Motivation: OReilly book on Photo Retouching with Photoshop
Features: 9 French artists use of Photoshop for Photo Retouching
Judged by the cover this book looks like one of those endless variations on how to do fine point retouching with Photoshop's cloner and healing brush tools out front and zzzzzzzzzzzz.... NOT! Yes the first chapter of nine is about classic image recovery techniques including a lot of clever use of color histograms and the channel command and functions available in Photoshop.

But be prepared in the next exercise for a jumping bikini clad model being whisked from the studio lights to an advertising poster with fresh and savvy background. Yes there are 14 of the book's 96 pages devoted to the Photoshop bread and butter project, the ultimate perfume product shot.

But there is also a wonderful section on the ultimate in Photoshop gardening. I should explain - in Photoshop "Grooming" is the cropping, color corrections, and small imperfection removal acceptable in most camera club photo finishing competitions. "Gardening" on the other hand implies large scale removal and equally discrete additions to the image and is generally frowned upon in camera club competitions. Finally, wholescale removal and additions are called "Photo Compositions" and that is back into the realm of Art.

And there are more exercises that explore color and figure transpositions (Corel Knockout is not referred to directly, but some of the exercises are good commercials). In sum, retouching here is really about recomposing images to meet an objective for artistic statement - and a good cross section of Photoshop tools are on display here. Missing from the mix is the usual OReilly book template, a comprehensive index - but at 96 pages it might be overkill. Again, the $25US will be a value to be reckoned in the eyes of the bookholder- this party would be sorely tempted.