Shadows and Light is no longer for sale

Great painters, Monet, or Vermeer can conjure pictures from their inner vision but the rest of us lack the artistic skills to get our ideas out of our mind and onto paper or canvas. Now, however, scenes can be created by anybody with the imagination to conceive of the image and the technical skills to use Photoshop® to its full potential.

Digital photography is different from traditional photography, not only in the means used to record, process and print the image. There is a profound, and revolutionary difference in what you can do with the picture.

With Photoshop® you can build any image that you can imagine by compositing parts from separate photographs, whether those parts are objects, people, backgrounds, sky, anything at all from as many photographs as you like, if — if — you can create a uniform lighting over all of the combined parts.

You have to learn the skills that I can teach you, but you also have to think differently — cast out all of your photographic training and rethink what you are doing. With digital photography and Photoshop®, you have the creative control of painting combined with the believability, and the instant access to image content of photography.

With Photoshop® you have the ability to make art — fine art, not just commercial art — that should stand equal to that of the best painting and sculpture. Serious, believable, beautiful photographic art that has been entirely “hand-made” in Photoshop®.

Shadows and Light is a four hundred and sixteen page electronic book available in .pdf format on a CD-ROM.
     You will find thirty seven clear, detailed, step-by-step tutorials on how to cutout any object (figures, trees, flyaway hair), move, reshape (change facial expressions, hand gestures, weight or height), and re-light (cast shadows as well as on-object shading) any object that has been moved into any scene.

For example, you might have a figure, this 3D render, for example:

You might want to move it into a real, sunlit scene such as this:

You would then need to re-light the figure with the same sunlight as is in the new scene, like this:

Find a detailed description of the book’s contents on this zipped .pdf file.
[Please note that graphics in this Features .pdf are very low resolution (72 ppi) to minimize file size. The images on the CD-ROM are all high resolution (350 ppi). When you view this Features file in Reader, be sure you have Edit > Preferences > General set to Smooth Line Art (select that option). Thanks.]
Shadows and Light Features .pdf
(299 KB)

The CD-ROM includes eleven Quicktime screen capture video clips, linked from within the document, that illustrate the techniques described in the text.

The screen capture videos are of excellent quality, 640 x 480, and require Quicktime version 5.02 or later to view. If you do not have Quicktime, you can download it from Apple.com (it’s free). There is no audio on the clips; they are there to serve as visual review of what you will have just learned in that tutorial.

Mac users, please note: this book was written on a PC. All commands, and keyboard shortcuts in the text are PC only. All videos and screen capture stills within the book feature only the Windows OS. This should not be a problem for advanced users, but may be an issue for less experienced users.

Copyright © 2003 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2003 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com