Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop 2nd Edition Paperback – February 25, 2020

This is a solid book, and I think some of the negative reviews are more reflective of the reviewers misguided expectations. The title of the book is “beginners guide to digital painting IN PHOTOSHOP”. This books does not teach you art fundamentals, it teaches you how to use photoshop as a tool for creating art. There are some brief explanations of core art fundamentals - value, perspective, composition, etc, but the aim of this book is really to explain how to use photoshop and the many tools within photoshop to reach a polished final product. I can see how this is misleading with “beginner” in the title of the book, but the book should be approached with the assumption that you have some general understanding of art fundamentals and are looking to branch out into a digital medium. In this case, it’s a great starting point. It touches on the various tools and techniques photoshop has to offer and then goes through a few brief tutorials. It also includes some quick explanations of material rendering such as rocks, foliage, leather, skin, etc.I would like to mention that this is the 2nd edition print of this product. I have the 1st edition which was printed back in 2011. I really enjoyed both versions, but this edition was far better produced. Everything is explained better and more concisely, and the format is easier to work through. The original was also printed in a landscape format, and this is like a standard book, which I find easier to use personally. The techniques in this edition are more poignant, and the contributing artists are more recognized members of the professional art community.I’m a sucker for digital art books, and most anything 3dtotal prints, this is a great addition to the collection and I highly recommend it. I think it has something for everyone whether you are just starting out painting in photoshop or you are more advanced, you will find the tips and techniques useful. If you are a true beginner to photoshop, I highly recommend checking out “Digital Painting in Photoshop: Industry Techniques for Beginners”. It goes much more in depth into photoshops tools, and the program as a whole, and only focuses on three or four tutorials - all of which are much more in depth and walks you through every step of the way. I think it is truly aimed at beginners, and may meet the expectations some were looking for in this book.

It is pretty hard to make sense of this book. At the same time, it is easy to see why it is all over the place. It is a collection of "tutorials" and Instructors. The quality and depth are widely apart from each other.I have no doubt that any of the artists presented knows how to do what their profession needs, but to express it so starters can learn from it is another story.I buy those books to explore their values and if those might be useful for people who I instruct.There are key concepts that are often misunderstood, for example, in the perspective part. This is below the beginner level. A two-point perspective has only two points if all surfaces are parallel or 90º to each other. A simple sentence would have changed the lives of so many artists. Now they might, as I have seen it often, try to squeeze any shape into two vanishing points only.The part where the sky and clouds are introduced, where to put the values, and why is not in the slightest explained. In other parts, there is an extremely well-done introduction to how the "inner logic" of it works, especially in the human painting part.Anyway, with so many weak points, I can only hope that a new editor with a better understanding is used to create edition three. There is, after all, a lot of potential in this work.One tip for edition three, without color management touched in the slightest, young artist will hit very fast a strong wall. Even TVs have left the sRGB (REC 709) gamut for good. To leave people in the belief that they can use Photoshop as it comes installed is beyond me.

The Kindle version of this book is so badly formatted that it is effectively useless. I do not recommend that you buy it. Those of us that have bought it are owed either a refund or an updated version.

Good book BUT:The kindle version has a serious issue on PC or Ipad in that the letters, paragraphs and even some of the graphics flows into each other and make it difficult to read/follow a discussion in the book. Needs to be corrected and updated electronic version made available!

This book starts off well explaining tools needed to use in photoshop for digital painting, but they hired different artist for tutorials and you get lost due to the artist ignoring key explanations for you to complete the exercise. I find myself going to youtube to get an understanding and ignoring the book altogether what a complete waste of money. It takes a special person to teach, someone can be a master at their craft but be a horrible teacher and that is what the artist in this book are horrible teachers. This book was written for pros not beginners they should change the title of the book to Pro's guide to painting better.

As a previous reviewer has stated, the kindle version has a huge font/formatting issue causing text between columns to run in on top of each other. Some graphics also cover ends of sentences as seen in the attached photos. This is a huge shame as I was very excited to purchase this and read - proving very annoying to impossible. Will change rating when updated to fix.

Was so excited about this book but for the Kindle for PC it is just not worth getting the Kindle version. The columns overlap at the edges which makes that part of the text unreadable. You cannot increase the text size and the Zoom feature is disabled. The spacing for a lot of the words are not even there so it makes a couple words squeezed together to look like one word which is frustrating trying to decipher what the sentence actually says. I would not recommend getting this particular book on Kindle. I give it 2 stars because the book would be great for it not being unreadable unless you read with magnifying glasses and are able to figure out the one word that is actually two or three words.

The words on the kindle edition are overlapping on every page and it's pretty much undecipherable.