Creative Photoshop CS4: Digital Illustration and Art Techniques [Paperback]

This is a project-based book for fairly experienced Photoshop users. It is not general Photoshop information or instruction for the uninitiated. It also seems to be geared to a niche category of designers, not the more conventional art, advertising, or photography market to which I belong. What follows are my subjective interpretations of the book's content.

The good points:
* Clearly explained thought process and workflow supported by equally clear and logical screen shots of Photoshop dialogs and, particularly, detailed layer stacks (so necessary to understand the sequence and the logic).
* The author is a more than a merely competent artist. His original art (sketches, cartoons, line drawings, photographs) are the basis for the projects in the book.
* The author knows how to teach. Not every artist or technically-skilled author knows how to put himself in the place of a reader with less knowledge or abilities and explain the how's and why's of the process.
* Originality in the use of Photoshop for unusual purposes. While you might, personally, not share his artistic vision, the projects do open your imagination to ideas you might not have otherwise considered and which can be made applicable to your own taste and interpretations. Excellent as a launching pad for your own brand of originality.
* Web downloads for the project materials, etc. It helps to do things his way first using the exact same illustrations shown in the book before going off in your own tangent with your own materials.
* Excellent organization. Each chapter/project begins with a synopsis explaining the project, what he hopes to achieve, how he will proceed, and the purpose of the exercise. I wish other Photoshop books would do this.
* Although a certain proficiency in Photoshop is assumed and probably required (i.e. knowledge of paths, pixel and vector masks, layers, selections, etc.) an experienced user can follow the text and screenshots to complete all the project steps.
* Excellent index and general organization.
* Excellent marginal notations: practical, on-point, clear, and just plain interesting.
* Probably the most original Photoshop book I've ever come across.

The not so good:
* I don't particularly care for his type of art (based on the genre of graffiti, tattoo, aliens, eyeballs, etc.). This is a problem because it is the art that sets the mood and 90% of the book is art I cannot relate to. Once I got past this, of course, I realized the actual techniques can be successfully adapted to any other graphic elements, but I wish there had been greater variety in the presentation.
* Our approaches to photography are polar opposites. He takes a photograph of a generic, middle-age woman and adds about 20-years worth of lines and wrinkles; sagging skin and chins; bags under the eyes and, possibly, a couple of terminal illnesses. I would take the same photo and try to make her skin smoother, her eyes brighter, and try to take 5-10 years off and an equal number of pounds. (Of course, what he does is so much more difficult than what I do that I might be displaying my jealousy here). Seriously, I did find this chapter extremely interesting and keep coming back to examine again how he did things. I don't plan to use it myself (unless I get really mad at someone!) but as an exercise in reverse engineering it is priceless.
* You have to keep in mind that this is not, strictly-speaking, a "Photoshop" book. Photoshop serves as a supplement to or support for the original art created in another medium (hand-drawn then digitized art, or art created digitally in Illustrator or some other vector drawing program). You either have to have access to or be able to create the art, then bring it into Photoshop and go on from there. (There are two exceptions, in which the projects are based on photographs.)
* Plain Photoshop is used for most projects, but for the 3-D project, Photoshop CS4 Extended is required.

When I taught Photoshop I told students it was the "Swiss Army Knife" of applications - lots of different users, who knew their part of the program very well but had no idea how to work the rest of the commands.

There are people who make their photographs look better, scan operators and professional photographers, people who remove unwanted boyfriends and husbands from pictures of happy occasions, and those that can take a cracked picture taken over fifty years ago and make it look like it was taken yesterday. I taught all these methods, but there was the equivalent of a locked door between us and those people who created artwork without using any pre-existing photographs or drawings.

That door has now been pretty much kicked open with Derek Lea's Creative Photoshop books where he reveals step-by-step instructions for making his own pictures. Lea's artwork is often unsettling (like the Woman/Octopus on the cover), but if you ignore that you'll find the whole book full of techniques that it's hard to find anywhere else.

I'd rather have a book that shows you how to make illustrations that are current, rather than someone giving you baby steps by showing you general principles. We may never have Lea's visions, but working through this book will give you a huge amount of techniques.

This book claims to be for Intermediate to Advanced digital artists, rather than just Photoshop users. For most, it may look intimidating, but just about every step is in there, and if you're the sort of person who knows the basics of Photoshop's features, you can work your way through. Lea helps by adding advice on problems you might have, and it's obvious he's given deep thought on how people become digital artists.

This book is published by Focal Press, who have a knack of bringing out books that show you unusual ways of using programs. I'm a fan of Martin Evening's books on Photoshop for photographers, and in Lea's book you get the same feeling that you're looking over the shoulder of a master of the game.

So, if you're a Photoshop user that is willing to spend time on facets that you've probably not looked at before, this could be the book for you. I'm sure you'll never look at Photoshop the same way again.

I am giving this book three stars because I like it.
But I can't give it five stars like most of the folks here.

Art style sets the tone for an art book. For that reason you only buy a manga art book if you aspire to draw big eyes, spikey hair and cat-human hybrids. This book has a similar self-imposed limitation. It feels like I am looking at the catalog of what Tim Burton's Tattoo Shop would look like...if such a thing existed.

The author goes out of the way to exaggerate the grotesque and the bizarre, and while this does make for some interesting and helpful projects, these aren't images I would place in my own portfolio.

Note this book is not a "Let's create art in photoshop" manual. It is project based, and assumes you created your initial art someplace else. Photography, pastel, or finger-paint. In other words these projects are using Photoshop as though it were nothing more than a very complex filter for art that already exists.

There are some useful techniques I haven't seen in any other book or forum, so you do want this in your hands for a week or two. I suggest getting it from the local library and saving yourself a few beans. Page for page ROI is a negative.