| 5 star: |  | (35) |
| 4 star: | | (5) |
| 3 star: | | (4) |
| 2 star: | (0) | |
| 1 star: | (0) |
Author: Lee Varis
Editorial Reviews
Review
A Hollywood photoillustrator with 30 years of experience, Varis has been published in National Geographic, Newsweek, and Fortune magazines. Far from a manual on fashion or nude photography, this is a comprehensive tutorial on how to photograph all types of people: young, old, and dozens of ethnic varieties. Varis supplements the book with a CD of numerous before-and-after sample image files and technical reference materials. He begins with a discussion of the right hardware and software and how to configure them, then teaches digital color management and lighting techniques as they apply to portraiture. He also provides in-depth chapters on retouching and special effects, including such techniques as skin smoothing, beauty retouching, screen diffusion, and depth of field effects. Highly recommended for serious students. (Library Journal, March 15, 2007)
Book Description
Achieving accurate skin tones is one of the most challenging tasks in digital photography. Master this challenge with professional photographer Lee Varis as he covers a range of skin: women and men, young and old, various tones, in-studio and outdoors, tattoos, and more. His step-by-step tutorials and before-and-after illustrations demonstrate various techniques for topics such as digital-specific lighting challenges and what can and cannot be done in post-process.
A free CD-ROM accompanies the book and contains sample image files to use while following the tutorials, plus equipment recommendations and technical reference materials that enhance and reinforce the instruction.
Order your copy of this practical guide today and get a complete start-to-finish approach to integrating everything from posing models to shooting and retouching candid scenes.
From the Back Cover
A practical guide to photographing people in the digital age
It's one thing to snap someone's picture. It's another thing entirely to capture the essence that made you reach for your camera in the first place. Now a top Hollywood pro shares his secrets for the digital capture of human skin in all its variety: young, old, male, female, different skin tones and ethnicities, with makeup or without—even tattooed skin!
Using step-by-step tutorials and stunning full-color examples, industry expert Lee Varis teaches it all: the basics of digital imaging, essential tricks to shooting indoors and out, how to light your subjects in any pose, and much more. Above all, you'll find out why the color of skin that's best for final output is almost always a departure from reality.
Topics include:
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
Provocative, December 1, 2006
By Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA)
It probably says more about me than the book that I found a title which applies to something that surrounds every person provocative. However, it's likely that advanced Photoshop users will find something provocative in this book
The book is aimed at photographers who know the basics of photography, including exposure, and the use of Photoshop including layers and masks. The author's emphasis is on portraits and people photography and how to get the most from photographs of these subjects. Although the author spends a little time looking at hardware like digital cameras and at basic portrait lighting techniques, his main concern is with post processing.
The author's stated aim is to fill the gaps left by other books, like the reproduction of dark skin. And he does this in many ways that I haven't seen before. For example he suggests better skin colors can be achieved by looking at the CMYK readings and applying a rule of thumb. (If you don't know what CMYK is, this book isn't for you.) Varis suggests that for Caucasians magenta and yellow should be of approximately equal value, with cyan a fourth to a third of the value. Images of African Americans should have a higher percentage of cyan and magenta. He then tells you how to make these adjustments. He also shows how to make tone and contrast adjustments for both color and black-and=white images.
The author devotes a chapter to retouching, showing the reader how to ease those wrinkles and even do a little tummy tuck in Photoshop. He also devotes space to special effects, but he emphasizes alteration of the image not to tell lies, so much as to give effect to the photographer's vision. There is also a chapter on preparing output for print.
Most of the techniques that Varis shows are attempts at improvements on simpler Photoshop techniques. For example in the chapter on preparing for printing, he describes a method of improving on the usual unsharp mask sharpening. He does this by adding two additional layers that allow individual control of the prominence of the light halos and the dark halos that are the essence of unsharp mask.
Application of these techniques requires effort above and beyond normal Photoshop processing. How useful they will be depends on the amount of work you are willing to invest in an image, although most of the techniques could certainly be embedded in actions. Equally important is the question of your own ability to envision when to employ a particular technique to improve your work. An alternate consideration might be your willingness to experiment with several techniques to see which will benefit you.
The book includes a CD with the images used as examples in the book. I recommend that you read chapter 9 of the book which discusses these images before any other chapter. Then unzip the folders they come in into a new folder and follow along with the book. Often the changes are subtle and more easily seen on a monitor as they are made than on the printed page.
In summary, this is a book for the experienced Photoshop user, willing to spend the time examining techniques that might enable one to get that slight edge in his or her photographs that would put one ahead of other digital photographers.
34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
One of the four best Photoshop books I know of, January 12, 2007
By Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA)
Lee Varis has written a superb treatise - and that's what it is - on "digitally lighting, photographing, and retouching faces and bodies". He joins a short list of Katrin Eismann and Steve Caplain as the best teachers of Photoshop I am aware of.
