Quick Recipes for Creative Fun: "Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook" by Tim Shelbourne

One of unfortunate aspects of using Photoshop in your work every day--even (or perhaps, especially) when you've been at it like I have since the very first version back in the early 1990's--is that often you get so involved in correcting and retouching images for purely technical reasons that you start to forget how much fun the program can be on a completely creative level. That's why I am having so much fun with Tim Shelbourne's new book Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook (O'Reilly; 2007). Shelbourne (a traditional "hand" artist for more than 20 years prior to going digital) has created a great book for rekindling your creative visual spirit--and it covers a lot of creative ground.

The book is very well organized into a "cookbook" style compendium that offers 53 different recipes for turning ordinary photos into very fun and creative images. Shelbourne presents a wide range of interesting visual tricks like creating woodcut effects, turning portraits into caricatures, simulating rain, simulating candlelight, adding water droplets (really fun!), adding rays of light to interiors and landscapes and even adding rainbows to your landscape photos. If you're ever bored with your images, this book will send you off onto a blissful journey of imagination.

Each of the ideas is covered in a quick step-by-step fashion in just a few pages and Shelbourne (unlike yours truly) wastes no words in explaining the techniques: what you get here are fast, easy-to-follow steps that take you from start to finish. Shelbourne uses some great photos and lots of screen captures of dialog boxes and toolbars so that you it feels like you're looking over his shoulder at his monitor. The layout of the book is clean and (thank you O'Reilly!) the steps are all numbered so that you don't get lost following the progression of the image (you'd be surprised how many publishers leave those numbers off).

The book is divided nicely into eight creative categories, including: Tonal and Lighting Effects (including tips on the new Black and White tool in CS3), Graphic Arts Effects (pen-and-ink drawing effects, for example), Lighting Effects (things like creating a star-filled sky), Natural World Effects (simulating sunsets, turning day into night), Traditional Photographic Effects (creating an Infrared look, for example, is nicely covered), Distortion Effects (how to clone with perspective), Texture Effects (creating wood, stone, metal and other surface textures) and Presentation Effects (some nice ideas for creating frame effects).

The book is probably aimed at a moderately skilled Photoshop user, but I would think anyone with a basic familiarity with Photoshop tools would find the book simple to follow. In fact, I would highly recommend the book to beginners because I think that when you're learning Photoshop it helps if you can see how the basic tools can be used to create exciting and fun visual effects quickly. And for someone like myself that has been using Photoshop for more than 15 years, this book is a really useful creative desktop reference for finding the fastest ways to add visual effects. I learned a neat trick for adding highlights to soft-focus images (pages 128-129) the very first time I opened the book and I've already used it several times. I wish I'd thought of this technique years ago!

A great book and, as I always say, any book is worth the price (in this case a bargain at $29.99) if you get a single nugget of creative help. In this case though, you'll get a ton of useful tips and ideas. For more on O'Reilly's great Photoshop and photo books, visit: www.oreilly.com