Book excerpt: Don’t bother reading this book unless you’re ready to get your hands dirty. In Hacking the Digital Print, artist Bonny Lhotka redefines what it means to be a photographer. For one thing, you don't always need Photoshop to alter the reality you capture through your lens. In this book, you’ll learn how to create unique images using tools you make and modify yourself. Lhotka shows you how to use analog distortion filters, custom textures, and lens modifiers to create images that look like you made them, not an app. You’ll also learn how to re-create classic printmaking techniques using non-toxic digital alternatives, including a water-based transfer solution that’s safe to use anywhere, whether it’s the studio, classroom, or kitchen counter. Anyone can push a button and create a nice print–there is little challenge in getting a high-quality image out of a desktop printer these days. Lhotka shows you how to take your work to the next level by printing on materials such as wood, glass, plastics, and metal. For the truly adventurous, Lhotka shares her custom techniques for taking photographs and applying them to 3D-printed objects created with popular consumer 3D printers. Part artist/part mad scientist, Lhotka has spent many hours experimenting, hacking, and tearing things apart to discover new ways to take, make, and print images. She encourages you to take the techniques you’ll learn in this book, hack them, and make them your own. With some techniques you will fail. It will be messy. You will try and have to try again. But in the process, you will make your own exciting discoveries, find solutions to your own problems, and create a body of work that is uniquely yours.