Beacon, by Andreas Rocha

Secrets of Corel Painter Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities by Daryl Wise and Linda Hellfritsch, is a new title from Course Technology PTR. It is printed in their familiar 7×9″ horizontal format. This makes it a bit hard to read, holding it in your lap, but it works very well lying open on a desk. The spine design allows the book to lie flat quite easily, without damaging the book. This is a dense, 314-page, color-filled book, with lots of great paintings to look at and be inspired by. Inspiration, in fact, is what this book is all about.

A New York Minute, by Richard Swiatlowski

The book highlights the work of 17 artists currently using Painter as part of their workflow. The range of styles is quite diverse, which is one of the book’s strengths. The majority of the works here are paintings created from scratch. Only a few artists here use Painter to modify photographs. Mostly what is presented here are what I would call illustrations or fine art paintings. The artists, for the most part, are new, to me at least. It’s nice to see some new blood. The stable of Corel Masters is getting rather tired at this point.

The Moon, by Song Yang

Each chapter includes information about the artist (software and hardware used, education, clients, and awards), a short interview section, a gallery of work, and a Technique section. This is where you’ll find one or two tutorials by each artist. These vary in level of detail. For instance, Chet Phillips’ tutorial is just that: a low-level, what-settings-to-use sort of tutorial (it’s great, too, by the way); most of the tutorials are more high-level. You’ll gain an understanding of the artist’s approach and workflow. For the most part, these are not follow-along projects.

For this sort of book, that’s perfect. As the title indicates, there are some “secrets” here: you’ll pick up quite a few clever tricks and new ideas browsing through each chapter. It’s fascinating to see how many different ways a single program can be used. Of course, nearly all of the artists here use Photoshop and other programs, in addition to Painter. This is the way it is in the world of professional art: no one program does it all.

The printing quality is first-rate. There is a DVD attached which pretty much contains nothing more than the same works shown in the printed book. These images look better in the book than in the tiny JPGs on the DVD. Be warned–the back of the book states that the DVD contains video tutorials, desktop wallpaper, and Painter movies. I found only two artists who had additional content. Still, the book itself is very worthwhile. You’ll be happy to have it on hand next time you need some inspiration and new ideas.

Page from Anomaly graphic novel, by Brian Haberlin

Together, by Pete Revonkorpi

Anno 1404 - Harbour, by Torsten Wolber

William Shakespaw, by Chet Phillips

Tupac, by Mike Thompson

Secrets of Corel Painter Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities by Daryl Wise and Linda Hellfritsch.

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The three-color, easy-as-pie method of creating a mask. What could be simpler?

There’s a new masking tool in Photoshop CS5, but so far, I haven’t been able to muster much enthusiasm for it. I pine for the old Extract tool, gone with version CS4. It wasn’t great, but it was easy to use, and it was similar to the other 3rd party masking tools on the market. If you’ve never used it, it was simplicity itself. You draw with three colors: red to mark the stuff to delete, green to indicate what to keep, and blue to mark the boundary between the two. Press the button, and if all goes well, the software figures out where the edge of your subject is, and creates a nice cut-out for you. That’s what Extract used to do, but now it’s gone.

Luckily, Topaz Labs has created what Extract could have become: Remask. I reviewed version 2 back in December 2009 (link). It worked pretty well then, and certainly beat the pants off the other masking software I tested. It was even better than Photoshop’s own Extract (admittedly, not a hard act to beat). Remask3 is out, and they’ve added a few things I noted as missing in version 2. Now it creates a duplicate layer, with a layer mask, automatically. Yea! This means that, once you return from the Remask plugin back to Photoshop, the mask is a layer mask, and you can non-destructively continue to tweak it if you so desire.

Once Remask3 is done creating your mask, you return to Photoshop with a nice duplicate layer with a layer mask. Ahhhh.

As with Remask2, I tested with a particularly nasty (from a masking standpoint) photo of a little boy. The hair at the top of his head is virtually the same color as the background. He has fine, wispy blond hair strands. A real challenge for a masking tool, I’d say. As you can see below, another nice addition is the choice of 2 and 4-pane views. This makes it easy to compare the mask to the original image, for example. You can paint on any of the panes to make changes.

Remask3 now has a two-pane and four-pane view available.

The Single Color Selection brush is new with Remask3.

Let’s say you have a photo of a tree, with lots of spaces in between the leaves (see below). This is where the new Single Color Selection brush comes in. It works like this: First,click on the Blue Reset button to set the whole image to Blue. Now you begin marking the colors you want to keep. Select the green brush, and the cursor becomes a green eyedropper. Pick a color on the image that you want to keep, and then the eye dropper becomes a green brush. Brush on the image, and wherever it encounters that color (or range of colors, based on a slider), it marks it green. Repeat this until all of the colors you want to keep are marked. Do the same with the Red Single Color Selection brush. Run the Compute function. Areas that are marked wrong can be fixed by continuing to apply the Single Color Selection Brush. It recomputes just the area of your brush stroke, so it is a fast process. (I think of this as the “Many Colors” brush, since it allows you to mark many colors for keeping or deleting.)

The new Single Color Selection brush is great for complex masking tasks.

The other difficult situation that Remask3 now handles with ease is transparency. A good example is a bridal veil. You need to select the veil itself as “keep,” but you want to “delete” the colors showing through the veil. Remask3 has added the Dual Color Brush to handle this. In Remask terms, “background” is the area to be deleted, and “foreground” is what you’re keeping. To use the Dual Color Brush, you select a foreground color (green — keep) and a backround color (red — delete). Then, the cursor becomes a brush. Brush over the veil, and it marks the area in a new way: it indicates with yellow what has been marked. It also recomputes the brush stroke area, and bingo (if all goes well) you have a transparent mask. It’s really a very sophisticated selection, and one that would be darn near impossible to create manually.

