Customer Reviews

The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing

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Hello. I am primarily an (amateur) landscape photographer as you may discern if you look at my Flickr gallery: [...]
I am also interested in night photography - particularly of the night sky. So it is not a surprise that the cover of the book would have been enough to capture my attention.

I pre-ordered my copy of The Photoshop Darkroom in June, 2009. It was a long wait and worth it.

I have several other books on Photoshop and this one beats them all in clarity and usefulness by a wide margin. Thankfully this book is NOT an exhaustive description of all of the features and nuances of Photoshop. A book that attempted to cover "all things Photoshop" would be thousands of pages long and filled with lots of really useless and boring information.

No, the authors: Harold and Phyllis Davis have instead taken a laser-like focus on about a dozen very useful techniques that are effective in producing pleasing results. The techniques are illustrated with full color, step by step images from Harold's own photographs. The quality of the illustrations is crucial to understanding the processes and the images in this book score very high on clarity [unlike several other books I have].

The steps for each process are clearly numbered, illustrated and labeled. And though the examples are from a Mac, I have no trouble following along with my older Photoshop version on a PC.

Is this book for you? Well, let me ask you these questions:

Would you like to make your photographs more appealing? More like the way you saw them? More like art? Something altogether different? The techniques and processes described allow all of these approaches.

* Do you use burn and dodge to darken and lighten? The Davis's will show you a far better way!
* Do you shoot JPG because you're afraid of RAW? Find out why RAW is superior and what you're missing?
* Ever thought about scanning or lighting small items at home? A clever, cheap and effective method is described in the beginning of the book.
* Would you like to manipulate or correct the color in your images cleanly? LAB mode may be your panacea and it's explained in this book.
* Do you use software for High Dynamic Range photos (or the built in HDR in Photoshop?) Learn why you may get far more delectable results by using a *SINGLE* RAW image. If you must use multiple images you'll learn how to blend them by hand to get more pleasing and natural looking results.
* Ever thought about capturing the night sky - as illustrated by the cover on the book? In The Photoshop Darkroom are copious tips both for shooting and then for processing night sky images. If you decide to pursue this passion further I understand that there is a Night Photography book in the works.
* Want to produce "Ansel Adams" quality black and white? This book explains how to get the most out of an image - and why standard "black and white conversion" options are not your friend.

Want to try to do the steps in the book using the actual images - thoughtfully the authors have provided a website for that, too!

In addition to all the great tips and illustrations this book has three important components that make it useful as a reference volume: A good table of contents, a Glossary and a complete and effective Index.

Is there anything wrong with the book? Well, not really, but I suppose there is one minor nit.

There are no page numbers on the many full page illustrations. Sometimes there is a run of 7 or 8 pages without numbers on them and most of the major sections start on un-numbered pages. I told you it was a nit!

The plethora of eye popping photos tend to make me pay more attention to the images than the text... but I really can't blame the authors for that, can I? ;-)

I should disclose that I have been a student in two of Harold's Night Photography Workshop classes and I like the guy for his talent, wit and wisdom which come through marvelously in the book.

This is a MUST BUY book.

I received this book approximately 2 weeks ago and it has provided me a very clear path on how to do so many changes and improvements using Photoshop, I will only take a few lines to describe the book. It is clear, concise, illustrative, easy to read and most of all written by someone who has used the product daily. Harold's description of techniques and the illustrations are superb. My wife purchased the 3-set from Amazon as an early Christmas present and boy am I glad she did. I have purchased other books on Photoshop and the authors talk so far above my head, I have to use oxygen after trying to read them. Harold's projects are down to earth. Buy it and enjoy reading and learning from a new experience with a professional.

Harold's book is MUCH more than a 'how to' book, though it does that very well. His approach to book layout, with handwritten notes and guidance, is fresh, easy to follow and to dip into.

But much more than that, in following Harold's techniques you are learning how one of the best exponents of using the digital (rather than simply doing what we did with film, but using digital techniques) medium thinks, and approaches image making from a new perspective. Even though I primarily use Adobe Lightroom for my photo workflow, there is much to learn from Harold's book. His style is informative and he has a light touch when guiding the reader that works very well.

If you are fortunate enough to be where Harold gives a workshop - make sure you get to it.

Take the techniques used in the book and apply them to your image making. You'll be amazed how your work can improve.

I'm so pleased with how easy to follow this book is! The authors use photo case studies to teach each of the creative techniques which means that there are actual screen shots of the image being edited at each step of the process. The other evening at a dinner party at my house, one friend picked up this book and for the remainder of the evening, it was the main topic of attention and conversation from friends who regularly shoot/edit digital photos and non-photographer friends alike. It is both a useful resource for digital photographers and a beauty to look at!

