This book is amazing! The tricks and tips are so much fun to try out, and some of the stuff in here is just unbelievably amazing! I absolutely love Photoshop, and it is so much fun learning how to do cool new things to amaze your friends! The projects in here are so creative. And the book also comes with a CD so you can try out the projects described in the book. Excellent book!!!

This product was bought as a gift for a bright 16 year old girl. It was purchased to fuel her interest in PhotoShop without her having to first wade through a ton of dry how to. This book allowed her to see what was possible so that she now seeks out the ways that she can do other more mundane applications of the program. It provided what it was purchase for. A match for a creative fire.

I purchased this book over a year ago, and I'm still using it. You give several examples in your chapters on how to do a certain task, in a down to earth writing style which I find very easy to understand. I've become so much more efficient in Photoshop thanks to your book.
Cheers!

This is a very fun book to work thru. It comes with a CD that has photos to work with. You will install the CD and use the different effects over and over. I find myself going back to the book on many different projects. Most of the effects are ones that you can use in editing any type of photo. I loved the book and recomend it highly. Even beginners will find it easy to follow.

Just got into this book and I love it already. It may help for you to have another book along for tool and palette reference. The accompanying cd-rom is a great help, but i just wish that it had more videos. This book is definitely one of the top PAdobe Photoshop CS2 One-on-One (One-On-One)hotoshop books that I own.

This is an excellent hands-on tutorial in getting the most out of Photoshop CS2, Ostensibly about creating realistic-looking photomontages (though most of the examples wouldn't fool someone who's paying attention), this book is actually for anyone who has struggled to learn about layers and masks and levels. It's accessible and fun.

This is an excellent hands-on tutorial in getting the most out of Photoshop CS2, Ostensibly about creating realistic-looking photomontages (though most of the examples wouldn't fool someone who's paying attention), this book is actually for anyone who has struggled to learn about layers and masks and levels. It's accessible and fun.

If you need a book for photomontage , this book is excellent.

it's worth every cent.

Excellent! You'll found out quite an amount of useful tips, tricks and of course tutorials.
Great print and paper.
All the tutorials are explained well and illustrated well. Some tutorials are Quicktime movies on CD.
The CD also contains bonus content like files to test your skills on, some pictures, Photoshop files of all the tutorials in the book, and the deleted pages of second edition.
The content itself is very useful: almost all of the tutorials are useful, no nonsense. For me the chapter that discusses the vanishing points is a blessing (well, the whole book is actually), so whatever you Photoshop needs are, this book will satisfy most of them.
In short, this book's a great way to upgrade your Photoshop skills.

Excellent! You'll found out quite an amount of useful tips, tricks and of course tutorials.
Great print and paper.
All the tutorials are explained well and illustrated well. Some tutorials are Quicktime movies on CD.
The CD also contains bonus content like files to test your skills on, some pictures, Photoshop files of all the tutorials in the book, and the deleted pages of second edition.
The content itself is very useful: almost all of the tutorials are useful, no nonsense. For me the chapter that discusses the vanishing points is a blessing (well, the whole book is actually), so whatever you Photoshop needs are, this book will satisfy most of them.
In short, this book's a great way to upgrade your Photoshop skills.

Squeezed between the covers of this book is an enormous amount of essential information about how to do just about everything with Photoshop with a little bit of Illustrator thrown in for good measure. The author starts the book off with one of the best visual demonstrations of how to use Photoshop to make selections, replace colors, and many more. Using commercial illustrations he has created for national magazines and newspapers he shows how he achieved the effects with just enough information to allow you to be able to create a similar photo treatment without making it so complicated that it puts you into a comma reading it. While the latest edition doesn't cover all of the new CS2 tools, it covers the ones necessary for those that do photo clean-ups or manipulation. He even explains how the 3D model feature in Photoshop works - a topic most authors neatly avoid.
The quality of the book is great. The colors in the examples are vibrant and it is visually appealing enough to warrant just sitting down and flipping through the book to get ideas for a project.