An example showing how Remask3 handles a bridal veil. When you replace the background image (bottom), the new background shows through the veil.

The Dual Color Brush is also useful when creating a mask over wispy hair. Some areas of hair are practically like a veil, with tiny areas of background showing through. For this, you tell Remask3 what’s what with the new Dual Color Brush. This works well when you’re trying to get Remask to reveal a thin strand of hair. Select a hair color as foreground, a background color as, well, background, and stroke over the stray hair. The hair is now visible in the mask. This is shown clearly in this fine 12 minute video put together by Topaz. Click on the image to watch it.

I used both the Dual Color Brush and the Single Color Brush to create a mask of this photo of a girl with fly-away hair. The image I used was probably too low a resolution (600 pixels wide at 72ppi) to test properly. The strands of hair weren’t defined very sharply, understandably. But you can get an idea of how well it works from this, I hope. The video, left, is well worth watching, to see how it’s done by someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

One last thing I want to mention is the excellent documentation and tutorials Topaz offers for their products. There are some excellent videos, like the one linked to above, and the user manual is clear and to the point. Learning new software is not usually so easy. Topaz Remask3 is available from Topaz Labs for $69.99. If you click on the box image below to purchase, you’ll help support this site. (Disclosure: Digital Image Magazine is a Topaz affiliate, and does earn a percentage of sales that originate from the site.)

Click on the box to order your copy of Topaz Remask3! And thanks for your support.

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InFocus uses the same, clean interface as its fellow Topaz apps, with presets on the left, working image in the middle, and parameter controls on the right.

The other day, a friend needed to have a family photo cleaned up for use on a Christmas card. The photo was taken with a cheap point-and-shoot camera, and the detail just wasn’t there. So I opened it up in Photoshop CS5, and did the usual stuff with Unsharp Mask. The results were okay, but still not very satisfactory. Then I remembered that Topaz Labs had just released a new product called InFocus, which was supposedly able to find and recover lost details in out-of-focus shots. This seemed like a good time to give it a try.

Topaz allows a 30 day trial on all their software. You get to try out the full product, save files, the whole nine yards, so you can really see how it works. I downloaded the program, installed it, and the first time I ran it, it required that I get a key from Topaz. I got one quickly via email, and was ready to start performing magic. I say magic, because the examples shown on the Topaz site look frankly unbelievable. You look at the before and after and think, no way. They blurred a sharp picture and called it Before. No way it can find that much detail in a blurry photo. Well, I can’t say I got such dramatic results, but without reading the directions or watching the nice tutorial video Topaz provides, I got the following results.

The original photo is on the left, blown up a bit to show what we’re dealing with. I enlarged this original about 100%, and then did my best with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask. The middle image shows what I came up with. Then, I went back to the original, blew it up 100% again, and ran Topaz InFocus. As you can see, it blew USM out of the water. When you look at the original and compare it to what InFocus did, it does seem like magic. This is one spooky piece of software. Afterwards, I reduced the file back down to the original 4×6″ print size, and it looked very good. My friend was thrilled.

I ran some informal tests to see if I could get a result as dramatic as Topaz shows on their site. Unfortunately, I couldn’t but then I don’t know the tool as well as they do. If you do decide to give InFocus a try, look for and watch the tutorial videos on the Topaz site. You’ll see how the sliders are meant to be used. You’ll also learn how different InFocus is from sharpening filters. Sharpeners tend to look for edges, and make them harder, more defined. InFocus, on the other hand, tries to find all of the details, not just the edges. It’s like a smart sharpener.

The controls are quite simple. There are two main areas: Deblur and Sharpen. The Deblur function is what I was talking about: finding details within a fuzzy photo. Under Deblur, there are four types of blur: generic, out-of-focus, straight motion (i.e., the camera wasn’t held steady), and Unknown/Estimate. You choose the type which most closely matches the problem you’re trying to solve. The Blur Radius slider is how you indicate to InFocus just how bad the blur type is. The higher the Blur Radius setting, the stronger the deblur effect. If you set it too high, you’ll get artifacts. You can counteract that with the Supress Artifacts slider. This will reduce minor artifacts, but the trade-off is loss of detail. The alternative is to simply lower the Blur Radius amount a tad.

The Estimate Blur button becomes active when you choose Unknown/Estimate as the blur type. First, set the Blur Radius to give InFocus some direction. Then, hit the button. This works best if you’re focused on an area of the photo containing some hard edges. It seems to use edges as a baseline, in determining just how blurry your image is. Once again, you can use the Suppress Artifacts slider if the deblurring is a little too aggressive. Keep in mind that, unlike the other blur types, Unknown/Estimate doesn’t do anything until you hit that button; the other settings work in real time as you slide the sliders.

For motion blur, you can tell InFocus about the angle of movement, using the Motion Angle slider. I didn’t have a good photo to test that with.

The bottom section, Sharpen, is sort of optional, it seems to me. You can get some extra detail with the Micro-Contrast slider. It seems to work a lot like Topaz Adjust, in a more subtle way. Honestly, the results of the Deblur settings seemed to be good enough, and I just bypassed the Sharpen section altogether.

Conclusion

Topaz InFocus is a valuable addition to the suite of tools from Topaz Labs. It won’t rescue a really badly out of focus image, but it does perform wonders with photos that are not as sharp as you’d like. I tried it with some photos that already looked pretty good, and it found missing details anyway. The mind seems to compensate for these subpar images, I guess. And for images that you are hanging onto but never use because they’re just not sharp enough, here’s your answer. It’s like you’ve suddenly found a bunch of great new, sharp pictures, all waiting on your hard drive.

