Customer Reviews

The Creative Digital Darkroom

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you've bought a Katrin Eismann book before, you're no doubt looking at this one, too, since her books are so good. And what you've come to expect from her is indeed here - clear, concise information and step by step tutorials with plenty of diagrams showing what's being done. In its layout it's very similar to her Restoration and Retouching books, but denser, with a smaller font and more information, while remaining clear and balanced with a solid presentation. There's very few pages of wasted space.

As the title implies, the theme of the book is using traditional darkroom techniques in the digital world. In fact, part of the audience it's aimed at are experienced photographers who'd like to move to digital and carry over the skills they've learned. Focusing on this theme, the authors give us tools in global and local enhancements of tone and color, as well as sharpening/blurring and removing distractions, to bring out a photo's full potential.

It's all good and thorough, but be aware that in choosing to focus on that, the authors don't touch on many of the tools that are essential parts of Photoshop, including Photomerge, Liquify, Text, and Actions. It also doesn't cover Bridge or printing in depth, but there's actually a chapter on printing available as a PDF at the book's website: creativedigitaldarkroom.com.

It does cover Levels and Curves in more depth than any other book I've seen. It also covers Layer Masks, Shadow/Highlight, Perspective, Blending Modes, Lens Correction, Camera RAW (including the new Clarity tool), Split Toning, Sepia Toning (including Greg Gorman's technique), HDR, LAB, edge effects (using the Filter Gallery), Cross-Processing, and Sharpening, as well as including sections on creating a faded b/w photo and the like.

That said, I do have a few issues with the book. While the landscapes are like those you'd take yourself, many of the photos are a bit too abstract and arty for my tastes. Duggan uses Holgas, pinhole cameras, and a Lensbaby that blurs all the edges, and if you're not into such creative uses of cameras, these can get old once you've seen a few. Also, many are of moody old storefronts and gravestones, which adds a somber tone to the book.

Also, for those interested in working on portraits, there's very few of them here, and nothing about creating dynamic b/w portraits. The five or so portraits are used simply to demonstrate vignetting, sharpening, and the use of a warming filter.

Those points aside, this book delivers. Even when introducing the fundamentals of such tools as Levels and Curves, it goes right into detailed examples of how to use each. Some books merely list what each tool does, simply from lack of room, but by focusing on the essential tools, here you get exactly what you need - a brief overview containing all the important points followed by how you can best use them in your work.

Is a lot of it review? The majority of the tools outlined - the ones you use every day - are indeed covered much as they are in Eismann's Restoration and Retouching. The main difference is that Restoration covers mostly portraits, while this one focuses on landscapes and still lifes. Also, Restoration only covers up to CS2, while this one outlines all the latest tools in CS3, including a good deal on the very useful Black and White filter, as well as the new RAW 4.1 converter. It also gives a good overview of Lightroom, which I wasn't familiar with, but now has me looking that way.

If you already have Real World CS3 or a similar book, you already know more than most about Photoshop's technical aspects, and so you surely don't need a review. Still, this book's two chapters on setting up your Preferences, the different color spaces, and batch renaming are only fifty pages, so there's really not much to skip. And if you don't have Real World CS3, this book actually does cover all the basics you need in setting up your computer and workspace.

By the way, if you don't have CS3, most of the techniques here can be used with CS2 and CS. You won't have the use of the Highlight, Recovery, Clarity, B/W, and Curves tools in Camera RAW, and you won't have the B/W Filter with built-in settings like Infrared, but the authors do tell you how you can use the Channel Mixer, and Levels and Curves work much the same.

To sum up, you'll be pleased with this book if you don't go into it with any expectations that it be anything else. When I first saw it listed, I thought it'd build on where Restoration left off, going deep into creative interpretative techniques now that you have your photos optimized. Such techniques are indeed in the later part of the book, such as in using scanned paper for adding texture, but on the whole this book shows how to use the tools you're used to to get the most out of each photo's tone, color, and dramatic impact. In short, it's for experienced darkroom photographers as well as beginner and intermediate Photoshop users, instead of those who are already advanced in using Photoshop.

If you're a total beginner taking snapshots and are looking for a good overall coverage of all Photoshop has to offer, you might try Deke McClelland's Photoshop CS3 One-On-One or Martin Evening's Photoshop CS3 for Photographers. They're not as thorough as this book in each tool, but they cover more ground, give you a good tour, and set you up fine. From there, if you find your work focusing on family snapshots, portraits, and restoring old photos, go with Eismann's Restoration and Retouching, which covers a great deal more on repairing photos, such as using the floating Healing Patch and Pattern Maker. (You can download a full chapter from her digitalretouch.org site.) And if your interests lead you to fine art or landscape photography, this would be the book to learn from next.