Squeezed between the covers of this book is an enormous amount of essential information about how to do just about everything with Photoshop with a little bit of Illustrator thrown in for good measure. The author starts the book off with one of the best visual demonstrations of how to use Photoshop to make selections, replace colors, and many more. Using commercial illustrations he has created for national magazines and newspapers he shows how he achieved the effects with just enough information to allow you to be able to create a similar photo treatment without making it so complicated that it puts you into a comma reading it. While the latest edition doesn't cover all of the new CS2 tools, it covers the ones necessary for those that do photo clean-ups or manipulation. He even explains how the 3D model feature in Photoshop works - a topic most authors neatly avoid.
The quality of the book is great. The colors in the examples are vibrant and it is visually appealing enough to warrant just sitting down and flipping through the book to get ideas for a project.

This book has many informative tutorials and is very good for anyone, from intermediate to advanced users. Worth the price!

Some people prefer War and Peace, but that doesn't come with a CD, isn't in English and doesn't do a thing for the reader's Photoshop skills. And where are the pictures?

What Tolstoy does have going for him is he doesn't try to get his readers to use the pen tool, which apparently works well in the hands of professionals but is annoying to the rest of us. Had he lived, I'm sure he would have convinced Adobe to offer Photoshop users the simple yet effective selection brush that is an integral part of the consumer-level Photoshop Elements.

How to Cheat in Photoshop has lovely pictures, isn't in Russian and imparts useful information like how to make your street look half underwater. This book is so good, I actually believe the 5-star reviews. With War and Peace, I'm never sure.

Some people prefer War and Peace, but that doesn't come with a CD, isn't in English and doesn't do a thing for the reader's Photoshop skills. And where are the pictures?

What Tolstoy does have going for him is he doesn't try to get his readers to use the pen tool, which apparently works well in the hands of professionals but is very annoying to the rest of us. Had he lived longer, I'm sure he would have convinced Adobe to offer Photoshop users the simple yet effective selection brush that is an integral part of the consumer-level Photoshop Elements.

How to Cheat in Photoshop has lovely pictures, isn't in Russian and imparts useful information like how to make your street look half underwater. This book is so good, I actually believe the 5-star reviews. With War and Peace, I'm never sure.

This guy can create a man with a hundred heads and you'll believe he exists!! Flawless, Highly Recommended. Every step was carefully written and explained.

Steve Caplin should produce a weekly (or even daily) webcast of his photorealistic montage techniques. Not only is he a master of the art, but he writes wonderfully well. Not for him is the amateurish comedian approach of Deke McClellan and Scott Kelby; both of whose books would be far more informative without their clumsy buffoonery.

Instead Caplin writes in a very straight-forward manner. Never dry, never tedious, sometimes with a slight touch of sly British humor, and always informative. Caplin rganizes his book into 151 short sections, each of them a self-contained lesson on some aspect of Photoshop that may be involved in the creation of montages. (This is not, however, a book for total beginners in Photoshop.)

Caplin does more to cover the various methods of selection and masking in fewer pages than anyone else I've seen . . . and he does it better. The use of the pen tool, usually the downfall of many, is thoroughly covered in six pages. (Examples are provided on the accompanying CD.)

Manipulating lights, shadows, perspective, matching skin tones, combining body parts, simulating glass and metal are just some of the subjects Caplin treats well.

I am writing about the third edition of this book, updated to cover Photoshop CS2. I have all three and they just keep getting better. Caplin obviously listens to his readers and incorporates their suggestions. Simply put, Caplin is a master of his craft, a far better writer than many of those covering this subject and one can hope he publishes more books in the future.