I should mention that InFocus is a 64-bit application, as all of the Topaz products are. It works with all the latest versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, and runs on both Windows and Macintosh. It ran very quickly on my Mac Pro with Snow Leopard installed. $69.95, from Topaz Labs.

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Detail of a Corel Painter painting by Richard Ramsey.

Almost exactly a year ago, I reviewed a DVD by master photographer Richard Ramsey, called “Painterly Faces.” (You can read the review here.) Richard Ramsey has a new DVD out, called “Backgrounds 101,” and he was kind enough to ship me a review copy. I wish I’d had this DVD six years ago when I was starting up my digital portait service for photographers. Ramsey’s method is fast, beautiful, and most importantly, sellable. In his low-key, friendly style, Ramsey has been sharing his knowledge of Painter on a series of DVDs, and they have a well-deserved high reputation in the photography community. If you want to know how to create painterly images with Photoshop and Painter–images that customers will find irresistible– I can’t think of a better way to learn. After all, Ramsey has won Tennessee Best Photographer of the Year 13 times!

One nice thing about the movies on this DVD are how clear and sharp they are, and they fill up the screen. It’s like watching over his shoulder as he paints. These are not the type of “speed painting” videos you may have seen on YouTube. Rather, you’re watching Ramsey paint in real time, so you can see just how fast he moves, what brush sizes he’s using, and how much time he spends on each area of the painting. As I say, six years ago, I taught myself Painter, and my style was always slow and very detailed. The results didn’t look very painterly. Photographers and their clients were looking for a much looser, freer style. In this DVD, you can see how to attain that look without losing the likeness of the subject. You may be surprised at how fast he works, while still achieving great results. Painter can become part of your workflow, without taking hours and hours. One part of Ramsey’s secret is his painting technique, which he shows in the first video demonstration. In the second, he reveals his second secret: pre-painted backgrounds.

Richard Ramsey, self portrait.

In the second video, you’ll watch how Ramsey applies his technique to a portrait of a little boy about three or four years old. This was fascinating to me to watch, as I have always struggled with the smooth faces of children and women, trying to look painterly, without giving the subject a case of bad skin! The trick is to use the same rough technique everywhere, so that it looks relatively smooth. If you overwork the face, smoothing and blending with a tiny brush, you’ll end up with a painting that has a photograph in the middle of it. It will look like you didn’t paint the face. Ramsey moves quickly, painting the boy’s face in about 3 minutes (he does go back to it later on, but the main work is very fast).

Once the boy is painted, he opens the file in Photoshop, and scans through his collection of painted backgrounds. These same backgrounds (101 of them) are included for your use on the DVD. Each has a different color scheme and look. Some are very busy, some are quiet and serene. Some are very brightly colored and modern-art looking. Ramsey finds a suitable background, then copies and pastes it onto a new layer behind the painting of the boy. Next, he shows how to use a layer mask in “reveal mode.” The mask is filled with black, and then he paints with white to reveal the boy surrounded by the background. This technique helps him avoid the “cut-out” look you’d get using a selection mask. It works really well with this loose style of painting.

The big advantage in using a pre-painted background is the enormous amount of time saved: you only need to paint the subject, not the background! Some of the portraits I have done had very complex backgrounds which ended up taking hours and hours to paint. Again, I wish I’d had this DVD way back when. Not only does the background save you time, but it lends the portrait a very painterly look. I’ve included some examples of Ramsey’s work here, so you can see how the backgrounds work with various subjects. Here’s a portrait of the actor Morgan Freeman, with a well-chosen background.

A background like this does not compete with the subject. Rather, it enhances the subject. It stays, well, in the background, doing its job. In a third, short video, Ramsey quickly reviews a gallery of his work, showing how he used a background in different ways in each. This part will really get your creative juices flowing. You’ll begin to see the possibilities. These aren’t just “digital backdrops.” They are parts of a painting, waiting to be used.

Detail of a portrait, by Richard Ramsey. Note the exciting colors in this portrait's background.

You can order this DVD on Richard Ramsey’s website for $149. The link is www.richardramsey.info. You can also see many examples of his work on his studio site, Ramsey Photography. Disclaimer: Digital Image Magazine makes no money from the sale of this DVD, but we did get a free copy of the DVD. My honest opinion is this DVD is worth every penny. If you’re a professional photographer, it’s easily worth much more. Enjoy!

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The Night Watchman, by Rob Alexander. Watercolor

As an artist, one of the things I struggle with is “making things up.” I’m talking about everything from modifying someone’s appearance to coming up with a complete fantasy landscape. The closer I can stick to an existing photo, the more comfortable I feel. But inventing stuff out of thin air is where I start to panic. How do illustrators come up with such convincing scenes, filled with alien architecture, odd creatures, and so forth? Do these artists have a special talent that a realist like me lacks?

Recently, two new books have come out, and they’re all about how to make stuff up. One of the authors, Tom Kidd, has some encouraging words in his introduction:

During the day we spend much of our time in directed thought. This is to our advantage at work, planning out our activities and in school. However, to become a successful and respected fantasy artist you’ll have to unleash the power of your free-ranging brain. That’s the part of your brain that’s active when you dream. The ability you have to imagine in your sleep can be harnessed when you’re awake. As strange as it seems, the best way to do that is by careful observation of nature and understanding the visual world by actively studying it through art. The more you do this, the better you become. The better you can see, the better you can imagine, the better you can makes things up and paint them.

I think this is good advice even if you aren’t painting fantasy. After all, whether you are working from life or from a photograph, as an artist you are interested in doing more than simply recording what’s in front of you. As a portrait artist, I’ve been learning how to change lighting and skintones in order to improve the portrait. This comes from studying how light falls, how colors interact. As you learn how to make things look real, you begin to see how you can alter things and still have them look real.

