Motivation: OReilly book on Illustration with Photoshop
Features: 9 French Illustrators explain how they used Photoshop on illustration projects
Photoshop has a deserved reputation as a brilliant photo finishing tool with its color, style, and layering controls. But Photoshop has built up a very solid palette of pens, brushes and brush customizations. These go along with traditional strengths in masking and newly strengthened filtering capabilities (the Filter browser is one of the star attractions of the new Photoshop CS)such that Photoshop is starting to be perceived as a topnotch illustration tool as well. It certainly helps Photoshop's case that vector drawing capabilities have also improved over the last few versions as well.

So what Oreilly's Illustration with Photoshop: A Designers handbook does is show how nine French illustrators have used Photoshop on serious illustration projects. What is fascinating to see is when and how Photoshop is used.

For example, I fully had expected the artists to start and use Photoshop from the beginning because the new hardware tablets and tools link in so very nicely with Photoshop's software brushes and vector pens. Not so. One illustrator, Hippolyte bemoans the exacting and unforgiving nature of scratchboard work yet proceeds to do so blithely bypassing Photoshop's powerful history and undo capabilities. And in general, many of the illustrators started with doing traditional pen and pencil drawings and then scanned the resulting sketches in. Two artists used photos as templates, similar to the improved cloning capabilities in Corel's Painter IX. So already there is diversity in approaches.

And this theme is carried on in the finishing of the images in color. In fact, several of the artists drastically revised the original pencil sketch image and tried a number of different coloring techniques. Notably absent were any widespread use of fills, patterns, and gradients. What was used were Photoshop's layering capabilities to try on different stylings. As well, polygon stars, light airbrush fog, and color density changes. In general, going from sketch to final product was a truly broad set of individual styling choices.

At slightly less than a hundred lavishly laid out pages, general guidelines but no comprehensive details - this is a specialized Photoshop book that will have some saying the $25US price tag is an absolute bargain and others hoping that it shows up in their local library.