Customer Reviews

Advanced Digital Black & White Photography (A Lark Photography Book)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a technical book addict. While I have only had this book 5 days, it has already paid for itself in improvement of my BW work. It is finely crafted, and to the point. It draws you in and it delivers for real world artists.

As a writer, I am struck by how well this book is structured and written, and the very fine layout of illustrations and methods. When you encounter an excellent technical book and find yourself immersed in it, sometimes you fail to notice the ease that essential information is being conveyed to you. Then suddenly it hits you, wow!, this is the gold standard. This is one of those books. It covers historical BW methods up to the present version of Photoshop, and then provides an outstanding and practical work flow in CS3. By understanding what has gone before, you understand better how CS3 takes BW to another level.

The book is written by a person who is technically competent, a fine writer, and a BW artist. He understands how to frame the issues, and pragmatically deal with accessing the Photoshop tools needed in real world work flow. It is easy to write a huge book that is just a grocery list of features. It is very difficult to write a book like this that is supremely competent, focused, concise, and outlines strategies of interest to real world working artists. I rate it as one of the finest books I have ever read on using software. If there are any other books written by this author, I will buy them on strength of this one.

I would say that someone with basic photoshop skills can easily use this book. If you lack these skills, I think this book would point you to what you need to learn. One of the challenges of learning photoshop is figuring what you need to know and what to ignore. This book finds that focus and is obviously written by a working artist. It is a tool unlike the bloated books that I own, that mostly collect dust and are consulted grudingly. Buy it, you will be pleasantly surprized.

In the past 6 months I have read over a dozen photography and photoshop books. I would rate this amongst the best of the latter. The instructions for creating different techniques within photoshop are well illustrated in step by step fashion (a big plus for a newby to photoshop). It was definitely a little light on the overall theory behind B&W photography, so I would only rely on it if you have photoshop.

I've been doing photography for over 40 years, read lots of books, taken lots of workshops. Advanced Digital Black and White Photography is the best, most informative, educational experience I have ever had in photography. Period.

This book has some good points and techniques which will aid any photographer in converting digital color photographs to workable B&W. With that being said, let the buyer beware; you will have to read between the lines (frequently) and make many of your own assumptions in order to really get to the bottom of what this author is trying to convey in the book.

I am extremely disappointed with the numerous typo's and vocabulary errors in the book. Also extremely disappointing are the assumptions made (by the author) as to the readers knowledge of Photoshop and being very experienced at using Photoshop myself, I am constantly shaking my head in dismay at the author's obvious lack of knowledge with Photoshop. His attempts to describe how to accomplish a task or technique using Photoshop many times lack accuracy and also lack adequate description for even an advanced user to know what he is trying to convey.

Bottom line, if you are inexperienced using Photoshop, don't buy this book. If you have experience using Photoshop, then be prepared to accept the fact that you probably have more experience than the author of this book and undoubtedly you too will notice the many inconsistencies and errors. I could give many examples, but what I am referring to is very evident through out the book.

My general consensus is that this was a quick throw together book, with no real proof editing, and no real concern for accuracy and worse of all, written by someone with no real writing skills. I will not buy another book written by this author.

The author provides a convincing argument to shoot your B/W pictures in RAW color and then process the image in the digital darkroom. This workflow provides the maximum flexibility for filtration and other techniques. This book covers many Photoshop techniques that many users should find extremely useful. Assumes that the reader understands Photoshop basics.

Excellent book for anyone wanting to improve/learn more about digital B&W. It is 'advanced' so you have to have some know-how already, but you can catch up very quickly with a basic understanding. Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in getting good with digital B&W photography.

This book is a great starting point for learning digital B&W conversions. It starts out with a little history and terminology of the B&W world, then dives into the different ways you can achieve this effect in Photoshop CS2, then in how to use the new B&W conversion tool in CS3. It does have a small section on Lightroom as well, but since Lightroom was new at the time of printing, this section is very thin.

I don't think the book is the definitive book for digital B&W, but I have found it very useful. I will say you will get more out of this book if you have CS3.

I borrowed this book from the library along with several other 'how-to' photography books, and this was the only one that pushed me to get up and actually try some of the tricks at the computer.
To get the most out of this book, you're shooting with a D-SLR in RAW and you've got PhotoShop. Yes, it's possible to shoot in black-and-white straight out of the camera, but that isn't really getting the most out of your camera. Converting to b&w via grayscale or desaturation isn't the best option either. PhotoShop will help you convert your color RAW images into stunning monochrome or Duotone, and this book is an invaluable guide.
I am not a PhotoShop novice, but I'm not an expert either. I'm an intermediate-level photography hobbyist. This book provided many tips and tricks that I did not yet know. It is so useful that I'm putting it on my Christmas list, because I haven't absorbed all of the info yet. It's by far one of the best specific guides to learning more about PhotoShop.

"Advanced Digital Black and White Photography" is not a bad book, it just needs a bit of polishing to be good, is all.

The author does give a lot of good advice about how to make good monotone photographs and I think he covers quite a lot of ground. He does, however, not present his material in a acceptable manner. First of all, there are far too many tpye-o's in the text, which is quite irritating. Secondly, and far more importantly, the author presents his photoshop methods in a less than clear fashion, often keeping the reader guessing as exactly how to go ahead and put them to use. He assumes the reader has some knowledge about photoshop, which naturally means, that one shouldn't expect a step by step guide, but the descriptions are at times downright confusing.

I believe that the work of a good editor in conjunction with a good proofreader is needed here. It's not a bad book, but with a little effort, it could be so much better.

I have enjoyed Black & White Photography since film days. I used to enjoy shooting with Black & White Transparency film with colored filters.

This book teaches me the best way to achieve a similar effect in Photoshop.

I guess the only criticism is that the book now needs updating for CS4.