I remember in art school, working from a photograph, and the instructor asked me why I had left a telephone pole in my picture. “Well, that’s how it looks in the photograph,” was my response. The instructor then pointed out that my painting would be greatly improved if my subject did not have a telephone pole sticking out his head. I got the point, and removed it. This is all a round-about way of saying that these two new books by Rob Alexander and Tom Kidd are liable to be helpful to any kind of artist, since we all have to “make stuff up” to one degree or another. Both authors generally work in oil, acrylics, watercolor, and other traditional media. These are not digital art books, per se. But each is a good, solid book about making art, written by a professional illustrator with many years in the field. Today I’ll give you a brief rundown of what’s in each book. You can order them right from this article (links below), and in doing so, you’ll support this site–and it won’t cost you a dime! Hopefully by now my readers know that I don’t recommend products that I don’t absolutely love. But I do want to be upfront about the sales through my site. I do make a few pennies from each sale. So, thanks in advance for your support.

How to Draw and Paint Fantasy Architecture, by Rob Alexander

Rob Alexander’s previous book, Drawing and Painting Fantasy Landscapes and Cityscapes was about creating imaginary landscapes. It dealt mostly with the entire landscape or cityscape, and buildings played just a minor role. In How to Draw and Paint Fantasy Architecture, Alexander concentrates completely on how to create imaginary structures. The book has four chapters.

Chapter 1 – Introduction to Architecture

This is a high-level intro to the real-life architectural styles which illustrators borrow from and adapt when creating their own styles. It covers Middle Eastern, Romanesque, Gothic, Mesoamerican, Viking, Asian, and Modern/Futuristic architecture. Each style is accompanied by professional work inspired by that particular genre, as well as photographs and drawings of real-world architectural examples.

Chapter 2 – Picture-Making Techniques

As in the first book, Alexander talks about methods and materials, but this time with an emphasis on painting architecture. Perspective, lighting, color theory, composition, mood, and concept are all examined and explained. You see how, step by step, a painting takes shape from initial sketch to finished piece.

Chapter 3 – Details and Textures

Here you’ll see examples of how to render specific details, textures, and materials, such as marble, wood, thatch, brickwork and mortar, and so on. Learn about how to use references to help your surfaces look realistically worn and weathered. This chapter draws on the material in Chapter 2.

Chapter 4 – Creating Your Own Worlds

Look over the shoulders of some of today’s best artists. Their working methods are clearly explained with step-by-step examples that show you their thought process, their creative process, and how they approached their paintings. This chapter pulls it all together, as you watch professionals using the methods learned in the first three chapters.

This is a beautiful book, with lots of helpful illustrations. I like the fact that the book includes the work of multiple artists, not just the author. This helps you to see a variety of approaches to painting imaginary architecture. The book does touch on digital work briefly, but it does not include texture files for download. I would have liked to see downloadable content, such as sketches from the step-by-step examples. I believe in hands-on learning. But overall, I think it will prove very helpful to me as I venture forth into the world of Making Stuff Up. Most books on this subject are about Matte Painting for the movie industry or video gaming industry. Both of the books reviewed here today help fill a large gap.

OtherWorlds, by Tom Kidd

Tom Kidd’s book is nearly 200 pages long, hardcover, and just gorgeous to behold. Kidd fans will no doubt buy it just for the images inside, as there are many works by this creative genius. From what I gather reading his semi-autobiography Kiddography: The Art and Life of Tom Kidd, Kidd has a near-photographic memory. He can apparently draw even complex architectural buildings from memory. It’s an enviable ability. But, as he says in the quote up top, the key to being able to Make Stuff Up is knowing, in your bones, how stuff in the real world looks, acts, and is put together. Not surprisingly, the first section (The Basics of Getting Started) begins with information about sketching. For most, if not all, of these visionary artists, the painting begins as a scribble: an idea captured on paper. Kidd explains how the sketching process proceeds, drawing and then re-drawing, allowing the image to develop organically. For a photo-manipulator like me, this is scary stuff! Next come Kidd’s three main media: oils, watercolor, and pen and ink. Kidd explains the need to get outside and study nature, with sketchbook and/or paintbox in hand.

Light and color are next, and there’s even a page on digital coloring. These pages will get you thinking about the main elements of an imaginary painting: a consistent light source, a color scheme, and an overall mood. This section ends with a page about shooting and using reference photos, when working with models.

The middle section is called Techniques, Theory, & Subject Matter. Kidd begins with a good explanation of color theory, especially the importance of warm and cool colors. One of the hallmarks of Kidd’s work is the huge sense of scale, of vast distances, in his paintings. He explains how he achieves this through layers (not the Photoshop kind) and aerial perspective. This is followed by the first step-by-step, Dragon Pass. This is a watercolor that you could follow along with, as it’s a fairly simple composition to copy. You’ll learn about foreground, middle ground, and distance, and how to render each effectively, using the light and color techniques explained earlier in the book. A similar exercise, called Distant Tanks, is next, and it’s a more complex oil painting.

Kidd next shares his ideas about composition and tonal masses. As in all painting and photography, the artist must lead the viewer’s eye. Action Massing deals with composing effective action scenes. Mood comes next, and Kidd explains that it should be planned from the beginning, along with composition. How do you establish a scary mood? A playful mood? A romantic mood? It’s not subject matter alone that does the trick. For instance, backlighting and soft edges can help evoke a romantic mood.

Well, I’m only up to page 70, which means I’m going to have to pick up the pace here. I did want to include some detail, though, so you can see the value of the book. The rest of the book covers subjects such as designing your own creatures (there’s a lot about this), painting outer space subjects, clouds and skies, snow and ice, the wonder of trees (lots of material here, as Kidd loves trees), water, night scenes, rocks, architecture, and (of course) fantastic flying machines.

