This book inspired me to purchase Shake. Well that and when Apple lowered the price on it to $499. But, here is a book that helps me translate my AfterEffects skills and my Motion experience by putting side by side examples for each application for the same project. Talk about a rosetta stone! Personally, I'd like to see more of that. Not all of the examples are like that but there are enough to get the user familiar with Shake.

For those people who already have indepth experience with a particular application, you know that using an application that's like it and is used for the same purpose is usually pretty easy to pick up. It's just a matter of translation. Where's the menu item or icon or keystroke that let's me do "this". I suppose I also appreciate this because I spent hours going to user group meetings to get all this information, but never had it in hard copy to take back to my computer and work with at my leisure. And yes you can find tutorials on line for a number of applications but not with all the pictures and detail that this book has to offer. It's truly a pleasuer.

I'm also very pleased with all the explaintions of different types of effects and how they are made. It's a wonderful compendium for the beginner. Or in my case an editor who enjoys playing around with fx.

The DVD comes with "Shake in a Day", a tutorial meant to get you up and running and a Trial Copy of Shake, along with trials of Motion 2.1, SilhouetteFX plugin and Conduit from dvGarage.

The book is full color which is very nice.

I'll be working through this book over the next few months in depth and I'll be sure to post more of my findings as I go.

cheers
diannah

Skin
The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting,
Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies
by Lee Varis
Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley
ISBN: 047004733-X

Oh my God! I called my mother up and asked her to send me all the photos she wanted me to retouch. I was going to give her a face lift based on what I saw in this book. She didn't send them to me but that's how excited I was.

Lee starts right out with Digital Imaging Basics which I skimmed right over but I could see it was a well thought out introduction for the beginner who's never done this before. I went right to Color Management and Workflow. Even though I'm not a shooter I do occasionally dabble behind the lens and the information Lee gives us in Lighting and Photographing People is phenominal. I'm going to give this book to a friend fo mine who does headshots. He's a good photographer but I know that the information on Lighting and then in the next chapter on Color of Skin is usually only gotten through hard won experience.

My favorite part of the book in on Retouching and Special Effects. I've been a Photoshop hound since the early 90's and I love some of the tips and tricks he reveals in these chapters.

And he doesn't leave Print behind, adding yet another section on ColorManagement for Print, something so often misunderstood by beginners.

The Companion CD is filled with even more information, calibration charts, PDFs and samples from the book.

cheers
diannah

Review to Come