Eismann has written books on retouching and masking that are absolutely essential. Caplain has written the bible on Photoshop montage. Varis has written the last word on on photographing people in the digital age.
One aside: all three of these authors are to be thanked for not attempting to be comedians along the lines of Scott Kelby, Deke McClelland and Russell Brown. Where this business of Photoshop authors trying to be "funny" started is unknown, but it is a ghastly thing when the author truly isn't funny.
Anyway, Varis covers the waterfront here, when it comes to photographing people. Everything. Color. Lighting. Correction. Retouching. Printing. In all, this book is about making the most of the people you photograph.
Profusely illustrated, Varis takes the reader step-by-step through each and every process.
There are a lot of Photoshop books out there, but few truly great ones. This is one of the few.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Book of the Year for people shooters, December 18, 2006
By Gary Jean (Alexandria, Virginia)
Photo techniques books have a tendency to rehash things we've seen before. Not this book. It is chock full of stuff that I have never seen in print.
The "focus" of the book (in case you didn't guess) is human skin, and the difficulties of digital capture, development, retouching and preparing for output.
Varis provides an explanation for the tendency of digital sensors to over-emphasize the red component of skin color. Better yet, he provides several techniques to effectively deal with the problem.
One way is a new camera calibration technique that uses a Macbeth color checker and Adobe Camera Raw. What's new about that? His method uses hue and saturation adjustments, which coincide with the adjustment sliders in the calibration tab of ACR. This is quite different, and potentially much easier, than Bruce Fraser's method (Real World Adobe Camera Raw), which requires a series of trial and error RGB adjustments.
Varis points out that "correct" RGB calibration may still have the "skin" block of the Macbeth color checker too red. He offers an alternative calibration that gives "correct" skin color, but may move the red block toward yellow. No free lunches. However, both calibrations can be saved in ACR and selectively used depending on subject matter.
Varis also presents skin correction techniques using Photoshop CS2 Hue-Saturation-Lightness layers. This is another straightforward and effective tool that I have never seen in print.
Varis writes for the professional and assumes some proficiency in Photoshop. However, there is much for the advanced amateur in his book.
Highly recommended!
A Hollywood photoillustrator with 30 years of experience, Varis has been published in National Geographic, Newsweek, and Fortune magazines. Far from a manual on fashion or nude photography, this is a comprehensive tutorial on how to photograph all types of people: young, old, and dozens of ethnic varieties. Varis supplements the book with a CD of numerous before-and-after sample image files and technical reference materials. He begins with a discussion of the right hardware and software and how to configure them, then teaches digital color management and lighting techniques as they apply to portraiture. He also provides in-depth chapters on retouching and special effects, including such techniques as skin smoothing, beauty retouching, screen diffusion, and depth of field effects. Highly recommended for serious students. (Library Journal, March 15, 2007)
Book Description
Achieving accurate skin tones is one of the most challenging tasks in digital photography. Master this challenge with professional photographer Lee Varis as he covers a range of skin: women and men, young and old, various tones, in-studio and outdoors, tattoos, and more. His step-by-step tutorials and before-and-after illustrations demonstrate various techniques for topics such as digital-specific lighting challenges and what can and cannot be done in post-process.
A free CD-ROM accompanies the book and contains sample image files to use while following the tutorials, plus equipment recommendations and technical reference materials that enhance and reinforce the instruction.
Order your copy of this practical guide today and get a complete start-to-finish approach to integrating everything from posing models to shooting and retouching candid scenes.
From the Back Cover
A practical guide to photographing people in the digital age
It's one thing to snap someone's picture. It's another thing entirely to capture the essence that made you reach for your camera in the first place. Now a top Hollywood pro shares his secrets for the digital capture of human skin in all its variety: young, old, male, female, different skin tones and ethnicities, with makeup or without—even tattooed skin!
Using step-by-step tutorials and stunning full-color examples, industry expert Lee Varis teaches it all: the basics of digital imaging, essential tricks to shooting indoors and out, how to light your subjects in any pose, and much more. Above all, you'll find out why the color of skin that's best for final output is almost always a departure from reality.
Topics include:
- Starting with the right hardware and software settings
- Developing your digital color "chops"
- Mastering Rembrandt lighting and other basic techniques
- Overcoming common digital skin problems, such as too much red
- Adjusting skin tones to withstand nearby colors like green grass
- Faking tattoos and photographing the real thing
- Trimming the fat, lighting up the eyes, and filling in wrinkles
- Adding soft focus, retouching, and other advanced Photoshop® techniques
- Discovering what can and what can't be done in post-process
- Know how to soften wrinkles and change shapes—and when not to!