Jerry

A terrific book! Step-by-step tutorials with plenty of illustrations in an easy-to-read format. Plus a CD with movie tutorials, examples and bonus photographs. I bought the previous edition and this edition has even more. I especially like the project on how to add beard and stubble. With this book I can make my composites look believable and save myself a ton of work in the process. And because the writer, Steve Caplin, isn't wordy, you start learn quickly and aren't bored silly. I even enjoyed reading it during my leisure time.

What a cool resource. I am an intermediate Photoshop user and this book gave me some quick shortcuts that I might never have known.

Great Book ~ Easy to follow & well explained. Plenty of examples.
Buy It, Its worth the money two times over... Enough Said!!!

This book lays out Photoshop tricks quick and easy. I am so glad Steve Caplin decided to write this book because I'm the type that gets bored and sleepy looking at a lot of text when trying to follow instructions. I end up giving up or trying to figure things out by myself without reading. Talk about A.D.D. and I'm soooo happy I came across this book because I've since been trying out every technique and Photoshop isn't so intimidating anymore! The book is very visual with lots of step-by-step pictures. Each Photoshop technique is covered on a spread. They don't even go beyond a spread. It's short and super easy. I just love this book! I don't usually have time to write reviews but for this one I made an exception. I'm now going to check out other books by this author because I love his style. He's to the point and his book is visually enjoyable, too.

How to Cheat is a really great book. Very well written, and the best illistrations of discussed techniques that I've seen. Every artist has a different technique, so you'll be learning Steve Caplin's look in this book. That is, the sort of thing you'll see in magazine articles, table of contents, etc.

Printed on great stock, this is a good looking book that is also just plain fun to read.

The only problem with the book is the included softare samples will not run under Mac OS X 10.4. The publisher has no update posted, nor any tech support on their website. Steve Caplin gets 5/5, FocalPress gets 3.5/5 for a useless website and no update.

This book is an absolute must for all Photoshop enthusiasts who play around with Photoshop with the spare time or work with the software every day. Most of the techniques in this book a unique and offer great potential to improve your techniques. 10 out of 10 from me.

How to cheat in photoshop

First let me state that: This is not a bad book.

I have bought a lot of photoshop books, but I have so much storage place on my shelves, so I have to choose which ones I want to keep, and this one is not a keeper.

It's too basic and at the same time a beginner would be lost trying to complete the images!

The sub title of this book is: The art of creating Photorealistic Montages. I guess that if you want to achieve his style (Steve Caplin), maybe this book is for you. But Steve's images are far from realistic. They look like photomontages "Kitschy" style!

You are never going to achieve realistic montage using quickmask and a brush to draw a mask. If you want to learn how to draw a mask, buy a Deke McClelland book (if you are serious with photoshop buy Deke's DVDs).

Steve is overusing the Burn & Dodge tool and I am not sure that he knows what the displacement map is.

Not a bad book but not a good one.

The best thing about the book is the section dealing with Glass reflexion & refraction from page 162 to 173.

Searching for "Cheat", "Photoshop" or any combination here on Amazon often leads to earlier editions of the book. If you're looking for the latest (third) edition and can't find it, try searching for the ISBN number:

0-240-51985-X

Hope this helps!

Steve

One of the best books written on Photoshop to date. I have read many books on Photoshop in the past, and I could never find one piece of material that put together all of the things that I was looking for until I bought this book.

It is definitely not a "How-to-use" Photoshop book, which there are numerous to chose from, but an outstanding guide to the techniques used to make great photo montages. These techniques are applicable whether you are actually in the business or just like to explore the depth of Photoshop as a hobby.

I consider myself an intermediate user of Photoshop, and I can honestly say that there were many things that I didn't even know that Photoshop could do until I read this book.

The examples are detailed enough to easily follow if you know your way around the program. All of the photo files are included with the attached CD along with Quicktime movies of some of the projects.

In addition, Steve Caplin provides some of his own insights about Photoshop and the photo montage business between chapters. I agree wholeheartedly on using the Wacom Graphire tablets. They are wonderful and come with some nice software.