The last section, called Putting it All Together, is the shortest (the middle section is huge). The step-by-step here shows Kidd developing one of his marvelous Byzantine structures, complete with airship. The last two walk-throughs show how to paint a future soldier, and how to create metropolis.

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The interface for PostworkShop is clean and intuitive.

If I were into posting pompous axioms and slogans on this blog, I guess one would be “The image is everything.” How you created it is secondary. We’re not media chauvinists around here. (I’ve kind of stated my “manifesto” on this topic here, if you’re interested.) Not everyone knows how to perform magic with a pencil or a paintbrush, or even a digital stylus. And that’s one of the wonderful things about making art on the computer: it enables everyone to be creative–even those “who can’t draw a straight line.” (I can’t do that either, but I do enjoy painting.) A case in point is a relatively new piece of software available for free for the Mac and the PC, called PostworkShop. It allows anyone to create, play, and just plain have a ball with images. It’s purpose is not to “replace” humans as painters. Nor is it meant as a shortcut for lazy artists. Yes, it is one of those push-a-button filter programs that have, perhaps, given digital art a bad name. But it’s quite powerful and deep, with a huge potential for improvisation and innovation.

PostworkShop comes in three flavors: Free, Artist, and Pro. Free is, well, free, and comes with 50 presets. The Artist version is $49, and the Pro is $99. Both of these come with over 350 presets, called styles. But the presets are just a starting point. You can modify them and save custom versions. You can create whole new styles and upload them to share with the community. There’s a node-based editor which I assume allows you to really dig in and come up with unique stuff, but so far I’ve just been exploring the preset styles. Some of the styles are just so-so, but others are truly extraordinary. If you’re looking to add a great look to your family photos, go ahead and download the free version; you’ll be amazed at what you can do with a few clicks.

You can upload your own brushes to PostworkShop, which is one of the ways you can create truly unique styles. All versions work with layers, and layer blending modes, much like Photoshop. So you can combine the effects of two or more styles together, resulting in an unlimited number of possible permutations. The interface is a bit different, but there are excellent tutorials and videos available online. It took me about an hour to get comfortable with the basics. Those under 50 would probably take considerably less time!

PostworkShop does a good–and sometimes great–job replicating real-world artistic looks, such as watercolor, pen and ink, etching, and painting. It also has a bunch of photography filters to play with. The program seems to follow the contours of objects in the photo, or at least takes it into consideration. Most of the filters that come delivered with Photoshop don’t do that: they just apply the same effect across the whole image. PostworkShop leaves some areas blank, such as a blue sky. The $200 Snap Art 2, from Alien Skin, applies the same effect evenly across the image, like Photoshop’s filters, regardless of the subject. The results of Snap Art’s filters are, I think, quite unimpressive, and none of them look convincing. I’d suggest you save your money and give PostworkShop a try.

PostworkShop is available here for download. (Full disclosure: I am not an affiliate, though they did give me a free copy to evaluate.)

Here’s a gallery of images I created this afternoon with PostworkShop. There are three original photos, each followed by variations.

[nggallery id=15]

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Where's everyone going? They don't seem to be in much of a hurry.

Digital Art Revolution is a Photoshop book written for traditional media artists who want to begin using Photoshop. Unlike most of the three bazillion Photoshop books out there, it’s not written for photographers. Actually, it’s kind of hard to describe just how different this book is. It’s not industry specific (gaming, commercial illustration, film, etc.); rather, it’s audience is pretty much anyone who wants to create images. Starting with basic design principles, the book delivers a thorough introduction to Photoshop. Absolute beginners may find the book moves a bit too fast, but I’m not sure. It’s hard for me to evaluate that, since I know Photoshop quite well. On the other hand, the writing is clear and concise, the illustrations and screen shots are helpful and large enough to see, and it just may be the best introduction to Photoshop ever written. It’s a big book (250 pages, 11×8.5″), but it’s still amazing how much information it manages to cover.

First-time author Scott Ligon is a frequent lecturer, digital artist, and director. He is the coordinator for the digital foundation curriculum at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he teaches art. The author’s fine art background and orientation lend a fresh and exciting flavor to the book. The work of 44 artists is showcased throughout, but the examples here are not the usual commercial digital fare flooding the internet. This isn’t another Photoshop eye candy book filled with speed paintings, vampires, and gun-toting, barely-clothed buxom babes. And that’s a good thing. If you spend much time (as I do) browsing the work on Deviant Art and such sites, you start to see how much artists are mimicking each other. Ligon encourages us to bring forth our own unique vision, rather than trying to copy what’s popular or trendy. According to Ligon, this is the beginning of the Golden Age of Digital Art, and everything is possible. “Take advantage of this time when anything can happen,” he says. “There are vast areas of possibility that have never been explored. It might as well be you who explores some of them.”

I hope that introduction gives you a feel for where this book is coming from, and how different it is. Here’s a breakdown, chapter by chapter, of what’s in the book.

The book begins with “Welcome to the Revolution,” an extremely eloquent and intelligent introduction to just what digital art is, and how it is a huge leap forward in the ongoing history of art. Ligon: “Digital technology offers the single, greatest advancement in the possibilities inherent in art-making since, well, art-making began.” It isn’t that the tools are new and cool: it’s that they enable us to do things that weren’t possible before. (I wrote a similar, less-elegant piece here, mostly in defense of 3D art.)

Chapter One – Understanding the Visual Language is, as Ligon admits, a “crash course” on the principles of visual communication. These are the elements of design and composition (line, shape, value, balance, repetition, etc.).

