THE PHOTOSHOP BOOK FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Book Review by Tom ZinnemanAnother Photoshop book! There must be dozens of Photoshop books available in your bookstore. So, why consider this one. Because it’s different; especially if you’re a digital photographer (note the title). This book does not discuss procedures for taking photographs, such as framing a shot, adjusting exposure, or changing metering modes. Nor does this book provide detailed discussion on how to use the various tools in Adobe’s Photoshop program, such as the clone tool, magic wand, or adjustment layers. So, exactly what does this book discuss?
After you uploaded images from the camera or scanner to your computer, you are ready to enter the digital darkroom. That is, you are ready to open your image editing program, such as Adobe’s Photoshop, and make improvements or corrections to selected images. That’s where this book fits it. It provides detailed step-by-step techniques for making changes to your images. For example, one of the first steps a photographer takes is to crop or resize an image. There is a whole chapter devoted to cropping, straightening, and resizing images using the Crop tool or the Rectangular Marquee tool using step-by-step procedures. Techniques for adding canvas area to your image, performing automated close cropping, and creating custom crop tools are discussed.There is a chapter devoted to correcting bad images. Techniques for dealing with digital noise, compensating for too much flash, and removing color aliasing are provided. There is a large chapter on color correction, in which many techniques using the Curves tool are provided. Chapters on retouching portraits, body sculpting, and converting from color to gray scale are provided. There is one whole chapter devoted to sharpening. In addition to basic sharpening using Unsharp Mask, other techniques based on lab color sharpening, luminosity sharpening, and sharpening with layers to avoid color shifts and noise are discussed. This book contains a smorgasbord of various techniques that any serious digital photographer should become acquainted with.
The author, Scott Kelly, is well qualified to write a book such as this. He has written several books on using Adobe’s Photoshop program. He is the Editor-in-Chief of several image-related magazines, including Photoshop User, Nikon’s Capture User, and Mac Design. He is also the Training Director for the Adobe Photoshop Seminar Tour and Conference Chair for Photoshop World. Last, but not least, he knows many expert Photoshop Users and Digital Photographers, many of whom have contributed some of their editing techniques for publication in this book.
As I was reading this book, I found myself continually jumping (don’t I wish) out of the chair and going to the computer to try out some of the various techniques. Although this book is written for Adobe’s Photoshop program, many of the techniques will also work in Adobe’s simpler program, Photoshop Elements. If you do a lot of work in the digital darkroom, this book will pay for itself in a short time.
THE PHOTOSHOP BOOK FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS
By Scott Kelby
New Riders Publishing - Copyright 2003
201 W. 103rd Street
Indianapolis, IN 46290-1097
800-571-5840 + 9 + 7477
www.newriders.com
Retail - $39.99; 358 pages