Customer Reviews

Digital Photography Before & After Makeovers

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There are plenty of books that go into great detail about taking pictures with digital cameras and then processing them through computer software like Photoshop. But I imagine there are a lot of digital camera owners who aren't interested in becoming Photoshop experts and instead want to do just a little extra work to make a picture a little better. This book is aimed at these camera owners.

The concept of this book is to take a poor picture and show how it could be easily improved by changing the defaults on the camera or using changed techniques for picture taking or doing a minimal amount of processing of the file in a computer.

The author divides the things that can be done into three main areas of change: exposure, focus and color. She concludes with reference to some photo editing tools that don't fall into these neat categories, like cropping and straightening. Under each heading she describes a problem and then suggests a solution. For example, in the color section she describes the phenomenon known as red eye, which is created when the red cells in the back of the eyeball reflect back a red light into a photograph. The author tells how to avoid it when taking a picture, by changing the lighting in a room, or adjusting one's flash, or composing the picture in a certain way. Finally she explains how to correct red eye in a photo editor.

Most of her photo editing suggestions rely on the use of Photoshop Elements, the inexpensive version of the popular software, but she tries to explain the process so that people using other software will be able to figure out what steps to take.

While it would be nice to say that this is the only book that a toe-dipper in the digital photography world will need, I'm afraid that more will be required. Even though the instruction that is provided is accurate and helpful, some parts of the digital process are ignored. For example, there is no discussion of how the picture gets from camera to editing software. And while references to important printer concepts are sprinkled throughout the book, I would have liked to see printing treated as a continuous process. (On the other hand King does tell the reader how to prepare a picture for use on the World Wide Web.) I suppose that many readers will be able to get this information from the manuals that come with their camera, or software, or printer, but it would have been nice to see it in this book of fundamentals.

Still, this will be a worthwhile read for the inexperienced photographer who doesn't expect to make digital photography a way of life.