Chapter Two – Meet Photoshop gets you grounded in the basics, from opening a file to learning what a pixel is, to file types, color modes, and the Photoshop GUI (graphical user interface).

Chapter Three – Photo Basics introduces you to photo editing in Photoshop: selecting, cropping, color and contrast adjustment, blurring, brushes, the spot healing brush, the clone stamp, the Liquify filter, and the patch tool. That’s a lot! Katrin Eismann has written two whole books on these topics, so obviously you’ll only learn so much from a single chapter. Still, the amount of material covered here – and covered well – is impressive. It’s a great introduction. There’s nothing more intimidating sometimes than a 1200-page doorstop with a title like “The Big Humongous Uber-Bible of Photoshop CS5.” For beginners, this is the way to begin.

Chapter Four – Compositing: The Illusion of Reality dives right into creating an image composed of a large group of photographs, combined to give the illusion of a real scene. (A scene full of zombies, by the way, which may make up for the lack of vampires mentioned earlier.) The next section shows how to use the Vanishing Point filter to place a mural on a wall, and how to use the transform tools to modify perspective.

Now that the basic Photoshop material is out of the way, it’s time to make some art! (There are exercises included in the chapters preceding this, but so far the emphasis has been on mechanics. The remainder of the book is much more hands-on.) Chapter Five – Expressive Nonrealistic Photo Art is about creating images that evoke feelings without concern for being photographically realistic. Ligon creates a composite image, and explains his thinking every step of the way. This makes a good transition from the “tool” chapters into the “art” chapters, showing the tools put to use. The chapter ends with a project Ligon assigns his students.

Chapter Six – Painting with Pixels is about digital painting with Photoshop’s brushes. First, you’ll learn how brushes work and how to modify them. Next comes controlling the color panels. Last is a demonstration showing how to adapt digital tools to Renaissance methods, with a sepia tone underpainting.

Chapter Seven-Painting with Shapes shows how to use selections as shapes, how to fill them with the gradient tool, and combine shapes into a composition. Again, it’s very helpful to follow along with Ligon, to understand the decisions and problem-solving that goes on. Next, learn about the Pattern Stamp tool, vector modes, tools, paths and layers, and the infamous Pen tool.

Chapter Eight-Mixing Paint, Photos, and Everything Else is about bringing objects from the real world into your images, via scanner and camera. Ligon has left discussion of the Filters till now, when you’re ready to use them as a tool, not an image-making device.

Chapter Nine-Finding Your Own Voice is like having coffee with a wise mentor, talking about how to develop your work, find a style, and what you want to say. It’s a chapter to spend quiet time with, reflecting, and coming back to now and again.

Chapter Ten-Into the Real World is about the various ways of sharing your work with the world, via print, monitors, galleries, and others.
Also, there’s a demonstration showing how to start with a real-world pencil sketch, and end bring into the digital realm for painting. The chapter concludes with a look at how some artists combine their digital work with real world materials, such as encaustic medium and varnish, or found objects and containers.

This book surprised me. I honestly did not think that the academic world had “gotten” digital yet, and that maybe they never would. I’m glad to see I was wrong. This is an excellent book, especially for those just beginning their Photoshop journey. For all artists, there’s plenty of food for thought here, about process, method, and technique, especially when working digitally. If you want to stop copying the ideas of others, but don’t know how to start creating your own work, this book is a wonderful guide.

You can read excerpts from the book on Scott Ligon’s website. Additionally, the publisher has provided this little viewer, to page through the book:

And lastly, here’s Scott Ligon’s YouTube promotional video.

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Contains 100% Photoshop, and zero trans fats. High in fiber, too!

Photoshop is used primarily as an image editor: photographers and artists use it to alter photographs, combine them, and so forth. Photoshop is also the most popular application for digital painting: creating images with brushes. In “100% Photoshop,” author Steve Caplin shows how Photoshop can be used to create realistic images without photographs, and without digital painting.

Caplin’s work really constitutes a third category of image-making with Photoshop, and there doesn’t seem to be a name for what he’s doing. Perhaps “technical illustration with a bitmap editor” covers it, though it’s not the most catchy description. Most of the slick cars and gadgets in magazines you see are not photographs or even Photoshopped photographs; they’re illustrations.

No photograph ever looked this good. Vector graphics can make products look better than real.

As you can see from this excerpt on the publisher’s website, the book is well-designed and easy to follow. I wouldn’t recommend this book to an absolute beginner, but if you know what a layer is, you’ll probably have no trouble with the exercises. This is a project-based book, and it’s best to proceed in order, chapter by chapter. Each chapter begins with a two-page spread showing the finished project. You can see them all here. Here’s a brief summary:

Chapter 1: Essential Techniques – All the tools you’ll be using are explained here with clear illustrations and text. Boy, I wish I’d had this chapter a few years ago!

Just a few bricks in my wall.

With the basic techniques established, the projects begin, and continue for the rest of the book.

Chapter 2: Setting the Scene – The scene looks like something from an old Humphrey Bogart movie. Learn how to build a door piece by piece, along with a hall light, light switch, scalloped glass with gold lettering, wainscoting, and a door handle. And dark, gloomy atmosphere, of course. By the end of the chapter you see how to build a complex scene out of basic pieces.

Chapter 3: Deep Space – Your basic outer space scene, complete with alien saucer, planets, moons, and stars.

Chapter 4: The Desk Drawer – Speaking of iPods, in this chapter you’ll create a desk drawer jammed with stuff, including an iPod, rubber bands, playing cards, a magnifying glass, a pencil, paper clips, a ruler, and an old-fashioned pocket watch (particularly nice, that watch). I’m sure I missed some things — there’s a lot in that drawer. This is my favorite chapter.

