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Digital Photography: Expert Techniques: Professional Tips for Using Photoshop & Related Tools to Enhance Your Digital Photographs
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10 new or used available from CDN$ 7.80
Average customer review:
Product Description
This absorbing book, by professional photographer and author Ken Milburn, offers a ton of expert advice to those who are ready to move to the next level with digital photography. Rather than a general discussion of photography principles, Digital Photography: Expert Techniques focuses on workflow: time-tested, step-by-step procedures based on hard-nosed experience by and for genuine practitioners of the art. The book's conversational tone presents detailed information about what to look for in today's affordable high-end digicams, how to use simple techniques and equipment to shoot breathtaking shots, instructions on shooting great panoramas, dos-and-don'ts for creating better Photoshop masks, and professional digital darkroom techniques for everything from knockouts to restoration to transforming your photos into watercolors. It even shows you how to get your most prized photographs printed and ready for exhibition.
Contents include:
- Understanding your digital camera from the inside out.
- Creating effects with the camera: making panoramas, high-resolution matrixes, infrared photos, and more.
- General composition and managing your workflow.
- Using the digital darkroom and Photoshop CS to make your images professional caliber.
- Understanding the power of Photoshop CS selections and masks.
- Using special effects to save what's good, and get rid of the bad and the ugly.
- Creating fictitious photos: bend and wrap images to fit an object, insert a more interesting skyscrape, and more.
- Professional color and tonal management
- Creating portfolios and presenting your images on the Web.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #303087 in Books
- Published on: 2004-03-19
- Original language: English
- Binding: Paperback
- 496 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"At last there is a book for the 'prosumer'! And if you don't know what the word means this isn't the book for you!" - Davey Winder, -PC Plus, September 2004
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Digital Photography: Expert Techniques, 2nd Ed
The author gives a lot of useful information for optimizing digital photographs. I found that the author assumes that the reader has Adobe Photoshop CS2 (which I don't) and that the reader already has some idea of the concepts involved with taking digital photographs. The book covers pretty well most things that a person will need to deal with such as the necessary computer hardware, image processing to eke out image quality both on a global scale (e.g. white balancing) and on localized changes (e.g. touching up facial blemishes), right to calibrating a printer.
One thing that was a bit annoying was the fact that the author introduces concepts without first explaining them. For example, the use of layers is mentioned in early chapters without really explaining what they're about. Then chapter 5 discusses them, without ever really explaining why they are used. Perhaps he has assumed that people are familiar with CS2 already. Another point was the concept of workflows. The term is used without really explaining what it is.
Overall, the book does a pretty good job providing expert techniques for digital photography. To get most benefit from the book, a reader should have Adobe Photoshop CS2.
Above and beyond the typical digital photography book
There are many books available explaining how to make the most of Photoshop or how to get everything you can out of your digital camera. While this book goes into some of these topics, it goes a step further by looking at it from the point of view of a professional photographer. This insight is particularly welcome, which shifts the focus of the book from knowing how to use Photoshop to how to be a better photographer.
The author takes the professional photographer's perspective (although this book can really be read and enjoyed by anyone serious about digital photography), which includes discussing issues such as storage, cataloging, CCD basics, and software. The author discusses some of his file naming techniques, shows some of the tools he uses, and provides recommendations for camera purchases.
Rather than simply rehashing the same Photoshop tricks available in every other digital photography book, the author shows what professional photographers do (bracketing photographs) as well as different software that might be better suited for a specific task (stitching software to combine many individual photographs into one large image). Naturally, many other image manipulations are discussed, however, the central point of the discussions are always how to make a better photograph. I found discussions that focused on the photograph rather than the software tool very refreshing and quite interesting and useful.
The author wraps up the book by providing some ideas on how to break into the business as a professional photographer. There is a discussion on printing photographs and how to create some beginning marketing materials. In all of these discussions, the focus remains on the photograph. I enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to individuals interested in a book that gives you more than the rest of the digital photography books out there.
Beautiful book, and excellent techniques...
O'Reilly has a book out called Digital Photography Expert Techniques by Ken Milburn. If you're ready to take your digital photography to the next level (close to professional grade), this is a book you'll want to see.
First off, the chapter contents: The Digital Photographer; Be Prepared; Bringing Out The Best Picture; Panoramas; Photoshop Selections, Masks, and Paths; Basic Digital Photo Corrections; Converting Photos to Paintings; Special Photographic Effects; Retouching and Rescuing Photos; Creating Fictitious Photos; Color Printing; Use Pictures to Sell Yourself; Sell It on the Web
This book targets the professional, or serious, digital photographer who is using an SLR digital camera with at least six megapixels and plenty of memory. It also assumes the use of Photoshop as the base editing tool for manipulating the images. But rather than stick with Photoshop as the only tool, the author will also educate you on other tools or plug-ins that will give spectacular results beyond what you could get by sticking with the base software. Another target for this book is the film photographer who wants to move to the digital realm, but doesn't quite know how best to set up the workflow of processing images. Because a digital photograph can take many forms after image enhancement, there are a number of good ideas here to help you know what to save and what to delete.
Each chapter is made up of a series of "tips" on how to do something interesting with your images or with your camera. For instance, in the retouching chapter, you'll find tips with the following titles: Restore Youth; Remove Stains; Eliminate Junk from the Landscape; Cosmetic Emphasis; Focus the Light on Points of Interest; Punch Out the Paunch; Proboscis Pruning and Changing Expressions; and Clone Detail from Another Photo. Each tip or technique is well documented as to the steps necessary in the software to accomplish the effect. He also usually shows before and after full-color comparisons so that you can visually grasp how the effect works and how you can use it in your own work.
Now, if you're like me, puttering around in the consumer world of digital cameras, you can still get some great ideas from this book. The tips on composition, image correction, and other basic skills are valid regardless of what level you're at. Your final result may not be quite as good as his due to not having an original image of the same resolution, but you can still end up with some stunning shots that will wow your friends.
Bottom line... quality information, well written, beautiful book that should be considered by any serious digital photographer.