I am an amateur photographer, and I have had the good fortune to attend two of Harold Davis' photo workshops. He is an absolute wealth of information with regard to digital photography, technique, and processing in the Photoshop darkroom. This book does a tremendously effective job of capturing his instruction and his actual workflow in a comprehensive, approachable, detailed way.

For anyone who has been dabbling in Photoshop (as I have for a number of years) and really wants to learn some more advanced techniques, this book is a great resource. Its step-by-step explanations are clear enough for even a very new Photoshop user to follow and apply and see impressive results. The way that the information, as well as tips and useful side comments are presented is also fun and visually appealing - with many amazing photographs, of course - so it's an enjoyable read.

The images in this book were well done and impressive. Unfortunately I was not as impressed with the Photoshop (PS) techniques. The authors acknowledge that there are many ways to accomplish the same things in PS and theirs is only one, which is true, but often there are more efficient and well known ways to accomplish something. For instance, they use multiple copies of the same Camera Raw file at different exposures instead of simply using a file with multiple smart object layers. That doesn't make any sense, and is definitely the hard way to do it. They do this with several examples, and complicated painting layers. It wore me out just reading it.

I started to get excited when they were discussing blending modes, because they had a well-done graphic showing white, gray, and black and how the different blending modes affect the layer. Unfortunately they only covered four blending modes.

Then there's the dodging and burning example. They don't like the dodge and burn tool. Everyone says the dodge and burn tool used to be really awful, but now with the "protect tones" option it works just fine. Instead they add a duplicate layer with either a screen blending mode to lighten, or a multiply blending mode to darken, then add a layer mask and paint in where they want to dodge and burn. Okay, so yes it works, but seems complicated.

They have this lovely example of a stacked star trails photo, where they use separate stacking software to accomplish. Again, why complicate it. Select the files in Bridge, choose load in Photoshop as layers, then change the blending modes to screen.

Their discussion of LAB mode was interesting, and the way they use it to modify color is dramatic. Unfortunately that was the only strong point in the book. They said they had a Photoshop action at their website that you could download. I went and checked it out. I downloaded all 5 downloads, and there was no action, just images. They weren't even layered images, if they had been layered, you could have seen what had been done.

If this were a really old book, I'd be more understanding, but it's only one year old.

If you are interested in post production work I suggest Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: a professional image editor's guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC instead. It is easier to follow, more thorough, and uses techniques that are more efficient while still achieving the same results.

This is THE Photoshop guide for those wanting to process RAW images. The authors shows you how to do this in Photoshop, step by step, using the Adobe Camera RAW engine. Then they take you through the most useful and important Photoshop capabilities, Layers and Masks, and then several other key tools such as Blending Modes and Channels. Everything proceeds logically, clearly, with lots of illustrations of Photoshop menus and windows to help you step by step. The layout is superb, with reminders, hints, and references to earlier pages to help you along the way. I'll be using this as a reference for years to come.

I am an amateur photographer who recently decided to take the plunge into the intimidating world of Photoshop. I read several books including one 600 page tome that was about as boring as reading a phone book. It wasn't until I read The Photoshop Darkroom that everything clicked! Mr. and Mrs. Davis present many of the most useful and powerful Photoshop techniques in an easy to follow step by step manner. All the photos used in the book are available for download making it easy for the reader to follow along. The sample photos are beautiful and the end results are inspirational. This could easily be a coffee table book if it wasn't so darn helpful. Each section begins with an introduction to the featured technique and is followed by step by step examples showing how the technique works. Along the way, each chapter is filled with helpful suggestions and tips about Photoshop and photography in general. Some of my favorite sections include: working in RAW, digital asset management (DAM), working with layers, black and white photos, hand HDR, stacking photos and sharpening. Since finishing this book and working through all the examples, my comfort level with Photoshop has increased tremendously! Speaking as a rookie Photoshop user, The Photoshop Darkroom has given me the confidence to take my photography to the next level. It will do the same for you! Highly recommended!

If you were to buy one photoshop book this year you should get 'The Photoshop Darkroom'. Don't be mistaken this is not a photoshop encyclopedia - there are plenty of those already - but a step by step guide for photographers. This is just the book to help you with your first faltering steps in photoshop. The techniques presented in the book will probably be sufficient for the majority of photographers and set you up for a deeper exploration of the full power of the software - or not! The section on LAB color is particularly impressive - the landscape shot on p192 goes from 'drab to fab' with some simple tweaks using LAB color. For me this alone was worth the price of admission! The focus of the book is largely landscape and nature photography so don't expect much discussion of editing of portrait shots, although many of the techniques described would apply equally well to people as they do to landscapes.

This book is the best I have ever used. Precise and to the point easy to follow instructions. All levels of photographers can benefit from this book.