Chapter 5: Fantasy Art – Here you’ll begin with random noise in the render clouds filter, and end up with a scary metallic-looking mask. There’s a great technique for creating very complex horns. Using Edit > Transform > Transform Again, you can quickly build up some very intricate structures.

Chapter 6: In the Attic – Starting with the bricks you learned about earlier, you’ll create the attic in a house, and then cram it full of old objects and keepsakes. The cover image of the book shows a portion of the finished illustration. Some of the things created here, like spokes in a bicycle tire, strings on a tennis racket, or a six-string guitar, seem impossibly complex. Caplin leads you through each object, dtep by step. By now you’ll see that you can reproduce anything, simply by breaking it down into parts. Once all the objects are created, you’ll arrange them and add convincing shadows.

Chapter 7: Futuretech – This subject here is a sci-fi control panel of some sort. Perhaps a TV remote of the future? It’s very cool looking. Learn how to make textured metal, shiny glass doodads, and other techy things. Lots of complex, intricate patterns here that I would never have thought you could make with Photoshop. I stand corrected.

Chapter 8: The Great Outdoors – Caplin applies his techniques to organic objects, and the results are not quite so impressive, to my mind. These techniques work really well when rendering man-made, artificial objects, but not so well for, say, blades of grass. Still, there are some methods here you may want to incorporate into your digital painting. For that old, weathered shed over there by the pond, perhaps.

Chapter 9: Still Life – A spooky scene, this, with gloomy setting, skull, candle, some old books, draped fabric, a glass of wine, and a metronome.

This is a big book at 250 pages, and it’s crammed with good stuff. It’s not a book about “how to make a candle,” etc., so much as it is about how to use a set of techniques to create whatever it is you need for an image. Caplin has found some ways of using Photoshop that I never would have thought of, like using the Glass Filter to make bricks. I’m not fond of the dodge and burn tools, which he uses a lot. It seems to lend a rather flat look to his work (shadows are black, highlights are white), which painting with a range of colors would fix. That’s really my only quibble. This is an exciting book that will open all kinds of new possibilities for digital artists. Highly recommended.

For more information on this topic:

Once you’ve mastered the techniques in “100% Photoshop,” you may want to check out the books by the master of Photoshop photo-realism, Bert Monroy, whose latest book, Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy: Digital Painting is simply astonishing. Monroy does cover his methods, but only at a high level. Best to start with Caplin’s book, I’d say. Here’s a sample of a recent Monroy painting, done with (you guessed it) 100% Photoshop.

This was made with Photoshop, too.

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Painted version, using ArtRage 3

We mentioned a few weeks back that ArtRage 3 had been released. Today I decided to take the demo out for a spin, put it through its paces, and report back. The results were not very impressive, though I do see some improvement. I also see that the price tag of the full-featured version has increased from $25 USD to $80 USD, and the reduced-feature version has gone from free to $40. Quite a jump. Is it worth it? Not in my opinion, though I should mention that I’ve been using Corel Painter nearly every day for the last five years. Today’s exercise made me realize I’d been taking Painter for granted. It’s very powerful, and there’s really nothing else like it. That said, I believe it’s too expensive, bloated, and I wish someone would buy it from the meatheads at Corel and give it a proper home. The release last year of version 11 was a disaster, and I’m sticking with version 10 until they come out with an actual upgrade to the program. As you can tell, I’m not the typical Corel fanboi, but I do use Painter and love it. For the type of work I do everyday (photo painting for photographers), I’m afraid ArtRage 3 just won’t cut it. But I had fun playing with it today, anyway. Here’s what I found.

Original photo used, courtesy of Best Friends Photography.

As you can see from the before and after of the cute pup above, I was able to paint a passable portrait, using the equivalent of the smear brush in Photoshop, or the various blenders in Painter. These worked well for the dog. ArtRage has a cloning ability, though it’s not called that. It’s called a tracing. As with Painter, you can tell ArtRage to use a file for color information, to clone color. This is the way I work when altering photographs for photography studios, so it’s what I concentrated on during the “road test.” To use the tracing facility, you begin by creating a new painting, using the following dialogue box.

The new painting dialogue. Click on the green icon to bring in your file for tracing/cloning.

ArtRage conveniently allows you to determine your new file based on the size of the file you’re tracing. You can also just skip the trace file input, and work from scratch. You’ll also choose your paper texture here. The paper or canvas texture works much like Painter’s, except it doesn’t seem to “fill in” with paint; the texture remains fully visible no matter how much paint you apply. You can change the paper texture later, if you like.

After opening your new painting file, you can control the visibility of the color source image (the tracing), much like with Painter’s tracing paper. I like the controls and feel of ArtRage quite a bit, and don’t miss the Windows-clutter of Painter at all. You can easily switch the clone-color option off by clicking on the color palette, but to go back, you’ll need to dig into the menu to tell ArtRage to once again use the tracing for color information. The brushes, familiar from version 2.5, work well for color cloning, though I couldn’t get the palette knife to apply color to a blank canvas, either with color clone turned on or off. It may be designed that way. The new Sticker Spray brush doesn’t clone color accurately at all. Blues come in as yellow, or red…it seems broken.

In Painter, it’s common to start with a “Quick Clone,” which is a blank canvas. The tracing paper control allows you to see a ghosted image of the source you’re cloning. You can do the same with ArtRage, but here is where I really began to appreciate how well Painter does this. ArtRage does not bring in color accurately, to make a long story short. I tried to work from a blank canvas, and then clone back in from the original photo. The results were always crude and disappointing.

