Katrin Eismann wrote a complete reference on retouching and restoring photographs with Photoshop for New Riders. The copy that I reviewed is the 2nd edition, and this book is the absolute reference for the job, in my opinion.

Eismann’s book has 366 pages and each of those pages is filled with an invaluable stream of how-to advice for restoring and retouching photos. There’s no easy beginning in this book. Eismann jumps in the topic both feet forward.

I honestly wouldn’t know how she should have gone about otherwise. Retouching and restoring aren’t the easiest of things you can do with Photoshop. Judging from Eismann’s book, there’s even a lot more you can do with Photoshop than just enhance old photographs.

Completely torn photos are brought back to a near-perfect state by the author. Photos that have been in the water, have discoloured severely or haven’t been right from the start, are all rbought to at least an acceptable level of perfection.

The great part of this book is that you can learn it all by applying a copycat method. Photos can be torn up in a number of ways, but bringing them back to completeness always involve the same methodology. Eismann teaches you the best method.

In doing so, she walsk you through most of Photoshop’s powerful tools, which is an added value of this book. Everybody has some photos that have discoloured over the years, are infected by fungus, or are torn apart. Photoshop Restoring and Retouching will show you exactly how you can bring those visual memories back to life.

The book, although at times using quite complicated methods, is a great tutorial for Photoshop novices as well.