- Beautifully color-balance every skin tone
- Brilliantly light any number of subjects in any location
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Sybex; Pap/Cdr edition (October 16, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 047004733X
- ISBN-13: 978-0470047330
- Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.8 x 1.1 inches
- Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,501 in Books
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
Provocative, December 1, 2006By Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA)
It probably says more about me than the book that I found a title which applies to something that surrounds every person provocative. However, it's likely that advanced Photoshop users will find something provocative in this book
The book is aimed at photographers who know the basics of photography, including exposure, and the use of Photoshop including layers and masks. The author's emphasis is on portraits and people photography and how to get the most from photographs of these subjects. Although the author spends a little time looking at hardware like digital cameras and at basic portrait lighting techniques, his main concern is with post processing.
The author's stated aim is to fill the gaps left by other books, like the reproduction of dark skin. And he does this in many ways that I haven't seen before. For example he suggests better skin colors can be achieved by looking at the CMYK readings and applying a rule of thumb. (If you don't know what CMYK is, this book isn't for you.) Varis suggests that for Caucasians magenta and yellow should be of approximately equal value, with cyan a fourth to a third of the value. Images of African Americans should have a higher percentage of cyan and magenta. He then tells you how to make these adjustments. He also shows how to make tone and contrast adjustments for both color and black-and=white images.
The author devotes a chapter to retouching, showing the reader how to ease those wrinkles and even do a little tummy tuck in Photoshop. He also devotes space to special effects, but he emphasizes alteration of the image not to tell lies, so much as to give effect to the photographer's vision. There is also a chapter on preparing output for print.
Most of the techniques that Varis shows are attempts at improvements on simpler Photoshop techniques. For example in the chapter on preparing for printing, he describes a method of improving on the usual unsharp mask sharpening. He does this by adding two additional layers that allow individual control of the prominence of the light halos and the dark halos that are the essence of unsharp mask.
Application of these techniques requires effort above and beyond normal Photoshop processing. How useful they will be depends on the amount of work you are willing to invest in an image, although most of the techniques could certainly be embedded in actions. Equally important is the question of your own ability to envision when to employ a particular technique to improve your work. An alternate consideration might be your willingness to experiment with several techniques to see which will benefit you.
The book includes a CD with the images used as examples in the book. I recommend that you read chapter 9 of the book which discusses these images before any other chapter. Then unzip the folders they come in into a new folder and follow along with the book. Often the changes are subtle and more easily seen on a monitor as they are made than on the printed page.
In summary, this is a book for the experienced Photoshop user, willing to spend the time examining techniques that might enable one to get that slight edge in his or her photographs that would put one ahead of other digital photographers.
34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
One of the four best Photoshop books I know of, January 12, 2007By Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA)
Lee Varis has written a superb treatise - and that's what it is - on "digitally lighting, photographing, and retouching faces and bodies". He joins a short list of Katrin Eismann and Steve Caplain as the best teachers of Photoshop I am aware of.
Eismann has written books on retouching and masking that are absolutely essential. Caplain has written the bible on Photoshop montage. Varis has written the last word on on photographing people in the digital age.
One aside: all three of these authors are to be thanked for not attempting to be comedians along the lines of Scott Kelby, Deke McClelland and Russell Brown. Where this business of Photoshop authors trying to be "funny" started is unknown, but it is a ghastly thing when the author truly isn't funny.
Anyway, Varis covers the waterfront here, when it comes to photographing people. Everything. Color. Lighting. Correction. Retouching. Printing. In all, this book is about making the most of the people you photograph.
Profusely illustrated, Varis takes the reader step-by-step through each and every process.
There are a lot of Photoshop books out there, but few truly great ones. This is one of the few.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Book of the Year for people shooters, December 18, 2006By Gary Jean (Alexandria, Virginia)
Photo techniques books have a tendency to rehash things we've seen before. Not this book. It is chock full of stuff that I have never seen in print.
The "focus" of the book (in case you didn't guess) is human skin, and the difficulties of digital capture, development, retouching and preparing for output.
Varis provides an explanation for the tendency of digital sensors to over-emphasize the red component of skin color. Better yet, he provides several techniques to effectively deal with the problem.
One way is a new camera calibration technique that uses a Macbeth color checker and Adobe Camera Raw. What's new about that? His method uses hue and saturation adjustments, which coincide with the adjustment sliders in the calibration tab of ACR. This is quite different, and potentially much easier, than Bruce Fraser's method (Real World Adobe Camera Raw), which requires a series of trial and error RGB adjustments.
Varis points out that "correct" RGB calibration may still have the "skin" block of the Macbeth color checker too red. He offers an alternative calibration that gives "correct" skin color, but may move the red block toward yellow. No free lunches. However, both calibrations can be saved in ACR and selectively used depending on subject matter.
Varis also presents skin correction techniques using Photoshop CS2 Hue-Saturation-Lightness layers. This is another straightforward and effective tool that I have never seen in print.
Varis writes for the professional and assumes some proficiency in Photoshop. However, there is much for the advanced amateur in his book.
Highly recommended!
No comments:
Post a Comment