Finally, if you already are a fine art or landscape photographer either new to Photoshop or without a solid grounding in the best use of all the fundamentals, or simply wish to brush up on your skills, this one is made for you.

Katrin Eismann is a phenomenal author and has compiled two excellent books, photoshop masking and compositing as well as photoshop restoration and retouching...with those books in mind, one may have thought that this book would be special, it's not...the book appears to be aimed at those people interested in a broad understanding of photoshop including workspaces, color management, color settings, types of printers, types of cameras, curves, levels etc...the basics...the authors eventually get into some reasonably "creative" work but not before most of the book deals with general information. There are too many books like this on the market. There are books that specialize in color (any of Dan Margulis's books) and sharpening and layers, masks, skin, etc...To try to pack that all into one book is simply giving one a taste, a general taste of the subject. This may be a good book for the beginner that wants to understand more about photoshop or an educator teaching a basic course, but this is not a book for a moderately skilled photoshop user. Unfortunately, this book was listed without a table of contents or an accurate description of its purpose. I would expect more from a Katrin Eismann book at this point in her career. p.s., thanks for the editorial review...i wish it or something similair would have been available prior to the date this book was first shipped to customers...If you're looking for a good book that focuses on the creative side of photoshop, consider Vincent Versace's, Welcome to Oz. My suggestion would be to proof read a copy of this book at Barnes and Noble etc...and decide if it's right for you. Various opinions will prevail and don't get fooled by reviews that covertly promote the author at the expense of the reader.

Why another book on digital photography? Another book on CSx? Another book on RAW image processing? Another book on workflow? Another book on photo composition? Why?
Because it's ONE book! A cohesive litany of eye-to-print, not only "hows", but the "whys"..
This book is about photography. Well written, illustrated and laid out. The organization is like workflow should be, natural, easy to follow. It has gems for the beginner and pro alike. But let's be clear on what the beginner is.
- The book is digital SLR focused.
- The book is ADOBE CS(3) focused.
- The book is RAW image capture focused.
- The book presumes you have workflow needs.
- The book assumes you didn't take the picture you thought you did.
- The book assumes you care enough to fix it.
The beginner here is not someone who got a Canon Pro-Shot for Christmas.
Many photographers have moved from film to digital in the last couple of years, only to be smacked in the face by the EXTREME DIFFERENCE in the workflow of the two media.
Ms. Eismann and Mr. Duggan have done a wonderful job covering so much so well without turning it into a MAC vs PC or CS3 primer. Throughout the ENTIRE book I felt I was working with images and concepts, never sitting in a classroom learning the Adobe interface. Thank you, Katrin and Seán, for that and this book!
If you are a photographer that is buried by all the images, by all the post shutter-click "stuff" and are looking for a life-line of sanity to make sense of it all, this is THE book. The Creative Digital Darkroom is simply the best comprehensive book you can buy, especially for thirty bucks.
Other reviewers have dinged this as a beginner's book. Sure, it appeals to that market, because it is full of step by steps and screen shots and explanations of how and why in CS3, Bridge, Lightroom and third party plug ins that don't exist in such detail in ANY SINGLE SOURCE. This book also gives the reader something that so many others lack - THE PICTURES IMAGES TO WORK ON! Ms. Eismann has, like in her other books, given the reader the links to the photos she uses to demonstrate her experience.
Every concept, tool and technique can be explored implicitly and rotely as shown in the book, but also can be exploded into a vast field of self-exploration. Fun stuff. Cool.
Every section is chock full of ideas and tips that easily could rescue, restore or release that one image that makes the book worthwhile.
There are hundreds of topics explained and visually manipulated on the pages of this book. For example, chapter two, Digital Nuts and Bolts has a section on color space.
Color space. What is it? What is meant by CMYK and RGB and sRGB (not the words cyan, magenta, yellow and black or red, blue, green, but what is Adobe RGB (1998) or Apple RGB or the camera manufactures' sRGB). Color space clipping from different cameras. Color and luminance. For beginners? Perhaps, but I know many a wedding photographer that now straps a Canon or Nikon pro body around the neck and hasn't a clue about what color space, resolution, bit depth, ISO-noise relationships and how to handle them with all those sliders in the software: let the lab handle it...
Five Star Plus

There are a large number of books that provide an overview of Photoshop; most are for beginners and emphasize the tools and how to use them. If you are lucky and happened to buy one written by a working photographer, you likely also had a number of the author's really good photographs to work with. If you were unlucky, you had a book written by someone who was an expert, professional Photoshop user, but whose sample photographs were more snapshots than art. Perhaps you learned how to use the tools but not necessarily why. The good photos didn't need a lot of adjustmant, and the poor ones might not seem worth the effort.

