Customer Reviews

A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Landscape Photography (Digital Photography)

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

 

 

This book provides a terrific overview of digital manipulations of landscape photos using Photoshop. For each of the sample photos in the book, the author provides a step by step guide from camera to final print.

My major quibble is the actual format of the book. At 7.5 x 9 inches, the page size is much too small. The illustrations of the intermediate steps and some of the computer screenshots are too small to be effective. A larger format book would have been much better.

This is a hard book to get your mind around. It is so obviously well intentioned and aims at filling a real need. After all, digital media does offer tools to landscape and other photographers and has limitations that film doesn't have.

Moreover, the publishers, in this and other books in their photography series, have come up with a different approach to teaching photography. The usual approach has been to have a narrative about some aspect of photography and then to provide examples, with each part building on the material previously presented. The AVA books instead start with a picture and then try to show the decisions and processes that the photographer used to get the final product. But they've gone even further imposing a strict graphic format for each subject. They start with a relevant quotation from the photographer. Then across a two-page spread, that includes the photograph, they give general tips, Down the left hand of the spread a flow chart of the photographer's actions is provided from capturing the image to creating an ink jet print. The author divides the brief discussion of the picture into three sections entitled shoot, enhance and enjoy.

The problem for me was that the digital process was not developed coherently. Rather, the entire process was set forth again and again and again. But as it was set forth it never described the steps taken in anything but the most general way. If one is an advanced photographer and already knows what is involved, the picture and spread might serve as an idea book. But if that was the author's purpose, it might have helped to discuss where the photographer's ideas came from.

In addition, many of the pictures were composites or involved extreme manipulation of the image, such as by twisting it around. My guess is that the average landscape photographer is not interested in surrealism but wants to know how he can make a picture that he took look more like what he envisioned at the time of capture.

This book also gave me the impression that it was designed to provide its audience with small bits and pieces, as if that audience would be unable to grasp some larger, more comprehensive view.

For some one interested in learning about digital photography, this book is not the place to start. Instead I would suggest something like "Photoshop CS2 Workflow" by Tim Grey, or if one wanted a tutorial approach, Barry Haynes' "Photoshop Artistry" book.

After reading the review suggesting this book is a little too much and it involves throwing around large files etc, I thought that this would be a high end book and something I would be interested in. Well Im a bit sad to say its very light on material. If your a beginner you may get a kick out of it but anything more than that you will be very dissapointed in this title. Much better books out there.

A. The blow-by-blow accounts of the steps the photographers featured in this book use to create these stunning images are indeed comprehensive, and fascinating. There's stuff to be learned here, even for beginners, but almost all of the examples require access to some pretty serious cameras and computer hardware...the artists are regularly working with individual files of 50, 100, almost 200 mb in *.RAW format, and spending hours or days in Photoshop to achieve the effects illustrated.
B. For all its beautiful production values and technical sophistication, this thing was sloppily edited...words are missing, lead-on sentences go nowhere, and in at least one instance, "there" was unforgivably used when the author meant "their." If there's a second edition, let's hope some of the money gets thrown at a decent copyeditor.

A book for digital landscape photography inspiration!! The book is organized in a very simple straightforward manner. Each page-spread has a sumptious photograph, comments from the author, comments from the photographer and a bullet recipe/list on how the photograph was accomplished. A strong knowledge of Photoshop is needed to understand the "how-to-do list." However, regardless of your Photoshop background, this is a book on landscape photography that you will keep returning to for inspiration and ideas.