRETT RATING: 9/10
DT&G Magazine
www.Design-Bookshelf.com
Review by Fred Showker Editor/Publisher, DT&G Magazine
BEST BOOK 2001
Folks, this is not a book review. Let's say you're not at all interested in buying another book about Photoshop or graphic arts. Now breath deeply, and consider not the book, but what the book stands for.
As a piece of software, Adobe Photoshop is alone in industry popularity, as well as capabilities for manipulating digital images. Even more rare is the genuine passion that it evokes from a selected few of its users.
What most of us have missed in the past five years is the realization that we're all taking part in the emergence of another genre of true art. A nation of aspiring digital graphic artists and designers sit on the sidelines and talk about Photoshop (myself included,) yet they trudge through the day to day tedium unaware of a new emerging art form.
You've heard the art critics and museum curators classify and departmentalize works of art. We hear of "masters in oil" or "masters in marble." But it took "The New Masters of Photoshop" to bring this new emergence into my reality. If any of this art actually survives a century, or even a millennium it will take its place in the ever-flowing time line of fine arts.
Mike Cina, and another thirty or so editors and contributing authors (referred to as "Friends of Ed") have taken the all-important major step to bring digital art to its deserving place in the overall scheme of fine arts. And, they've packaged it for the consumption of the rest of us living the art in this time - not 50 or 100 years from now. Yes, there have been others. But I believe this one is a true milestone.
The New Masters of Photoshop is an important book because it not only showcases the works of Masters who use Photoshop, but because it looks into the minds of these masters - no, I take that back. Too weak. It actually looks into the very souls of the masters and brings forth the passion and emotion of the works they present. Imagine for a moment if you could pick up a fabulously illustrated book (along with video on CD) that actually presents the thoughts, ideas and inner feelings of Michelangelo or Da Vinci - discovering how they wrought their works, and more importantly, why. Do you suppose any of their contemporaries even guessed what they were missing?
I'm not proposing that there are Michelangelos or Da Vinicis in this group of 'new' artists. Only the test of time will prove their worth as true masters. However, it's plain to see -- and I shall testify - there is true greatness in these pages. Greatness such that no Photoshop user, or graphic artist should ignore. Untouched, unimagined greatness. psychosurgery by Derek Lea.
From the thought provoking 'psychosurgery' of Derek Lea to the emotionally sensitive "Finders, Keepers" of Catherine McIntyre to the stark precision of Colin Smith's photorealism, the artists herein demonstrate examples of their print work, web work, public work, and private work, explaining the techniques they use to achieve their results. More than that, though, they'll tell you how they think: who their influences are, where their ideas come from, and how they find inspiration when the well has run dry.
If you want proof, don't just site there with that dumb stupor on your face. Go and download the entire chapter of Josh Fallon's "Metamorphose" (where he takes you through his rind technique). (It's an easy PDF Download.)
Ladies and gentlemen, if you even care for your craft, or your art, you would be foolish indeed to let this opportunity slip away - for a paltry 59-bucks.
Aside from all that, "The New Masters of Photoshop" is a gallery of Photoshop practice and theory, backed with essays on the influences and inspirations that lie behind the sharpest digital art in today's media-saturated world. The book deconstructs sophisticated, complex, and astonishing Photoshop graphics, providing motivation, skills and inspiration in equal parts.
The projects presented include examples of collage and montage that involve manipulation of whole images and tiny fragments - working on a grand scale, and at a pixel-by-pixel level. Layers and masks, with all their subtleties, are used in fascinating ways; and filters are treated with the sensitivity and discretion they require. They let you share the experience - showing the layer structures of the files, the raw images, and the way they are brought together to form the finished work.
And, let me say that ALL of the work is a joy to see and learn about. Unlike some other 'masters' style compilations, there's not a single dud in the group - in my opinion.
Cancel your appointments for the day. As a benefit, the CD contains an extraordinary audio/video with actual interviews with the authors. So, not only do you get to see their writings about the projects, you get to visit with them, actually getting the feeling of their presence. Along with that, the source files for the tutorials are included on the CD with unflattened Photoshop files for closer inspection.
For me, each page is a visual treat. It's exactly what I needed to shake my sensitivity - to get my eyes and my mind actually seeing again. I've gone page by page through the book, now, the third time, and I can't wait to go through it again... slowly.
I guess this actually did turn out like a book review after all. But keep the stress on the aspect of seeing, experiencing, and even being part of a new art generation. If you immerse yourself - allow yourself the luxury to be immersed - in this collection of art, you'll be amongst the few contemporaries of these New Masters who have been touched by their works; in their own time. "Each page is a visual treat... exactly what the Photoshop user needs to heighten sensitivity and shake you out of the Photoshop doldrums!"
Photoshop User Magazine
Nineteen authors collaborated on this project, each sharing personal thoughts and feelings and presenting a tutorial. While you may not recognize their names, these 19 artists from around the world are certainly influential (and include Colin Smith, a Guru Award winner from Photoshop World L.A.).
Rather than a teaching tool, use this lavishly produced volume as inspiration. Read a section, learn about the artist, and see how a particular technique was accomplished or a favorite piece produced. The variety of artwork and approaches is a definite plus.« less