New beauty retouching book online

[studionewmarket]

ok, finaly after few weeks I had a chance to go through the whole book, initially after reading first 90 pages or so I was on the fence, just like another poster here, but for me it got much better afterwards, I am very happy I got it and the methods used in the book have already helped me. I would recommend this book for beginner and intermediate, if someone is looking for high end, advanced retouching with only non destructive methods, than this one may not be the book for them. If you are a fan of Godmother and her short video, than this is a book for you, many similar techniques properly explained, perhaps with a bit of less emphasis on d&b. Overall very pleased, good value, inexpensive, would probably give it 7.5 out of 10.



With that in mind I find here some weakness, perhaps something to think about for the next edition.



Not having downloadible images is IMO a major weakness, yes I have read Gry's explanation before, but I am sorry, I don't buy it. The images in the book are wonderfull and a joy to look at, but not very helpfull, I would rather deal with less of an image which would give me an option to see that your tutorials do exactly what they say, based on the same image that I can work on. In few instances I didn't have appropriate image handy and spend half an hour looking for an image on my hardrive, in the end simply downloaded one of the images from Eisman's book, I remembered that she had something I need. Many bestsellers have this option, probably for a good reason.



I also find that in some instances the book is a bit all over the place, with some topics touched upon, but obviously they deserve way more attention to explain in debth which is beyond the scope of the book, so why bother, this imo applies to layers explanation, masking (good books on this subject by Eismann).



Despite some weaknesses I find this to be very good buy.



Thank you.

Peter

[grygarness]

Thanks for the very positive feedback from several of you here on the forum. My next project will be on montage, which of course involves a lot of layers and masking. Studionewmarket (above) thinks I only touch briefly on Layers and Masking in the beauty book, but I have to say it uses Layers for pretty much every tutorial, explaining how and why they are used in each instance. The introduction to Layers is admittedly quite short (3 pages plus a page on Adjustment layers) but it should be pretty concise, and the use of Layers throughout the book is extensive. The word layer is mentioned 191 times throughout. There are 10 pages dedicated to selections and masking plus 8 tutorials that really go into the nitty-gritty of masking, as well as the general use of masking throughout the tutorials.

I have not supplied images for the following reasons:
The book is a guide to retouching for images destined for press and commercial use. The flat sizes of such images never go lower than 25 mb and will most often be between 40-80 mb. If I supplied one file for each tutorial at 25 mb this would amount to 2 gig. Compressed as decent jpegs it would still probably be 250-400 mb. That's an awful lot of bandwith when it gets busy. Katrin Eismann's images are max 5-6 mb in their open flat state. Fine for consumer training, but not for professional training.

Peter, you say you'd rather have lower quality images and access to the images, and that there are plenty of books that offer that. Exactly – there are many of those, but are there many books for the professionals? I opted to use publishable images (most of them already published) mostly of professional models, putting my money where my mouth is. There is no way I would get permissions to distribute images of these models as practice images, only to see them popping up all over the web with various interpretations! I'd get sued! I start each tutorial with a challenge or image 'problem'. If you haven't got the problem yet, why don't you just skip the tutorials you don't need... until you need them. Just like a cook-book, you can pick and choose the 'recipes' you want to make. Can't get fish that particular day... well then you don't have to make a fish dish. However if you retouch for a while, you should come across all the challenges here.

Sorry I can't supply the fish!

allthebest –– GG

[kalun_leung]

Will there be a printed one insteaded of just ebook later? i would more prefer a printed book actually? please let me know because i am really interested in this book.

[LESider]

buy it and print it out. went to kinkos and printed it out for $11 B&W and filled in with about 20 pages printed in color from my printer. The PDF is nice as you can really zoom in on photos and see things better than if they were in a book.

[grygarness]

The book is formatted so you can print what you need, as LEsider suggests. Because CS3 is in the middle of a cycle I doubt if there will be a print version before a possible new edition for CS4. Still – this is only a possibility. Not a sure thing, so don't hold me to it. What do you all think about a DVD version with Quicktime tutorials? Any thoughts? –– GG

[JD Spears]

Gry,
Just bought the Retouching book. I'll let people know what I think after reading. And yes! I personally prefer Quicktime to books anway.

[Mchilly]

Looks interesting to me, I'm checking it out...

[hubas]

Don't know if im just stupid or blind. But i tried the trick with blur and then distort > diffuse glow and when i remove the diffuse glow from the smart object i see no difference what so ever. So as far as i can tell it is the same as just bluring the image.

Did I do something wrong or?

[kalun_leung]

I think a Ebook is fine with me but i just love the feeling of a priunted book, that's may be just a metter of my personal favourites.

Anyway i think i will buy that ebook if there will not be any printed version release.

[Christos]

I just can't seem to get myself to edit at 8-bit. I have always edited at 16-bit to preserve color data.

[Gee]

mmmh i guess i'm gonna buy it.
right now i'm out of money but i guess it's gonna be soon.

i've watched the demo on google and it seems cool...

[dlew308]

I found this website googling for Gry. I'll wait til my PS skills are way better before buying the book. I may wait for the exchange rate to get better too kekeke....

[The Baron]

Got it. Great, totally understandable. Getting excellent results already!