Adobe Photoshop CS2 offers professional and amateur photographers, artists, and designers unprecedented opportunities to manipulate images on their personal computers, but it's a complex application that can take years to master. With Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook, you don't have to be a Photoshop expert to create sophisticated effects. The 61 easy-to-follow, fully illustrated recipes in the book show you how to use Photoshop CS2 to simulate classic camera and darkroom techniques and special effects-without making you first learn Photoshop inside and out.

Author and digital artist Tim Shelbourne has assembled a collection of real-world techniques that you'll be able to apply immediately to your own images, whether you're working on photographs or digital illustrations. Digital files of the examples in the book are available for download, so you can easily follow along as Tim takes you through each recipe.

The book covers:

• Creating graphic art effects: posterization, watercolor, pen and ink, woodcut
• Working with lighting effects: neon glows, lens flares, fire and flame effects
• Simulating natural phenomena: rain, clouds, rainbows, lightning, snow
• Adapting traditional techniques: film grain, contrast masks, hand-tinting
• Adding motion blurs and other special effects
• Simulating textures: stone, metal, glass, plastic
• Making mattes, vignettes, frames, borders, signatures
• Assembling multi-layered images and photomontages

Packed with hundreds of full-color photographs, step-by-step instructions, and at-a-glance panels with many practical tips, Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook is all you need to quickly and easily create professional graphic art effects from almost any image source.