What worked much better was telling ArtRage, via the menu, to apply the tracing image to the canvas. This is like a standard clone in Painter, and it’s how I painted the dog at the top of the article. I used a soft variant of the palette knife, which worked just like a blender or the smear brush in Photoshop. New to version 3 are a whole new category of brushes, which seem to be made using a whole new technology. It takes some getting used to. It’s called the Sticker Spray brush. Stickers are similar to the Image Hose in Painter. But they also seem like a new direction for ArtRage, and I wish they had implemented it across the board instead of off to the side, so to speak. I also wish they had finished getting the bugs out before releasing it. There’s a lot of power and flexibility here, but the color cloning, as mentioned earlier, is broken. The colors are not even close to correct. ArtRage’s version of the Brush Creator is not intuitive or well-documented. Controls all over the place, in fact, have names which signal nothing to me. For instance, what the heck is “Drip Spike”? “Auto-flatten”?

ArtRage comes with a lot of brushes that remind me of a program my kids used to play with years ago, KidPix. Why anyone would want to paint with dominoes or cartoon leaves is beyond me. Interviews with the owners of ArtRage indicate they are trying to please everyone from grandma to professional illustrators. They seem to be taking the same road Painter did, adding all kinds of useless fluff with each new release. It’s a shame, because there’s a need for a nice, clean, strong painting program. Do digital artists really want stencils, rulers, and all the odd little toy brushes ArtRage offers? I doubt it. But that’s just my take. You can download and install the demo of ArtRage for free, and it’s good for thirty days. Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

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Topaz Remask 2 gives great results, fast and easy.

Topaz Labs is primarily known for their low-priced alternative to the $600 Lucis Art filter. It’s called Topaz Adjust, and sells for a mere $50. Now Topaz has released the second version of Remask, their low-price alternative to the overpriced masking tools on the market, and it looks like a real category killer. It’s incredibly fast, easy to use (once you figure it out), and dirt cheap compared to everything else out there: Topaz Remask 2 is $69.99. This review will show how Remask 2 stands up to several alternative masking tools, including those delivered with Photoshop and Vertus Fluid Mask 3. We’ll finish up with a quick-start guide, so you can download the trial version and get right to work.

The ultimate masking test!

Results obtaining using the Green channel as a mask. Not bad, but not good, either.

The other Photoshop method we’ll look at is the Extract filter (which Adobe unfortunately dropped from CS4). As we’ll see, you use Topaz Remask 2 very much like you do (or did) Extract: just draw an outline to tell the software where the edge of your mask goes. Easy as pie. Luckily, Topaz’s version does a much better job than Adobe’s (below).

Without getting into some serious tweaking, here's what Photoshop's Extract filter gave me.

A while back, I invested well over $200 in a masking tool called Fluid Mask 3, from Vertus. Perhaps the fault lies with me, but the fact remains I’ve never been able to use Fluid Mask effectively. For a difficult image such as this one, Fluid Mask requires about six steps. The work flow is completely unlike anything else, and the learning curve is steep. If you are a serious professional retouch artist, you may find it to be a powerful tool. For someone like me, who only turns to a masking tool occasionally, it wasn’t a good fit at all. Here’s my pitiful results using Vertus Fluid Mask 3.

For such an expensive program, these results are quite disappointing.

As you can see in the image at the top of this review, Topaz Remask 2 gives a much better result than anything else we’ve tried here. And it took less time–by far–than any of these methods. Here’s how it works. Remask 2 lives in your plugins folder, and you access it via Filter > Topaz Labs > Topaz Remask 2. But you’ll want to duplicate your background layer before getting started. If you don’t, you’ll get an error message. (Hopefully Topaz will change this so that it works more like the Nik Filters, creating a duplicate layer with a layer mask automatically). Drag your Background down to the Duplicate Layer icon in the Layers palette, and then click on the Layer Mask icon in the Layers palette. It should look like this.

Drag the icon on the Background layer (mini image of your photo) to the Duplicate Layer icon. Then, click the Layer Mask icon.

Make sure your Background Copy layer is active (click it to highlight it). NOW go ahead and start up Topaz Remask, from the Filter menu. When Remask first appears, you’ll see your image with a green cast to it. Down in the bottom left, you’ll see a drop-down called “Menu.” When one of the choices under Menu is the User Manual, but it doesn’t seem to work on my Mac Pro. So, here you are, scratching your head, wondering what to do. And that’s a shame, really, since the program is so darned easy to use. Perhaps they could add a little button that brings up some brief text (or a video) showing how to get started. In lieu of that, here’s my quick start guide.

Goodness! My little boy is looking rather green!

Though Remask is very similar to Photoshop’s Extract tool, it starts by applying a “keep” color (green) to the entire image, and that may throw you. First you’ll mark the dividing line, in blue, between the keep portions and the delete portions. Use the blue paintbrush, as indicated.

Next, click on the red bucket icon, as shown below. Click anywhere in the “delete” (background) area. It fills with red.

Now click on the compute button. I choose the “High Quality” setting, since my image is only 1MB. In about two seconds, it’s done. Click on the Mask tab (shown below) to see the mask you just created. Not too shabby!

Pretty impressive results for about a minute's worth of effort, I'd say.

If you’re happy with the mask, just click OK, and you’ll find your image file has been updated. Now the layer mask has your selection mask in it. Using a layer mask this way is non-destructive, and allows you to keep working on the mask to refine it. However, there is a Magic Brush option available to you within Remask, once it has processed the initial Compute. You’ll see the checkbox become available. By using the green and red brushes in Magic Brush mode, you can explicitly tell Remask where to clean up the mask. One other adjustment you can make is to the edge hardness, which is like a feathering control.

There are some Remask 2 tutorials available on the Topaz site, but the product is so simple, I hope the above will be all you need to get going. Overall, it’s a great product, and performs nearly miraculously, even in the worst situations. If you’re looking for an easy and fast masking tool that won’t break the bank, give the free trial a spin. I think you’ll like it.

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