NAPP* Dream Team Creative Studio
Authors: Sharon Steuer, Bert Monroy, Ben Wilmore

*National Association of Photoshop Professionals
New Riders, PeachPit Press, Adobe Press
ISBN 0-7357-1340-5 $99.99

Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG

The Dream Team Creative Studio is a set of three excellent Photoshop books. The set consists of Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy, author Bert Monroy, New Riders, ISBN: 0735712468, $45.00; Creative Thinking In Photoshop, author Sharon Steuer, New Riders, ISBN 0735711224, $45; and Photoshop 7 Studio Techniques, author Ben Wilmore, Adobe Press, ISBN 0321115635, $50.00. Together these three books are a mind blowing set of tools that will bring a whole new meaning to creative thinking when working with Adobe Photoshop. There are other sets in the NAPP Dream Team collection too.

 Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy. A while back I reviewed another Bert Monroy book. His work is exquisite. He takes digital photos and turns them into works of art and he creates art that looks like photos. He is absolutely amazing and his books are so beautiful that they are like coffee table art books……you want to display them proudly but they are also learning tools for taking Photoshop’s power and putting it to work. For every artist out there or every person yearning to be artistic, you must have Photoshop books in your learning library in order to increase your awareness of what Photoshop can do and to learn the techniques that take a photo or image to new levels of artistic expression. This is a book of techniques.  Whether you want to retouch, restore, enhance or change a photo into a whole new look, you will find this book full of ideas and the methods to bring the ideas to fruition. The photo example is the original photo that I chose to for the tutorial.

I chose a tutorial lesson that created a stormy weather scene from a photo taken in daylight in New York City . This books does not come with a CD that includes photos, you will have to find your own photos to work with which is what I did. I did this tutorial several times first with a lighthouse photo and then a waterfront shot of New York City .

I even applied the same steps to creating the look in Paint Shop Pro 8 and had complete success.  I followed his lesson step-by-step and turned a sunny day into a stormy night! The procedure involves using alpha channels (if necessary when the sky color may be too close to the other colors in the photo) or selecting with the magic wand, levels adjustments, curves, hue and saturation adjustments, adding noise to a new layer, various blurs, and combining using these tools to completely change the photo. The author is a master at creating paintings and other works of art with Photoshop and his skill and understanding of the application is shared through his tutorials and examples in this book. I was able to follow what I was supposed to do and when he suggested an alternative method could be used when alpha channels weren’t necessary, I tried that and made that work with great success too.  Professional or novice users alike can gain a wealth of knowledge and inspiration from working with this book. I jumped into the later chapters to do this tutorial too……..not something from the beginning. In this chapter there was even a method that showed how to take what would be standing water on a sidewalk after it had rained and apply a technique that would give the water the proper texture to make it look like it was puddled on a cement sidewalk. The tips and techniques are fabulous. You are shown the little details that make a design into a true work of art. These realistic touches bring true professional quality to your image designs.

Book contents:

Chapter 1: Off to a Good Start                                    Chapter 6: Creating the Elements

Chapter 2: The Art of Brush Making                          Chapter 7: Reflections

Chapter 3: A Greener World: Creating Foliage          Chapter 8: Bending Things a Bit

Chapter 4: Lights and Shadows                                 The Gallery

Chapter 5: What’s It Made Of? Creating Textures     Index

I love this book. I recommend it highly. You can never have enough books to teach you new techniques, inspire you to try new things, and increase your understanding of how Photoshop works.  When I did the tutorial for creating a storm on a sunny photo I learned from the author not only how to do the steps but why certain steps were necessary….such as changing the lighting on the buildings. The buildings were bright and reflecting the sunlight, this wouldn’t do in a storm. So the section had to be masked and have the buildings darkened to match the stormy night. It was important to adjust the lighting to match the mood and bring darkness to the color of the buildings in the stormy scene.  Since I was using my own photo I also made other slight adjustments to create the look that I was aiming for. Each photo you work with may need your own fine adjustments but by learning the steps to create the effect you will also see what else you need to do to finish the effect if fine tuning is necessary. A flash demo of how this was done will be available in my SIG review section.     (Click the links to view the tutorials)

Below are other photos that I changed the weather in. I also added some special effects, lightning from Alien Skin’s Xenofex 2 and mist from AutoFX’s Mystical Lighting.

Creative Thinking in PHOTOSHOP.  Sharon Steuer shares her love of Photoshop and creative design with us through this book. She said in the early days when she learned the programs were less intimidating and you learned to create as you could. She steps back to this method to encourage you to learn as you go and explore. Gain confidence in yourself by creating designs instead of memorizing lists of things about how the application works. Learn a design and then learn something else. Her advice is exactly how I started. I learned to follow the steps for a technique and then I leaned how to do more things with those steps and I just kept exploring. I looked for tutorials and techniques to teach me more things and I still look for them. I will never have enough books because each book brings me a whole now set of ideas and suggestions to learn from. I cannot imagine ever advancing without the help of these books to teach me more and show me more and more creative ideas.

