Free Downloads Photoshop Compositing Secrets: Unlocking The Key To Perfect Selections And Amazing Photoshop Effects For Totally Realistic Composites
Unlocking the Key to Perfect Selections and Amazing Photoshop Effects for Totally Realistic Composites Compositing is one of the hottest trends in Photoshop and photography today for portrait photographers, designers of all walks of life, and even retouchers. Everywhere you look, from group photos, to school graduation or sports portraits, to magazines, movie posters, and DVD covers, chances are, you’ve seen compositing. In Photoshop Compositing Secrets, Matt Kloskowski takes you through the entire process behind creating convincing, well-executed, and captivating composites. You’ll see how to create images that run the gamut from real-world portraits for corporate, graduation, or group photos to sports portraits, templates, and collages, and even the surreal, dramatic composites that clients clamor for. You'll learn: One of the most important secrets to compositing: how to master selections in Photoshop (yes, even wispy hair), What background color, and camera and lighting setups work best for compositing, How to move a subject from one background to another, and the Photoshop lighting and shadowing techniques to make it look real, And all the Photoshop tips, tricks, and special effects you need to pull off a convincing, professional composite. No matter if you're a professional, an aspiring professional, or a hobbyist, Photoshop Compositing Secrets will sharpen your skills and open up a whole new avenue of photographic expression in an easy-to-understand way that will have you creating your own composites in no time.
Paperback: 408 pages
Publisher: Peachpit Press; 1 edition (August 8, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0321808231
ISBN-13: 978-0321808233
Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (142 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #300,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #109 in Books > Computers & Technology > Digital Audio, Video & Photography > Adobe > Adobe Photoshop #182 in Books > Arts & Photography > Photography & Video > Equipment, Techniques & Reference > Digital Editing #301 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Graphics & Visualization
I received my book yesterday and quickly sat down to devour it. The first chapter was good for compositing techniques and covered ways Adobe Photoshop CS5 and three different add-on software products (costing from $49 - $199 each in addition to Photoshop) could improve the results of your efforts.The rest of the book involved descriptions of various composite photos including single image used as background and main photo, series composites of individual shots or action shots, and various was to make cool backgrounds pop. It was all very interesting but in each case (except for a single use of football players in action that was not covered in any detail), the emphasis was on how to light figures in your studio, how many lights, what color backdrop, etc. Chapters on HS Portraits, family pics, advertisements, office pics, etc. all required shooting the individuals in a studio.I shoot animals in nature and sometimes the background is better changed because of cars, man made structures, or other intrusions. I do not have the luxury of creating lighting and poses just as I want them. Hence, I was greatly disappointed in this book.If you have a studio and want to composite studio shots, the book is a great tool! It is well written and descriptive.If you do not have a studio, don't buy the book. The description does say "portrait photographers, designers of all walks of life, and even retouchers" but I didn't read "studio photogs only" in that. My bad; don't let it be yours.I am giving 4 stars because it is well done, but not for all photographers.
Matt is a great teacher and there's lots of good stuff in this book, but be warned. If you think it's about pulling folks out of your back yard photos and putting them someplace else, you'll be disappointed. The majority of this book is about how to set up and light your subjects in a studio against a seamless background so they'll look right when you mask them out and put them into another shot. This is all good information for folks with studios and multiple lights, planning in advance to composite the shot.I was hoping to get a lot more information on masking, and maybe some on color and temperature balance so things looked real. Instead I got "Plan ahead, write down the focal length, f-stop and distance from your subject, then set your camera the same when shooting the background; note the spot where your subject would be if he was actually there, then back your camera off the same distance you shot from in the studio. In my amateur world, it'd be a lot easier to just transport the subject to the location and take one shot.The book was definitely NOT a waste of money, and I got several good things from it. There were good tips on masking, but masking from a seamless background is not that hard. I'm an amateur with one removable flash, two reflectors, and no studio, I don't get paid for my work, I just wanna have fun in my hobby. I could have got everything of interest to me in far fewer chapters. This book is more for professional photographers and graphic designers.
I love this book. Combining images, and making it look believable is hard, tedious work. In this book Matt Kloskowski lays out exactly how he does it, and actually makes it sound easy, hopefully I'll get to the point where it is.Some of it was familiar from watching Photoshop User TV, but much of it was new. In one example he explained how he kept track (on his phone) his lens, and focal length, distance from the subject, and how high the camera was from the ground when he photographed his main subject. He then replicated all of this when he photographed the background so the subject would look right when put in that atmosphere.He covers the shadows (super important to making it look real), the filters, the clipping masks, layer blend modes, and a couple of ways to get rid of that nasty fringe quickly to name just a few of his helpful tips. This is a book that I will keep right next to my computer and refer to any time I am doing a composite.If you like this book, I also recommend his earlier book Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature (2nd Edition) which was absolutely wonderful!
WAO! I must say I am totally impressed!!! I have seen some other online classes from the author and also read some other of his books and articles so I kinda knew this was going to be good, but he has outdone himself this time! It doesn't matter if your are relatively new to Photoshop or if you have more experience, you will find something new to learn in every project. There are various different projects in the book, each one cleverly designed to help us see the different problems we may find and how to solve them. He clearly explains how and why he used the techniques so you will be able to apply them to your own projects when needed. You can even download every photo used in the projects to follow along. Also you will find very different approches to compositing on every chapter, so we can think in a lot more ways to use compositing as a tool to achieve results that we may not be able to get otherwise. Matt teaches us a lot of tips to help us get the work done better, faster but without forgetting details. For me, just the tips shared in the first chapters about selections, extracting and planning ahead, saved me a lot of time and in my opinion are well worth the price of the whole book!!!
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