Customer Reviews

Getting Started with Digital Imaging, Second Edition: Tips, tools and techniques for photographers

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This book covers many areas of digital imaging, or appears to do. If you bother to actually try to get any benefit from the book, you're wasting your time.
The first thing you realise is that the author should be a politician - talks a lot of words but doesn't actually say anything or commit himself to anything.
I was "lucky" to obtain this book at 25% of the cover price, via a book club, and I still feel I was robbed!

Joe Farace is a prolific photo/technical writer with top credentials, but this effort misses the intended target. The title "Getting Started..." leads one to expect this book to be a primer for beginners learning about digital imaging, hopefully to gain a good grounding in the basics from which then to move on to more advanced topics. But that's not what I found. Instead, it seems more like a compilation of short pieces on a whole array of digital topics sort of thrown together, some at the beginning level, but many fairly advanced (like recording Photoshop actions and using layer masks). I'm not suggesting the latter aren't valid digital imaging topics, but I do wonder how they would be considered topics for a beginning digital photographer just "getting started."

Another serious flaw is how dated much of the material and illustrations are. I understand publishing lag time and shelf life, but in the fast-paced business of technical writing, references to hardware and software from several years ago makes one question the currency of the rest of the information. This looks to be a second edition that was rushed to print with limited effort to really make the whole book current. Accordingly, there are a number of better written, more cohesive, up-to-date "getting started" titles out there.

Book titles are important. I think the title of this book is very appropriate. It's a getting started book for those who want to get started with digital imaging. It's not for advanced digital image makers, as the title implies. Again, it's a great guide for those who are just jumping on the digital bandwagon. (What took you so long.)