Ready to cook up an award-winning photo? This book shows you how!

SEBASTOPOL, Calif. Learning to use Photoshop CS3 can be daunting. But with Tim Shelbourne's timely new book Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook (O'Reilly, $29.99), you don't have to be a trained artist, pro photographer, or Photoshop expert to cook up amazing results quickly and easily.

Indeed, Photoshop CS3 offers digital creatives innumerable exciting digital ingredients and garnishes to experiment with. "Day can be turned to night, skin can be transformed to wood or stone, and that image of your pet dog can sport a knowing, but subtle grin," explains Shelbourne.

And Shelbourne packed his new book with 53 easy-to-follow recipes, inspirational digital imagery, and authoritative information and advice for digital photographers, designers, and artists. So if your experience of digital manipulation so far consists of simple tonal adjustments and color corrections you're in for a treat.

This ultimate no-nonsense handbook shows you how to:

• Use the improved Vanishing Point, Lens Blur, and Black & White filters

• Create graphic art effects: posterization, watercolor, pen and ink

• Work with lighting effects: neon glows, lens flares, fire and flame effects

• Simulate natural phenomena: rain, snow, and lightning

• Adapt traditional techniques: film grain, contrast masks, hand-tinting, cross-processing

• Add motion blurs and other special effects

• Assemble multi-layered images and photomontages

Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook is a valuable resource that you'll return to again and again, and a real bonus for those times when inspiration runs short or you need to pin down a particular event. It gives aspiring digital artists everything they need to start with almost any image source and end up with stunning works of art reminiscent of the finest portraits, landscapes, silkscreen paintings, Japanese woodcut prints, Pop Art comic strips, and much, much more.

Tim Shelbourne worked for 20 years as a traditional artist and illustrator before converting to digital image making. Tim specializes in digital fine art and photo-manipulation using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Corel Painter. His tutorials are published regularly in Total Digital Photography magazine.

The Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook is available for $21.89 through the Imaging Resource Amazon affiliate program, a 27 percent discount.