In his small studio in Brooklyn Heights, New York, Hamid Rahmanian spent 10,000 hours in front of his computer cobbling together a new Shahnameh, the epic mythology of Iran.

In the 1,000 years since the Persian poet Ferdowsi put the oral tradition into verse, there have been many versions produced in lithograph, miniature and manuscript form. To create Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings, Rahmanian meticulously researched and scanned images and texts spanning the 14th through the 19th centuries, from the Indian subcontinent to the Levant and beyond.

“I work like a DJ,” said Rahmanian, 44, an award-winning graphic designer and filmmaker. “A DJ samples music that already exists and manipulates the song and creates their own original music.”

Once he had grabbed the images, Rahmanian digitally retouched and recomposed them into an elegant, vibrant and very readable Shahnameh. The book itself is like a Photoshop epic. Each page has anywhere from 7 to 120 layers to it, and as anyone who has ever attempted to make the slightest alteration in Photoshop will know, that requires a lot of time, skill and attention to detail.