Book Review: How To Cheat In Photoshop CS6: The Art of Creating Realistic Photomontages by Steve Caplin

In How to Cheat in Photoshop CS6, author Steve Caplin wants to show you how to cheat in Photoshop two different ways. First, he shows how to make images that look like photos, but are really composites. The end result is something that never existed in reality, creating photographic work without the need for a studio. Second is to show you how to cheat by taking short cuts to work more quickly and economically. Chaplin feels that many books have too many long-winded explanations; he has quicker solutions, and is willing to share.

How To Cheat In Photoshop CS6 is broken down in to 15 chapters and a DVD. The DVD contains most of the workthroughs, but not all. These tend to be some of the case studies that include photos of politicians and celebrities that he was not able to get clearance to include on the DVD. In this book there is no chapter on setting up or how to use Photoshop and so it is assumed that you are comfortable working with the program and have a reasonable working knowledge. There is a brief introduction to what some of the new in Adobe Photoshop CS6 are.

Chapter One, "Natural Selection," begins by showing how to select objects. Since the point of this book is to take objects from one setting and integrate them into another, this chapter is fundamental. You will see how to work with many selection tools that come with Photoshop and when each one should be used.

Chapter Two, "Transform and Distortion," explains how, when creating a photomontage and combining images, you will need to change the size and scale of objects to match the rest of the picture. The tools that you will use include Puppet Warp, Content-Aware tools, and the Clone tool.

Chapter Three, "Hiding and Showing," explains how instead of deleting a layer--which is permanent--you can instead use a layer mask to remove the item, allowing it to return it back into the image later if you find you needed it. You will also learn about weaving and blending images.

Chapter Four, "Image Adjustment," looks at using the curves adjustment to get the shadows and highlights to match. This is important when you are swapping heads or hands and the skin tones don't look right. Here you will learn about working with curves, levels, unsharp masking, adjustment layers, and more.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging.

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