Start Dreaming

Start Dreaming!

Idea to Image is about how Adobe Photoshop CS2, the most powerful image-editing program for photographers, can help you through the process of turning your ideas into more creative and artistic imagesor images that can bring a smile to your face. At a deeper level, this book is about using your imaginationabout dreaming in Photoshop to create your own artistic pictures, unique images that no person on the planet has even dreamed (or conjured up).

What will you learn in this book? Plenty, I hopeabout Photoshop, photography, and your own creative talent. You'll also learn a bit about me because any book is a reflection (permanent, no less) of the author's personality.

In addition to my favorite Photoshop artistic techniques, illustrated with some of my favorite photographs from around the world, I've included two chapters on photography. "The Photographic Idea" leads off the book, and "The Photographic Image" closes it. (Get it? Idea to Image.) These are important chapters, because you must strive to get the best possible and most creative in-camera image. Always.

Sandwiched between the "Idea" and "Image" chapters are the chapters that form the heart of this book: "Image-Enhancement Artistry," "Creative-Image Artistry," and "Advanced-Image Artistry." They offer ideas for cooking up artistic images from your straight shots.

The chapters are lessons that are carefully designed to enhance your learning experience. You can look at them like a menu: "Image-Enhancement Artistry" is the Photoshop appetizer, "Creative-Image Artistry" is the Photoshop main course, and "Advanced Image-Artistry" is the Photoshop dessert.

For each lesson in the middle section, I've included a work imagethe photograph that leads off the lesson. You can download these images from the Images page at www.ricksammon.com. Play around with these to your heart's content. Make a screensaver if you like. But please remember that I hold the copyright on these images, and they are for your own personal use only.

Here are four suggestions about how to approach this book:

1. Read the chapters and lessons in order. You'll learn important techniques in early lessons that you can use in later lessons.

2. Learn one technique at a time, and then practice that technique on your images. Using a music analogy (I attended Berklee College of Music), if you try to master in one week a jazz tune that changes keys five or six times and requires a bunch of thirteenth and minor ninth chords, you'll probably become frustrated, just as I would. But if you try to learn only a few measures and chords per day, or per week, you'll see your progress and be more satisfied with your efforts.

3. When you're applying different effects suggested in this book, play and have fun. Don't take this stuff too seriously. The goal is to create something new and exciting and differentan image that will make you smile. Again, using the music analogy, improvise!

4. Don't be so quick to move on to the next lesson. Experiment with the pull-down menus. Click fly-out arrows here and there. See what other creative possibilities await you.

But what about me, the guy who put all these lessons together for you? To begin, many people say that I'm lucky to have this dream jobtravel photographer and writer, author, television host, workshop leader, magazine columnist, and Photoshop instructor. When I hear that, I always respond, "The harder I work, the luckier I become." Truth is, I work my butt offin the field and at my computer. My advice is, "Work hard, get lucky!"

But it is a dream job, traveling around the planet, looking through my camera, and capturing a frozen moment in time. (It was a nightmare, however, when I was seasick in the Philippines, and a horror when I had heatstroke in Morocco. But I still wouldn't trade my job for anythingexcept maybe to play rhythm guitar for Eric Clapton or Carlos Santana.)

Image-making has evolved tremendously since I took pictures as a kid. Today, photography is really a 50-50 deal: 50 percent image capture, 50 percent digital darkroom work.

Work? Personally, I don't consider sitting at my computer for hours with my iTunes playing work. I'm practicing, having fun, and working toward a goal. If you're into Zen, you know that working toward the goal is the joy of the processalthough coming up with a new, improved, creative image is cool, too.

With this book (my twenty-seventh, I think), I hope you take and make better in-camera pictures and then have a blast (as well as a rewarding experience) enhancing them in Photoshop.

Someone once asked me where I get my creative ideas. My reply: All the ideas are out there somewhere in a flowing river. It's up to us to fish them out. (I'm just glad that I don't live downriver from Photoshop Evangelist Julieanne Kost.)

Rick "Raw Rules" Sammon
June 2006

P.S. Most introductions don't include a postscript, but I include it here to make two important points, in case you skipped ahead. One: my most important job is being a dad; that puts my life in perspective. Two: I have a sign over my desk that reads, "Don't believe your own bullsh**." That helps me keep my accomplishments in perspective…which is good for folks who think they're famous.