Beth Wheeler

A wonderful way to bring your visions to life: Beth Wheeler is a quilter, and she wrote this book for quilters, but the techniques she presents have much broader application. Painters, collage artists, journalers, and anyone else who wants to use Photoshop to make unique images from photos will find plenty of information and inspiration in Next Steps in Altered Photo Artistry. And the included CD, with images used in the book, enables you to follow the steps to get the same results you see in the book. It’s a great way to learn!

Beginning with Photoshop navigation, Wheeler gets you comfortable with standard commands and frequently used functions, including cropping and resizing images – so you can use just part of a photo, if you want, and size it to fit your project.

Especially helpful to me was the section on color functions – adjusting hue and saturation, along with replacing one color with another, are two functions that instantly expand moods and effects you can create with one image. I was also pleased to learn about the colorization function – I converted a photo to black and white, then colorized it to get that vintage, hand-tinted look. How cool is that?

I played for a long time with the techniques in the chapter called Abstraction. These are fun, fun, fun! Making changes in perspective and applying distortion filters to the image can give a soft, dreamy look or transform your image into something else altogether.
The one-page section on embellishment seemed out of place and, as brief as it was, might just as well have been left out. But no matter: The gallery of images that follows is so inspiring, my mind is busy with ideas for altered photo applications on textiles as well as collages and maybe some greeting cards for the coming holiday season.… (altro)