This book was written to inspire the digital artist whether they are a professional or a beginner. By sharing her love of Photoshop, she encourages us all to be creative in our approach to digital artistry. Also the some of ideas suggested here are for taking the Photoshop image and then processing it into a actual art piece whether through a print process or other methods. Photoshop images are also used as templates.

These examples are an example of what I tried to recreate. The author took a photo and by using a series of blend modes made her image look more like a painting. Using multiple layers and adjustments and filters, the photo is blended and softened and then textured.  While this is my first attempt at doing this, I was impressed by the fact that I am able to follow the instructions and make my image look similar to the books example.

Contents: Foreword & Introduction

Chapter 1: Compositing and the Creative Process

Chapter 2: Creative Problem Solving Using Layers

Chapter 3: Improvising with Color Using Layers

Chapter 4: Radical Ways to Generate New Ideas from Older, or “Finished” Work

Chapter 5: Nonlinear Creativity

Chapter 6: Compositional Brainstorming

Chapter 7: Creating Monotypes from Digital Images

Chapter 8: Collaborating with Other Artists or Photographers

Chapter 9: Simulating Installations of Your Work

Appendix: Arranging Your Workspace; Techniques At A Glance; Index

Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Studio Techniques. This book is a guide to mastering the essential features of Photoshop. It comes with a copanion CD so that you have the images to work with. It covers:

This book covers all the new Photoshop 7 features including a chapter dedicated to color management.

Cover to cover this is another outstanding collection of techniques to improve and advance user skills. It presents itself well covering the subject from it’s foundations to its creativity essentials. An example is chapter four which covers resolution. Resolution means many things to many people. This chapter explains the differences and how to get it right. There is a quote at the top of the chapter that pretty much sums up what you should know about understanding resolution, “The difference between failure and success is doing something nearly right and doing it exactly right”. If it’s not done right, it’s not going to work.  This chapter topics include: Understanding Pixel Size, Printing, Resolution and Line Art, Resolution and Grayscale or Color Images Inkket, Laser Printing/Printing Press, Dye Sub (dye sublimation), 35mm Slides, Multimedia/Internet, Digital Cameras, Resolution and File Size, Resampling, Other Resolution Tricks, Scan with Maximum Resolutions, Sharpening, Res vs. PPI, Print Size, and terminology. As you can see there is a lot of information being provided in this book.

This book expands the techniques that you need to learn in order to manipulate your digital images like a professional. If you began your Photoshop training with the Adobe Press Classroom in a Book for Photoshop 7, this book will advance your understanding of its features.

Contents:

Part I – Working Foundations                     Part III –Creative Explorations        

Chapter 1: Tool and Palette Primer                Chapter 11: Shadows

Chapter 2: Selection Primer                           Chapter 12: Collage

Chapter 3: Layers Primer                               Chapter 13: Enhancement

                                                                        Chapter 14: Retouching

Part II – Production Essentials                    Chapter15: Type and Background Effects

Chapter 4: Resolution Solutions

Chapter 5: Line Art Scanning                          Part IV – Web Graphics

Chapter 6: Optimizing Grayscale Images      Chapter 16: Interface Design

Chapter 7: Understanding Curves                  Chapter 17: Slicing and Rollovers

Chapter 8: Color Management                       Chapter 18: Animation

Chapter 9: Color Correction                           Chapter 19: Optimization

Chapter 10: Channels                                     Index

A further sampling of the depth of coverage in chapters: Chapter 1: Tool and Palette Primer – Preparing Your Workspace, Working with Screen Modes, A Quick Tour of the Tools, Navigating Your Document, Picking Colors, Basic Editing Tools, Closing Thoughts, Ben’s Techno-babble Decoder Ring, Keyboard Shortcuts; Chapter 14: Retouching – Patch Tool, Healing Brush Tool, clone Stamp Tool, The Doge and Burn Tools, The Sponge Tool, The Sharpen and Blur Tools, Closing thoughts, Ben’s Techno-babble Decoder Ring, Keyboard Shortcuts. I hope this helps you to see the just how much is offered through working with this book.

I refer to books like these all the time to learn and to expand my creative ideas and pass them on to our SIG members. Each one offers something new, as does each new version when it is released. Don’t think for a moment that because a version number becomes older that a book ceases to offer you something. That isn’t true. These books are all for the current version of Photoshop but when a new version is released you will still have all the design ideas and technical knowledge from these books plus all new ones from a newer publication. Don’t pass up a book for version 6 because you think it can’t help you if you are using version 7.

Please take advantage of the discount offers available for our members on the group web site. You will not only save money but your knowledge and Photoshop skills will be improved dramatically. You have an entire multi-level education available to you at less that it would cost you to take some local courses on the subject. These books and the others found on the PeachPit Press and New Riders web sites are worth their weight in gold when it comes to educational value. I encourage those of you who seriously want to learn more about Photoshop to invest in some of these books.