Overall a great book. I am always going back to reference it.

Why does Amazon insist on selling an outdated version of this book? My wife bought me this book from Amazon for Father's day, but had to return it and buy the LATEST EDITION from another online retailer.

I'm a graphic designer, working with both print and web, and I am finding this book an absolute treasure! If you're an intermediate Photoshop user, there's no question about it, YOU NEED THIS BOOK! The tricks and tips revealed in this book are simply amazing. I've only owned the book for a few days, and am already using techniques I've learned from these pages. I'm eagerly waiting to devour more of the material.

This is not a book for novices--it assumes that you already know your way around Photoshop. Without that basic knowledge, you'll be out of your depth in many of these lessons.

I love it that each two-page spread is a self-contained unit/lesson which teaches a technique or procedure that will give you the desired results.

I have to say that I don't think I've ever been this excited about a book on Photoshop!!

Fine book, but the edition on sale by Amazon is not the current edition. If you own, or intend to buy, Photoshop CS, buy the current edition, ISBN 0240519531. Or, like me, you'll waste time and money buying and returning the wrong edition, then buying the new one somewhere else. Hope this helps.

What a FANTASTIC book this is! I actually have the newer version of this book that was just released for Photoshop CS this month, but since I cannot find it here at Amazon I thought I would add the review to this older version....simply because it is such an excellent book! I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone else....middle to highly skilled PS users.....perhaps even beginners...they might struggle a bit in the beginning but it is a valuable book to have in the library that you can refer to. I am an advanced PS user but find this book invaluable for referring to for quick tips and ideas and quick methods for doing things that one might normally do habitually in a much more complicated & roundabout way. GREAT for inspiration too!! And there are so many things I have learnt about...new methods....new ideas....THANKS FOR A REALLY GREAT BOOK, STEVE!!

And I thought I was already Photoshop Guru 'til I bought this Book! It gave me tremendous amount of tips and tricks that I would never discover in a lifetime. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who'd want to master the program, and would like to impress people with their graphic manipulations.

All-in-all, this is a very nice investment, you can't afford to pass. I would have bought this for any price. Every penny was well spent!

I'm so pleased with Steve Caplins ability to illuminate the path through complex software issues that I'm desperately hoping he chooses to write books on CAD, you know, great programs like WiseImage Pro 5.2 which is a terrific program (Like Illustrator aspired to be but wasn't) but is much more (in my opinion I) difficult to learn (than Adobe) and the WiseImage help files are complex (in my opinion II) and stuffy (in my opinion III). Keep writing Steve, and give us some crutches to get through CAD programs too! Thanks :>

I was surprised to see a book sensibly written and illustrated for a change. Usually these books are interesting enough to buy but then after you sit down and try to follow the lessons they're either boring or worse, you have to repeat an operation ten times to find out what the author 'meant' to say. This book is not the case, this book is exciting and very well presented so that you can glide through it with ease without getting shrouded in that dull envelope of boring figuring-out repetitiveness that other books and lessons grind you down with. I was, actually, quite disliking the cover and not liking the taste of the illustrations used in the lessons, oddly enough. I would have preferred pictures for the lessons more to my liking, even the coffee cup looks unappetizing, but for the purpose of the lesson its perfectly fine. What makes this book better is that he explains how to use the pen tool simply and efficiently in little cartoon box examples on two pages before you put it to use on the coffee cup. That is what makes this book different. He recognizes that you needed something about the tool AMPLIFIED before you started the lesson, THE PEN TOOL. I read that part at the book store downtown and went home and tried it and realized I needed the lesson as well, .... It would be difficult to follow if one were unfamiliar with PhotoShop, so I would take a 'one-day' course on PhotoShop if necessary to get up to speed for this book, this is comfortable for intermediate level users. After all, you would have to know it first, certainly, before you attempted to cheat, wouldn't you? Can't cheat at cards unless you know how to play cards, right? I'm waiting for the Cheat Illustrator book now. Buy it, you won't regret it.