If you were really unlucky, you might not have gotten any sample images, or 'color' was a small selection of small images bound together in the middle of the volume with the rest of the book in B&W... even the 'color' illustrations!

This books is well done... full color throughout. As far as I can tell, all the images used as examples in the book are available as downloads from the book's web site. This is important! Many of the examples are necessarily printed at a small size. You cannot esily see the outcome of the various editing steps. But with Bridge open to each chapter's image set, you can open and follow along with exactly what you are reading. (It's amazing how many authors do not do this!)

This book is written by a photgraphic artist who uses Photoshop as a tool to create works of art. So the emphasis here is to present Photoshop as a tool to achieve rsults that were either similar to existing film effects (cross procesing, grain, dodge, burn etc) and also things that are just so much easier and new in Photoshop.

This is no a beginner's guide to photography (digital or film), or a beginners guide to Photoshop. You should have experience in both. No explanation of f/stops and shutter speeds, and no elementary hand holding in Photoshop. You will learn how to color correct, balance tone & contrast, create film and digital effects, B&W conversion and much more.

If you have experience with earlier versions of Photoshop, and are moving to CS3, I would also recommend Fraser & Schewe's excellent book, "Real World Camera Raw", coverage of which would have made this book another 300+ pages longer.

So yes, this book does have, in part, some resemblance to other Photoshop 'recipe' books, but is written at a much higher level. Even more impressive in this book is the close attention to non-destructive image editing techniques. That is, techniques that do not commit changes that can't be later adjusted, removed or changed. The smart object abilities of CS3 are emhasized.

So if you want to move you digital darkroom techniqies to a higher level of artistry, this is great book to learn from!

Katrin Eismann is amazing. She's an amazing teacher and an amazing writer. I absolutely LOVE her other books, especially Photoshop Masking & Compositing (VOICES), Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter), and Real World Digital Photography (2nd Edition) (Real World). I don't know much about Sean Duggan, but Katrin's books have always amazed me.

Katrin teaches concepts very thoroughly; describing not only what to do, but how and why the method works. I've never been left wondering, "What about ...?" because she covers it ALL. With that said, here's what I thought regarding this specific book:

Photographers transitioning to a Digital workflow will benefit from this book the most. It will teach you how to make your images look their very BEST.

This is NOT the best book for well seasoned Photoshop users, although it has it's jewels of insight. Why? Because this book will hold your hand and walk you through every single tiny little step to teach you the method you're trying to master. If you already know Raw processing, retouching, layer masking, curves, layer adjustments and layer modes, then you're probably going to know most of this book already. With that said, there are still lots of "Advanced" Photoshop users that don't know these things and would benefit greatly from this book.

I've been using Photoshop for 10 years now and so reading this book was painfully slow going for me because the steps were written so thoroughly. I kept hoping the next chapter would be about creative enhancements, but most of the book covered the essentials of prepping your files to produce the highest quality final product (which is important but can be boring).

I gave this book a 3 of 5 not because it wasn't a well written book, but because it didn't live up to my expectations as an intermediate to advanced user book. Had it been described as a book for Digital Imaging beginners then it would get a 5. I've always learned TONS from every page of Katrin's other books, but this one left me feeling like a professor attending an entry-level course... possibly because Katrin has already taught me most of the information through her other books.

This review is belated because as time permitted I wished to read this book in detail before commenting on it. I have now done so, and my overall perception is that The Creative Digital Darkroom (CDD) is destined to be a foundation text in many digital photography learning environments for years to come. While versions of Photoshop come and go, the fundamentals remain and get improved, so the techniques discussed here will be valuable for many years.

The market is over-flowing with instructional material about how to use Photoshop. This book is much more than that. It is a creative odyssey about vision and how to convey our vision with compelling images using effective techniques of digital photography. Vision is at the heart of this book. The authors stress the "what" as much as the "how", because first we need the photographic content, then the techniques for conveying it. When I look at a photograph - my photographs, any photographs - there is a filtering process: what's the purpose of this picture; what's it showing me, and how good is the graphic language. CDD, unlike so many other books on the subject, teaches a very skillful integration of exactly these considerations.

