Know of any books that describe Photo to Art techniques?
If so, post them in this thread.

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12/2006 Update: Now that the following book is a couple years old, it's price has dropped considerably. Used copies can be had for less than one dollar!

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50 Fast Digital Photo Techniques, Gregory Georges
ISBN: 0764535781

Check out the reviews at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0764535781/customer-reviews/qid=1022954341/ref=sr_11_0_1/103-1272183-3194223).

Eleven of the 50 techniques are photo to art specific. That's 22%. Not bad.

The rest of the techniques cover a multitude of general subjects such as Dust & Scratch removal, Sharpening, Color Correction, Blurring, Changing Colors, making Frames, Backgrounds and Textures, combining images, etc.

Note: This book focuses on using Photoshop Elements, but since Elements has the same filter set as Photoshop and many of the same features/functions, e.g., Variations, Levels, etc., PS users won't notice the difference.

This is a good one for beginners.

Photoshop 6 Cookbook illustrates more than 115 filter / blend / layer combination techniques presented as "step-by-step recipes," each showing the resulting image in dazzling color (for the color based examples).

All effects are made to the same scanned photograph (available from the publisher by request), so it's easy to compare results.

The receipes run the gamut from exceptionally basic, e.g., to create a 3-level posterization, invoke a Posterization adjustment layer and choose '3' (Duh!) to fairly complex recipies involving stacked layers, blend modes and/or filter applications.

I found the book inspiring because it presented recipies (that generated some pretty arty results) I would have never in 100 years thunk up myself, and helped turn on a few lightbulbs when it came to understanding blend modes.

Here's the link to the description, price, etc. at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1883403839/qid=1023083688/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-1272183-3194223). Note the very low prices of used editions.

For those relatively new to Photoshop with an interest in "Photo to Art" techniques, I believe this book would be a valuable addition to your collection.

great book called painter 9 for photographers. Just got a copy on ebay.

There's also this one:

Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook: 62 Easy-To-Follow Recipes for Creating the Classic Styles of Great Artists & Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

There's also this one:

Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook: 62 Easy-To-Follow Recipes for Creating the Classic Styles of Great Artists & Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)For more info on this book and others in this series see: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/photophotofx/

For a brief review see: http://digitalimagemakerworld.com/2006/05/10/photoartcanvas-books-by-and-about-others/

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re: painter 9 for photographers

One of the strengths of this book is the comprehensive examples of effects one can achieve using different brush variants.

Another is it's visual presentation of the various papers (textures) that are installed with Painter.

A couple more (courtesy of Robert Barnett):

Photoshop Filter Effects Encylopedia
Roger Pring
O'Reilly
0-596-10021-3

Photoshop Effects Cookbook
Tim Shelbourne
O'Reilly
0-596-10022-1

Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook (noted previously)
John Beardsworth
O'Reilly
0-596-10062-0

Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers
John Beardsworth
O'Reilly
0-596-10020-5