First, thanks SO much to everyone who shared their ideas for what they’d like to see covered in my new Photoshop CS4 Down & Dirty Tricks book. The good news is: A lot of the techniques you guys asked for are already in the book (which is really good news for me), and some of your ideas are going to be added to the book (now that I know what you’re looking for).

psw09poster2After reading your comments (over 150 of them), I did realize that I haven’t done a good job of making it clear exactly what the book is about, which is why I included this Photoshop World poster at left. Creating that poster from scratch, including putting the collage together which includes the field, the stadium, the lights, the helmet, the reflection of the stadium in the helmet, adding the shadows, creating the text effects, etc. —that whole thing–-that is a Down & Dirty Trick (well, it’s the kind of thing my book is full of, anyway).

That poster (created as part of our college football theme this year at Photoshop World) was not only designed by NAPP’s own Creative Director (and Photoshop World instructor) Felix Nelson, but Felix did a step-by-step of how he created it in this month’s issue of Photoshop User magazine, in the column Felix and I created called (you guessed it) “Photoshop Down & Dirty Tricks”(our column is now in it’s 10th year in the magazine!)

So, this book doesn’t cover things like color correction, or portrait retouching, or sharpening, or Lab color, or photo restorations, or Actions, or HDR (all those things are covered in my other books). This book is about special effects, collages, photographic effects, type effects, advertising effects, and stuff like that, and luckily I got LOTS of great ideas from your ideas, and because of that, these folks are getting free signed books from me:

  • Steve Vansak
  • Joe Gass
  • Dennis Smith
  • Jay Rodriguez
  • Trenton Moore
  • Jacob Hurlbut
  • Tim
  • Debbi
  • Matt Timmons
  • Csaba
  • Vincent Mistretta
  • Sacha Fernandez

Disclaimer: I am sending these folks signed copies of the book when it comes out, because they had great ideas, or pointed me to great examples. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ll actually be able to figure any of these effects out, so keep your fingers crossed.

3D Stuff: There were a lot of requests yesterday for effects using the new 3D tools in Photoshop CS4 Extended. I’m totally not a 3D designer on any level, but I knew this book would need to have some cool 3D stuff, so a few months back I went to my in-house Photoshop 3D expert Corey Barker, and asked him to do a special chapter for my book with a bunch of 3D tricks. Corey is just amazing, and I think having this extra chapter from him is definitely going to take things up a big notch.

The Book Cover: We had a book team meeting yesterday, and while our original idea was just to update the old book cover (so readers would recognize that it’s a new version of the old book), the old cover is just too old looking, so Jessica Maldonado (my in-house book designer and general wonder designer) is going to come up with something completely new and fresh. I’ll show you guys the new cover once Jess has it nailed down (Note to Peachpit Press; we’re sending a new cover!). ;-)