The authors treat the subject as photography - harking back to the days of film and wet process, showing how the same and new effects enabled by the new technology are created in the digital darkroom.

The book is organized according to the most fundamental themes of the photographic process. After an extensive, but necessary, introduction to the fundamentals of digital imaging and digital image management (which anyone serious about the subject really, really needs to know correctly), the content moves into managing tone and contrast, dodging, burning and exposure control, color correction, being creative with colour, creative image enhancement, working with focus (sharpness and blur), and finally there is an on-line chapter on printing, which I really wish had been included in the book for sake of completeness and convenience.

Those who have read these authors' previous works will recognize the painstaking attention to the clarity, completeness and logic of the processes they systematically explain and illustrate. It's hard to go wrong following these techniques on our own images, a number of which I have done very satisfactorily. I like to call this approach "Photoshop's Joy of Cooking", but it's really much more than that. The Joy of Cooking, clear as it is, doesn't need to explain why you need 2 cups of flour in a waffle mix, but this book does need to tell you, e.g., why you need a Curve of a particular shape to achieve a specific kind of contrast, and it does so. This helps us think about the "why" underlying the "how", which is so important to a true understanding of how to move beyond the book and use the program in ways of our making. One of the wonderful things about Photoshop is the limitless ways in which one's vision can be achieved. The authors have accomplished a very judicious selection by zeroing-in on the really important ones which help us do what we would most like to do with our photos very effectively. Highly recommended.

I'm puzzled by the enthusiastic reviews of this book. I agree that the writing and concepts are quite good. But the book design and the printing quality are a real negative for a photography book (so to speak...). It made me think I was looking at a low-grade newspaper: all the images and screenshots are printing in low-res, low contrast B&W with significant banding and streaking. In addition to looking shabby, it makes it hard to see the effect the images were supposed to illustrate. It's so bad that I thought I was reading a cheap rip-off of the original, possibly published by pirates in some far-off copyright-ignoring country (which shall remain nameless), since it's inconceivable that writers and photographers the quality of Eismann and Duggan would tolerate this shabby presentation of their work. I'm also amazed that O'Reilly, normally a very-high quality publisher, would put their name on this thing.

The book design is also a head-scratcher: huge swaths of small type with little white space. Just looking at it gives me claustrophobia, and reading it is tiring.

I wouldn't normally rate a book primarily for these kinds of faults, but sheesh...this is a photography book! It's supposed to have at least half-way decent photos in it, not images that look like an old newspaper! And for $49.99 list, it should have GREAT images and printing!

I returned it almost immediately.

All in all, I was left with with the age-old question: What were they thinking?

I would have to admit that this is rather a lightweight effort on digital photography and Photoshop aimed at the beginner. The author starts out with very basic ideas on digital photography that probably anyone with experience should know and then goes through the basics of manipulating your images in Photoshop. The instructions are detailed and clear, but if you have done any work with Photoshop and digital cameras before, there is probably not that much here you are unfamiliar with. The best three chapters are the last three on creative color, creative enhancement, and enhancing focus. The book is well-illustrated and the instructions are clear. The book includes directions in numbered steps and screen-shots of the application as the author discusses various aspects of Photoshop and the effect or enhancement being attempted. However, if you have any experience you can probably skip this one. The table of contents is as follows:

Chapter 1. Silver to Silicon
Section 1.1. Seeing Images
Section 1.2. In the Digital Darkroom
Section 1.3. Learning and Forgetting the Rules

Chapter 2. Digital Nuts and Bolts
Section 2.1. Building a Digital Darkroom
Section 2.2. Under the Hood: Essential Photoshop Preferences and Color Settings
Section 2.3. Photoshop Color Settings
Section 2.4. The Color Settings Dialog
Section 2.5. RGB Working Spaces
Section 2.6. Color Management Policies
Section 2.7. Conversion Options and Advanced Controls
Section 2.8. Saving Your Color Settings
Section 2.9. File Navigation and Inspection
Section 2.10. Your Bags Are Packed

Chapter 3. Scan, Develop, and Organize
Section 3.1. From Analog to Digital
Section 3.2. Starting with Film
Section 3.3. Starting with a Digital Camera
Section 3.4. Working with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop Lightroom

Chapter 4. File Preparation
Section 4.1. Essential Image Quality
Section 4.2. Noise Reduction
Section 4.3. Sharpening Process
Section 4.4. Correcting Optical Distortion and Perspective
Section 4.5. Spotting and Cleanup

