Too good to be true? Here’s the deal: Why fork out several hundred dollars for Photoshop‘s flagship CS edition when a few dollars will do. That at least is the promise made by a certain Evan Sharboneau, author of Trick Photography and Special Effects.

Sharboneau promises the kind of get-slim-in-60-seconds guarantee. And asks for $97 instead of Photoshop’s $700. Still, he does make sense.

Everyone was assuming he was using Photoshop, he says. But it was the plain old digital camera only.

He had no money to burn, so he had to figure it out on a shoestring.

And trying to photoshop your photos, he insists, will only take you that far.

Photos don’t just happen. You need to have an artistic eye.

And, more importantly, you must know the tricks to create artistic photos and how to apply those tricks.

Key is, says Evan, knowing when and how to use special photographic techniques.

The three core parts to his instructional ebook are:

• Light painting and long exposure effects: Fundamental lights and techniques, other light sources, light painting techniques, lightning, motion blur, star trails and other fun long exposures.
• Trick photography and special effects: In-camera illusions, HDR and infrared photography, 360×180 planet panoramas, time-displacement photography via scanner, Droste and Harris shutter effects.
• Photoshop projects: Introduction to layer masks and blending modes, multiplicity photography, levitation photography, invisibility and flesh manipulations, fake tilt-shift photography and mixing day with night.

Seeing is believing? This is what you can get:

To be honest, even for the hard-boiled photographer it’s a useful, refreshingly original ebook that inspires.