Digital Home Thoughts: The Only Photoshop Book You'll Ever Need

Helpful Tips Abound
The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers has taught me a few techniques that have become a standard part of my Photoshop repertoire.

One of these is the Extract filter. Until I bought Kelby’s book, the Extract filter was just a confusing mess of tools and sliders. Kelby uses eleven steps, including a clever layer duplication, to illustrate extracting someone from a background for use in another image. Three of the steps take care of dealing with pesky drop-outs (areas that should have been captured by the extraction but weren’t). He doesn’t use an easy image as a sample, either: he dives right in and extracts a model with very wispy hair from a sporty looking car.


Figure 2: Before extraction.


Figure 3: After extraction.

While extraction is a fun party trick and makes for great (and sometimes goofy!) images, my favourite tip by far is whitening teeth. This is just one of 18 different techniques described to correct common problems with portraits, but is so straightforward and simple I wonder how I lived without it.


Figure 4: Before whitening.


Figure 5: After whitening.

While the above two techniques should give you a taste of what you expect from The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, it’s impossible to do justice to Kelby’s detailed portrait retouching techniques in a short review. I will say that the pages of chapter six are well worn in my copy: every portrait I take has me reaching for this section to correct the little issues before sending the image to print.