Chapter 5. Tone and Contrast
Section 5.1. Understanding Tone and Contrast
Section 5.2. Listen to the Image
Section 5.3. Non-Destructive Editing
Section 5.4. Global Image Improvements
Section 5.5. Converting Color to Black-and-White
Section 5.6. Toning and Split Toning Effects
Section 5.7. Building a Solid Foundation

Chapter 6. Dodging, Burning, and Exposure Control
Section 6.1. Interpreting the Image with Tone
Section 6.2. Non-Destructive Dodging and Burning
Section 6.3. Contrast and Exposure Control
Section 6.4. Seeing the Light

Chapter 7. Color Correction
Section 7.1. The Landscape of Color
Section 7.2. Global Color Correction
Section 7.3. The Power of Curves
Section 7.4. Color Enhancements
Section 7.5. Local Color Correction
Section 7.6. The Power of Lab
Section 7.7. A Journey Through the Landscape of Color

Chapter 8. Creative Color
Section 8.1. The Structure of Color
Section 8.2. Working with Hue
Section 8.3. Creative Color Temperature
Section 8.4. Exploring Image Mode Blending
Section 8.5. Create Cross-processing Effects
Section 8.6. It's a Colorful World

Chapter 9. Creative Enhancements
Section 9.1. Optical and Film Effects
Section 9.2. Darkroom Special Effects
Section 9.3. Adding Texture
Section 9.4. Fading Away: The Distressed Image
Section 9.5. Blending Textures into Skies
Section 9.6. Creative Edge Effects
Section 9.7. Enhancing the Visual Story

Chapter 10. Enhancing Focus
Section 10.1. Remove Distractions
Section 10.2. Sharpen with Finesse
Section 10.3. Valuable Noise
Section 10.4. Your Vision Comes First

I'm a multi-media artist and I've used Photoshop since PS 6. I consider myself an intermediate to advanced user, and my library includes "specialist" books by John Paul Caponigro, Dan Margulis, Daniel Giordan, Vincent Versace, Eddie Tapp ... I could go on. I also have Katrin Eismann's other books, and when I was first coming properly to grips with Photoshop, her earlier collaboration with Sean Duggan, on digital photography, was my bible. So I eagerly awaited publication of this one.

The strength of this book, as with the earlier volumes, is its clarity and user-friendliness. As the Amazon book description states, it is aimed at those photographers in the transition from film to digital, as well as those who want to take further steps to realise their creative vision. In my experience, it's unusual to find a book that successfully marries both objectives, as I found this one to do. There are short sections on the architecture of Photoshop and the RAW settings, the suggested workflow and the basics of file preparation. The bulk of the book is about how to come into relationship with the captured image and develop its potential to the point where it finally says what you wanted it to say. Along the way there is a lot of how-to, and a great deal of why, and a concentration on photographic concepts as opposed to plain Photoshop technique. There was little in the book that was mind-bogglingly new to me, but the layout, the lucidity of the text, and the underlying philosophy made it, for me, greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps this had something to do with the accessibility of the authors' thought processes and the way their personalities came through.

You won't find flash and dazzle in this book, just a lot of solid, workable methods for improving your workflow and fine-tuning your images. If you're hesitating about buying it, read the authors' Preface. I found that the book delivers what they promise, so for me it's 5 stars.

I have been through a number of photoshop books in the past few years. Of all of them I can say that the authors were certainly prepared and that they put a lot of effort in their book.
But if on the one hand the authors knew pretty well what they were saying, the same could not be said about their readers, whom I guess were having a few problems connecting their experience and previous understanding of Photoshop to what they were being taught.

This book is a step forward in this regard, in that it has a very real-life, down-to-earth, experience-based approach with what it talks about. Photoshop books are normally organised around conceptual areas or tools. This book is organised around what you get to do with it and around the experience of dealing with images.
I appreciate the occasional divagation of the authors who sometimes interrupt the flow of the information to mention something that they believe is important but that does not fit in the paragraph itself.

What I don't like about this book - and about al other photoshop books I've ever encountered - is the tutorial, step-by-step approach to teaching. There are things you can be taught, and things that you can only learn. Other things, you can only be taught to a certain extent, or be pointed at.
Creative skills belong to this last group. I don't want to be told to "enter mask mode, set the brush to 32 pixels and 20% hardness [...] do this, do that and here is the final image". Creativity doesn't come packaged in procedures, and nor do its tools.