Awesome book im not a begginner, but im not advanced either. The book opened my eyes and was pretty inspiring. Some of he techniques it teached are things you would actually use when designing a image. All in all its a awesome book I highy recommend it to Middle range or higher Photoshop users.

This is my 24th PS book. I've been through all the page by page manuals from the CIAB books through the Real World types, the Magic Series, WOW Series, etc. I'm at that stage where Photrealism is a challenge I would like to conquer. I have both books by the photorealistic guru Bert Monroy, and they are both excellent. Steve Caplin's book "How to Cheat in Photoshop" is a joy and can proudly sit right next to Berts books. While Mr. Monroy's books go into step by step detail, Steve Caplins book shows the shortcuts that become invaluable time savers when working in this type of medium. And there are serious plusses here. Beside the standard CD with images to use to work through the lessons, some of the more complicated lessons have video instruction that make what he is trying to convey much easier to follow. But my favorite thing about this book is that it is set up as a reference book. If you need to "match the head to the body", there is a heading and a two page "how to". Sections include: Selecting, Hiding and Showing, Composing the Scene, Light and Shade, Heads and Bodies, Shiny Surfaces, Metal, Wood and Stone, Paper and Fabric, The Third Dimension and Hyper Realism. But again, this book is set up like a reference book. It's not really intended to be started on page one and worked through. It's like Scott Kelby's great "Down and Dirty" books. So who should buy this book? If you are not into Photorealism, stay away. And although the lessions are well written and some even have video instruction, I am not sure if I would recommend this book to PS novices. The book is definitely written with the assumption that you have a certain level of knowledge of PS. But I really am enjoying this book. I can't remember thinking a book was this cool since I read Photoshop Channel Chops! This book is going to get used a lot.

This is the first book about image compositing in Photoshop. The author, a master picture mixer, reveals how he uses a small set of Photoshop functions to collage all kinds of source material into realistic-looking composites simply, quickly, and reliably.

I must say that this book is definitely one of the best Photoshop advice books I have see. Steve Caplin is very thorough and addresses topics everyone can relate to. Many questions of mine about how to produce clean edges, make perfect selections, and wrap text were presented very straight-forward. There is so much content in this book, along with the HOT TIPS in the margins of about every page.
At the 36.99 list price, no Photshop user should be without it.....

Being a part time photoshop user of not much more than beginner status I still enjoyed this book. I learned a lot and there is much more in there to grow into.

This book is very well done. The work examples are very good.., not the amaturish examples found in many other books. Almost every page has full color pictures on it, not just a few pages in the middle.

This book is not for beginners at Photoshop. You would be very frustrated. You need to have a good grasp of the tools in Photoshop before you are ready for this one. More advanced users will really appreciate it though.

The author, Steve Caplin is a professional Illustrator for MacUser magazine. His book examples are oriented towards creating photos for magazine ads. I really like this book. I also recommend looking at Photoshop 7 Studio by Bert Monroy for a good photorealism book. This one is better though.

This book came into my hands at the right time. I have been developing my Photoshop skills for a few years now following the teachings of some of the best users in the business: Kelby, Eismann, Bauer, McClelland, O'Quinn, Ward, Smith, Hamlin, Balay, Monroy, and others. Now add Steve Caplin for writing a book that teaches photorealistic skills and montage techniques that are truly amazing and totally useful.

This is not a beginners book, however. You need a good base in Photoshop to follow many of his techniques. There is an accompanying CD with the images he uses in his book. This was helpful to me to be able to follow along with his well written tutorials. Mr. Caplin is also accessible through his website to help get you past a problem. He lives in England, so be aware of time zones. His website is fun to visit, too! With this in mind, buy the book and add real depth and artistic skills to your expanding base of Photoshop techniques that will truly amaze your clients and help build your business! Thank you Steve Caplin!