Greetings. I've only been to three D-MAG meetings as an official member and I've won two awesome prizes. If you're just now stumbling upon our little tribe here, I highly recommend coming to check it out. Awesome prizes like this one are just part of the reason why...

                Creative Photoshop CS4 Digital Illustration and Art Techniques (Focal Press, ISBN: 978-0-240-52134-3) was the first fortune to befall me as a D-MAG member. I call it a fortune because it approximately four-hundred pages of pure gold. Yo-ho-ho...

Now... I was a little concerned about even taking it at first, the book identified itself as intended for intermediates, and I am a rank amateur when it comes to Photoshop. I've always enjoyed photography... as a young lad I kicked it old school, pops had his own darkroom in the basement, and when we eventually went digital for the convenience, made do with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 that came with some scanner we bought. That's all I used for years. Thought I could even consider myself an intermediate until I went back to school and got to use real Photoshop. I'm rambling, but what I was getting to was this, the book is so well composed, that even when it was telling me to do things I'd never even heard of, I was able to get through it.

The overall layout is great. Any step one takes in a project is usually comprised of a fistful of mini-steps that make it up, and what I usually don't like about tutorial books is that they just keep with continuous text, like a high school history book, with crappy little pics off to the side, or sometimes the full screen capture, printed in a halftone pattern and nothing's legible. I'd lose count of how many CAD text books I've had like that.  Creative Photoshop CS4 Digital Illustration and Art Techniques is nothing like that. The steps are blocked out, by themselves, so you don't get lost in the middle of the page going back and forth from page to screen; and all the pics are crisp, clear, and full color, of whatever it is that's important.

Another great feature were the little side notes, expert tips they called them... off in the margins, broken down into six categories; Shortcuts, pretty self explanatory, help with quick workarounds to otherwise time consuming steps; Info, which expand upon the steps taken in the tutorial where it might make it easier to know the why behind the how; Download files, again self explanatory, the book has an accompanying website with files matching those in the book to work through the tutorial (though I always prefer following a tutorial with my own files); Caution, a very nice side note, warning when one of those things are coming up, and what it is, that just might, maybe, throw your project all to hell if you don't do it just right the first time; CS4, a warning that what's there is only available in CS4 (which I'm sure would carry up to CS5, and I didn't really run into any issues in the projects I was most interested in and I only have access to CS3 at my school(I know there are free student versions; it's just my home computer is tantamount to an abacus)); and lastly Creative Tips, which give nice little tidbits about using Photoshop tools in unconventional means for interesting results, and using things all around you in the everyday world for a Photoshop project.

Wow. That's gotta be a world record for length of a single sentence... the entire paragraph...

Anyway, I'll wrap up by expanding on that last bit... And this was what I really look forward to playing with more when I get some free time, but incorporating traditional, physical art techniques into Photoshop. I was an advanced art major in high school (and even UofL for a bit) and before this book I never really had a desire to use Photoshop for anything other than tweaking a photo's levels, shadows/highlights, etc, but there are some really interesting projects in this book. I wouldn't expect to check out a Photoshop tutorial and see "other required materials - old fax machine, thermal paper, hairdryer". Ever see an advertisement that had that high school flyer made on a Xerox machine look? How'd they get it to look so convincing? They probably used a Xerox machine. There's all kinds of great stuff between these covers.

-D. Zack Culver

A.S.S. Drafting & Design,

currently enrolled in Visual Communications

D.Zack.Culver@Gmail.com