Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Digital Color

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"A Field Guide to Digital Color" is an excellent introduction and reference for those who need to know more about color that "it exists" but who do not live and breathe GretagMacbeth color charts.

This book is wonderful for photographers of all levels who own Photoshop or a similar image editing program and are serious about editing their photos and getting things "just right". For amateurs, it serves as an excellent guide for gaining understanding of the key concepts related to how the eye sees color, color mixing systems (additive and subtractive), color matching, perceptive effects that humans eyes have when colors are placed near each other, scanning images, color spaces, printing images, matching color spaces.

Although the book is by no means the answer to specific questions you might have about your situation, it provides references for all of the materials used and you can research a particular subject you need to gain further knowledge of quite easily. It will also help you to develop the terminology necessary to ask the right questions of an expert.

I am an advanced photographer and work with computer graphics (OpenGL) and found this book to be very useful for providing an overview of the entire chain of color from seeing it with our eyes, capturing images, manipulating them on a computer, and then outputting them for our eyes again with a printer, monitor, or other output device.

In the age of digital cameras, printouts and projectors, almost everyone needs some introduction to color and color reproduction.

If you are a professional working in color reproduction, there are plenty of books on color engineering and computational color science - those by Phil Green et al, Stephen Westland, William Hunt are all good examples. But Maureen Stone's book has filled a long felt gap at a different level, where you need to understand the fundamentals thoroughly to get the best out of your everyday color reproduction equiptment - your computer monitor, color printer, your digital camera - what have you.

Three features of the book make it stand out: first, the selection of topics within its twelve chapters, second, the accuracy of the technical inforamation, and third the writing style. In fact, I am not sure if there is another book in the market on digital color at this level!

Ms Stone has selected just the right topics for providing a grounding in the issues of color reproduction. Her treatment of the Color Management Systems is probably one of the best at this level that I am familiar with. Color theory is complex. It is a hard-core science from one angle, an art from another angle, and an engineering discipline from yet another. The book has done a good job of summarizing the results precisely and explaining them accurately in a manner that almost anyone with interest in colors can understand.

The free-flowing writing style makes it easy to read - I finished reading through the book in about a week! And, now I keep going back to it off and on, just to confrim (or re-learn) my fundamentals.

The references and annotations to references are very useful.

This is the first book on colors for every computer user, digital camera user, color printer user and for graphics engineers.

A Field Guide To Digital Color by computer expert Maureen C. Stone is a handy user manual to digital color on the computer, and applying digital color for maximum visual effect. From RGB and Brightness, to additive and subtractive color systems, to color image capture, reproduction, and appearance, A Field Guide To Digital Color is a thorough, professional quality resource (and includes an annotated bibliography for in-depth reference and future study) which is confidently recommended for novice and experienced digital artists seeking to master and manipulate this demanding medium.

An excellent and friendly introduction to digital color. In particular, the color images are well-done and helpful. This is the best book I've found for a general survey of the basic science and engineering of digital color devices. Those interested in research in these areas might also want the more advanced text, Digital Color Imaging Handbook, edited by Gaurav Sharma.