Digital Photo Art: New Directions
Airey is an author and international photographer whose work crosses the boundaries between traditional drawing, painting, and digital imaging. In her sixth book, she outlines techniques for turning ordinary digital photographs into beautiful works of art. Drawing on her skills as a traditional artist, she explores the transfer of digital images to fine art papers, canvas, and even wood and metal, sometimes incorporating other physical processes, such as paper coatings and hand-painting photos with oils. She also outlines in step-by-step fashion how to use software, such as PhotoShop, Corel Painter, Nik Software, and Akvis Software, to transform pictures taken with a digital camera into images that look remarkably like paintings. Infrared photography is one of her specialties; she gives an excellent dissertation on how to think in infrared and provides information on how to have a digital camera converted to a dedicated infrared camera. The instructions are brief, easy to follow, and should spark some ideas to take some of those images already sitting on your hard drive to a new level. --David Siegfried