Art and Design in Photoshop: How to simulate just about anything from great works of art to urban graffiti

by Steve Caplin

Fancy designing your own classic and contemporary movie posters, books and magazine covers?

Feel like turning your photographs into works by Turner, Matisse and Magritte?

Want to create illustrations in the styles of The Simpsons, steampunk and Victorian engravings?

Then you need Art and Design in Photoshop.

In this unique book, acclaimed master of photomontage and visual trickery Steve Caplin shows you how to stretch your creative boundaries. Taking the same tried-and-tested practical approach as his best selling How to Cheat in Photoshop titles, Steve's step-by-step instructions recreate a dazzling and diverse array of fabulous design effects. You'll learn how to design everything from wine labels to sushi cartons, from certificates to iPod advertising, from textbooks to pulp fiction.

Written by a working pro, the clear guidelines pinpoint exactly what you need to know: how to get slick-looking results with minimum fuss, with a 16-page Photoshop Reference chapter that provides an at-a-glance guide to Photoshop tools and techniques for less experienced users. Steve explains both typography and the design process in a clear, informative and entertaining way.

All the images, textures and fonts used in the book are supplied on the accompanying CD-ROM. Imaginative, inspirational and fun to use, this book is a must-have for every creative Photoshop user, both amateur and professional.

* Learn to quickly and ingeniously create fantastic graphic effects in Photoshop, from graffiti to classic art, newsprint and stained-glass windows
* Easy and fun to use with clear step-by-step instructions and hundreds of screenshots.
* Backwards compatible: fully up-to-date with the latest Photoshop release but also relevant for use with previous versions of Photoshop

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, Design, Reference

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before you read this book, please understand one thing: This is NOT a manual on "How to Use Photoshop". You do need to have a basic grasp of the software already before you try to follow the tutorials. This IS a book on learning how to create photorealism using Photoshop's tools, and in that, it's a tremendously fun and quite educational book. The images and fonts used in the tutorials are included in the book's CD. You will realize how light affects objects and how light can reflect on and affect other objects; you will see how awkward objects look if shadows are not cast correctly or are omitted; you will see basic typography in action and learn appropriate typeface selection; in fact, your ability to observe detail will be noticeably sharper after going through the tutorials. You will learn the basics of many different artistic styles and genres. The author is a working graphic artist and is highly skilled in Photoshop, which becomes obvious as you page through the book; what's better is that he is an excellent teacher as well. Many of the tutorials can be used with Photoshop Elements as well, although the toolset is somewhat more limited in Elements and the locations of the tools may not match exactly as shown.

[Nada Elfeituri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book if you don't like the theoretical method of learning programs, where a detailed and boring description of every tool is given.
Instead, there's a series of step-by-step tutorials that you can follow, which also give an amazing insight to graphic design. The author himself says that the book is not there to teach just Photoshop, but design.
You need to have some basic knowledge of Photoshop beforehand, but he still explains the tutorials in detail.
I've done about 80% of the tutorials in the book, and read the rest. They're very easy to follow and don't restrict the creative process if you want to experiment.
Overall, a great book if you're learning Photoshop for graphic design.

[Puti Soedarsono · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my very first design book. Caplin has managed to introduce some basic principles in simplest and attractive ways for beginners who knows nothing about design.