Chapter 11. 38 Special Photographic Special Effects

Everything up to this point has been all "scientific" and "by the book." It hasn't been fun. It's been work. Okay, it's been fun work, but it's all been correcting and managing and balancing color and fixing blemishes and stuff like that. But you know, and I know, that's not why you bought Photoshop. You didn't buy your first copy of Photoshop because you wanted to create a tonal balance within your images. You did it to meet girls. Unless, of course, you're already a girl, in which case you might have bought it to meet girls, but girls aren't as impressed with Photoshop as guys are (we tend to like anything that runs on a computer or comes with a remote), so my guess is you bought it to meet boys. Okay, that's not why any of us really bought Photoshop, is it? It is? Wow, I didn't see that coming. Anyway, if you didn't buy Photoshop to attract the opposite sex in some kind of weird mating ritual (sex and mating in the same sentenceI might as well order a Jag!), you probably bought it because of all the cool effects you can pull off. You probably thought, "I can't wait to create some flaming text, and then some ice text, and then I want to scan a photo of my friend Earl and put his head on my other friend Dean's body, and then...." That stuff wears off pretty fast, doesn't it? But now, you want to do real stuff. Effects that matter. Effects clients are willing to pay for. I'm here for you, to lead you away from the flaming text and toward the lightthe light of a new tomorrow that's brimming with hope and glistening with the soft edges that only a well-placed drop shadow can bring.