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For those of you that have read my review of Scott Kelby’s the photoshop CS2 book for digital professionals, I am about to sound like a broken record, because I have found another problem > solution book about Photoshop.

As some background, I don’t like going through a chapter’s worth of material trying to find out if I really need to use layers or masks or any of the other 40 dozen tools that Photoshop has to actually fix a photo I am working on. So, I am ecstatic if I can find a book or a website that tells me what I want to know in simple, clearcut ways.

I have been also looking for general instruction on photography and found several reviews about a book by Lee Frost that is great for learning how to take pictures. I will be writing a review of that book soon. While I have been waiting for this book I stumbled upon “The A-Z of CREATIVE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY“, also by Lee Frost, at my local library. I picked it up because I thought maybe it would tide me over until the one I really want to read arrived.

I was right, it did tide me over. The book is short, you can thumb through it within 10-15 minutes and have a great idea what it is about. As a warning: It also has some nudes on a few of its pages so if that bothers you, you will want to steer clear of it (and this book may not be an appropriate gift for your child photographer).

Within the first few pages Lee shows you techniques for creating Greeting card-type pictures and adding text to pictures in a few different ways. Next are Border effects and Building pictures from different elements of photos. With this and Scott Kelby’s book sitting side-by-side I began to flip through both and noticed that the coverage that the two books have is complementary, with one filling in gaps that the other leaves. There are, of course, some overlapping techniques, but even these seem to fit well with one another.

Between the two books there are 60 or more high-level techniques (and a long list of sub-techniques) that I have at my fingertips that can be useful right away.

Here is a short list of some of the techniques in The A-Z of CREATIVE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY:

Double Exposures
Faking Infrared
Grain
Graduated Filter Effects
Joiners
Lith Effects
Mirror Images
Movement
Photo First Aid
Panoramas
Soft-Focus Effects
Zoom Effects

Of course, there are many more. These are just a few that caught my eye and I have played around with.

Here is a short excerpt from one of his tips about Lith Effects:

“Step 1: Open up the Layer’s palette using the Window dropdown menu. Double-click the Background layer and rename it ‘Shadows’, then duplicate this layer and name it ‘Highlights’.

Step 2: To recreate the light highlights and mid-tones that are characteristic of lith prints, select the Highlights layer, then go to…”

To the side of each of these steps is a small picture that shows you how to do what is being described. You read it, you see it and you can do it pretty quickly. Small steps that walk you through what you want to accomplish.

If you are looking for books that are all-inclusive this probably isn’t what you want. If you are a photographer who wants to get something done in Photoshop so you can get back to shooting photos you will like this book.

Lee also has a few other books that I am going to look over, particularly interesting to me are the ones about shooting landscapes, one about taking pictures that sell, and another about low-light shooting. To check out a list of Lee’s books, click here.

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