Adobe Photoshop CS2 offers professional and amateur photographers, artists, and designers unprecedented opportunities to manipulate images on their personal computers, but it's a complex application that can take years to master. With Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook, you don't have to be a Photoshop expert to create sophisticated effects. The 61 easy-to-follow, fully illustrated recipes in the book show you how to use Photoshop CS2 to simulate classic camera and darkroom techniques and special effects-without making you first learn Photoshop inside and out.

Author and digital artist Tim Shelbourne has assembled a collection of real-world techniques that you'll be able to apply immediately to your own images, whether you're working on photographs or digital illustrations. Digital files of the examples in the book are available for download, so you can easily follow along as Tim takes you through each recipe.

The book covers:

• Creating graphic art effects: posterization, watercolor, pen and ink, woodcut

• Working with lighting effects: neon glows, lens flares, fire and flame effects

• Simulating natural phenomena: rain, clouds, rainbows, lightning, snow

• Adapting traditional techniques: film grain, contrast masks, hand-tinting

• Adding motion blurs and other special effects

• Simulating textures: stone, metal, glass, plastic

• Making mattes, vignettes, frames, borders, signatures

• Assembling multi-layered images and photomontages

Packed with hundreds of full-color photographs, step-by-step instructions, and at-a-glance panels with many practical tips, Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook is all you need to quickly and easily create professional graphic art effects from almost any image source.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

If you know photoshop...you know most of this stuff in the book - 2007-03-03
Reviewer Rating:
Just a pretty rehash of photoshop filters and effects.
Skip it if you know photoshop
If you don't and like big picture learning this will teach you effects...but it won't teach you photoshop.

Good book but results may vary - 2008-01-04
Reviewer Rating:
There are a lot of good ideas provided in this book for some very cool effects. However, please know that many of the effects/settings are very specific to the images they use in the examples. Your results will vary greatly with your own photos so it will take quite a bit of tweaking.

Not that great a resource - 2007-03-28
Reviewer Rating:
I am a firm believer that cookbooks should remain in the kitchen. This book did not really provide me with any new recipes of use. The one recipe I did want to use for a client operation, I resourced the online materials and followed it through but was unable to have it turn out. If the experiment was a cake, it would have been in the compost bin.

Most of the book is taken up with two page layouts that show you how different effects work. Well I have been pretty familiar with the graphic pen filter for a long time, so most of the book which touched on those was wasted pulp.

There was nothing here that really wowed me about either the work, the layout or the subject matter. Maybe a first entry user of Photoshop might find it interesting , but I can't really recommend this title to a serious Photoshop user. I couldn't even give this book away at my user group meeting.

Next Level of Photoshop Artistic Quality - 2007-01-10
Reviewer Rating:
I have been Fooling around with Photoshop-CS2 for years, i have been able to produce Amazing Effects. Many of my greatest Photoshops were done by Accident, because i wasn't sure were to start or in what direction to go in. I got this book and right away i saw some i have done but wasn't sure how i did it. Plus they have Tons of other effects you can do, by the time your done you will have Museam Quality Photos. Most people will ask you to do Photos for them to hang up in there house as a Center Piece.

excellent getting started book - 2009-02-09
Reviewer Rating:
i agree with a couple of the reviews here about the settings used in the examples. 41% opacity? will it explode if i make it 42? however, the book is aptly called a cookbook, because like all recipes (except for baking), they are meant for experimenting with once you get the basics.

we rarely question a recipe that says 1/4 teaspoon of tumeric. what happens if i bump it up to 1/2? but i know what happens from experience when I accidentally put 1 tablespoon of cayenne in instead of 1 teaspoon!

From this perspective, these books are awesome - cutting straight to the chase more than a dummies guide. just play with the settings in each step - save different versions of the files as you go along - and then test print the different results. we did this with black and white photo developing, why not with photoshop?

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