Book Review Cher Threinen-Pendarvis:Beyond Digital Photography

I am a geek. As such I love books. My reading habit is non-curable and I peruse books on many subjects, Art and Marketing are my favorite topics and in the world digital painting every book that is published (to my knowledge) I have been fortunate enough to read. Amazon loves me.

Beyond Digital Photography is another must have book for anyone serious about transforming their photography into painterly works of fine art. This book was written by Cher Threinen-Pendarvis and Donal Jolley and published by PeachPit Press. You most likely have heard of these two well respected artists and authors. Cher is the author of the popular Painter Wow! series and Donal has been featured in many publications including The Photoshop CS/CS2 Wow! Book, the Painter Wow! Book and other publications.

Beyond Digital Photography offers extensive step-by-step information on many topics. One of the coolest things is that time is spend with Corel Painter and Photoshop. Finally we have a book that highlights the use of Painter and Photoshop together! I believe one needs to have an intermediate level of skill with the programs in order to get the most out of this book.

Many different types of paintings and techniques are covered at length. There is a great area in Chapter Two that will show you how to obtain nice flowing painterly techniques for those that are artistically challenged. If you are looking for a few nice water color techniques shoot over to Chapter 5 where Cher gives and awesome explanation on how Painters Digital Watercolors work. Take a peek at the workflow she uses to prepare an image and make it more suitable for a high key watercolor emulation.

Finally my favorite Chapter is Six. Donal shares a unique approach to utilizing layers to achieve an oil painted look that you have to try as soon as you read it. There is also an awesome demonstration from Cher of Painters Real bristle Brushes.

All in all a smoking book. The next time you are about to spend 500 bucks on a workshop…cancel your trip, hole up in your studio or a hotel room for the weekend with your computer, Wacom tablet and this book. You will be glad you did.

Photoshop Painting With Adobe’s CS5 will be much easier

By Julie Christy Encabo

There are selection of new features that are being developed by ‘Photoshop Labs’, including Painter-style brushes, a new warp tool and more.

The new brush tools aim to match what is found within the Corel Painter application. When you choose a brush, its prototype is displayed so you will get an idea about the type of brush you are about to use.   It has ‘wet’ paints (they have properties of drying out) that you can smudge, smear or blend. Also, there is a shortcut when we want to change the color of the paint on the brush, it is just a one-press command where the color picker will then be shown. Another improvement with the brushes is its shortcut command, when we want to resize the brush, we can use the same command like in the previous version (left and right parenthesis )  but when we drag our mouse horizontally, the size will change, and when we drag it vertically, the softness will change, how cool is that?

Potentially, the new technology could allow Photoshop users to drastically change someone’s appearance or position, as well as modify an environment with more ease.

With the new CS5, A similar tool to the  After Effects’ Puppet tool (Go to Edit -> Puppet Warp) has been added to Photoshop, enabling artists to warp the image by placing pins into areas to lock them down, then moving the areas around them. An overlaid grid or mesh will show up that tells you how the image is being warped, it can be turned on/off and the number of points can be adjusted. By locking down certain areas of an image using digital pins, you could change specific parts without altering the overall subject.

The new spot healing and fill tool will give you a great opportunity to give your picture a realistic view. When you want to use this, you will only need to color/select the area you want to disappear or adjust and the program will use the pattern of the picture and make multiple patches from the surrounding area in order to fill the hole that you just created, not like in the previous version where you need to define a point you want to patch your image from.

All in all a very cool upgrade and well worth the cash outlay.