Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition) [Paperback]

Dan Margulis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2006 | ISBN-10: 032144017X | ISBN-13: 978-0321440174 | Edition: 5

The commonsense, by-the-numbers approach of Professional Photoshop has shaped the workflows of a generation of Photoshop experts. This new edition, the first in nearly five years, is completely updated for the age of digital photography. It continues the book’s tradition of introducing astoundingly effective, previously unknown methods  of image enhancement. The original photographs found in the book come from a variety of professional sources, and all correction exercises are on the included CD. Professional Photoshop has changed radically from edition to edition, and this time is no exception—with almost 90 percent new content and completely overhauled coverage of curves, channel blending, and sharpening.Professional Photoshop offers a full explanation of:

• How curves bring out detail in the most important areas of the imagen 
  
• A comprehensive strategy for blending channels to create deeper, stronger images
  
• The strengths and weaknesses of CMYK, LAB, and RGB, and when to use each one
  
• The first detailed look at the Shadow/Highlight command—and even more sophis-ticated ways to enhance contrast in the lightest and darkest parts of the imagen
• Sharpening strategies, in three full chapters, including the innovative hiraloam method (High Radius, Low Amount). Plus, a fiendishly effective method of merging hiraloam and conventional unsharp masking
• The realities—and the politics—of preparing files for commercial offset printing and how to deal with colors that are out of the press’s gamut
• What Camera Raw and similar acquisition modules can offer
• Typical problems of digital captures that were not found in the age of film— and how to correct for them

Editorial Reviews

Review

"?a wealth of information on this crucial, complex subject?Star Rating ****?"(Mac World, December 2002) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

Bring your images to life!

The common-sense, by-the-numbers approach of Professional Photoshop has changed the way professional retouchers, photographers, and artists prepare their files for print. Although many of the corrections are technically difficult, the concepts are logical and can be understood even by color beginners. This extensively revised edition, covering versions through Photoshop 7, continues the tradition of introducing astoundingly effective, previously unknown methods.

Here's what the experts had to say about the best-selling Professional Photoshop 6:

"This is the best guide to color correction there is, period. The information on color correction by the numbers is invaluable for anyone involved with the commercial application of photography and is especially pertinent for digital photography that can be used in print. This is a book that you will want to re-read numerous times."
-Lee Varis, Digital Photography for Graphic Designers

"Dan is the experts' expert on the logical and effective ways to make any image look its best when printed. He has a very likable writing style that integrates metaphors and examples from other disciplines to engage your interest and explain his techniques."
-Jay Nelson, Design Tools Monthly

"The cover would have you believe that this is a book about digital prepress color correction, which is like saying that Leonardo da Vinci was a medical illustrator. Margulis' real agenda is to teach us to look critically at digital images, to understand what we see, and finally how to reason from our understanding toward an image we can take pride in. Best of all, this book is a fun read about a subject that's hardly a great party topic, written with wit, and illustrated with impressive corrections of some profoundly discouraging original images."
-User manual for dPhoto software

In addition to its relentless exploration of curves, this volume teaches:
* The uses of LAB color correction
* How to bring out detail in the most important areas of the image
* Precision control of unsharp masking
* Channel blending to build contrast
* The pivotal role of the black plate
* Blending in Luminosity mode
* Custom profiles to correct hopeless images
* A powerful new overlay blend method that will revolutionize the handling of faces
* Control of all facets of the separation process
* The unwanted color and how to exploit it
* Correcting for factors beyond the photographer's control

Includes a CD-ROM containing many of the images plus extra instructional material! --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; 5 edition (November 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 032144017X
• ISBN-13: 978-0321440174
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 1.2 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #540,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

130 of 131 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Top Notch - A NEW BOOK December 29, 2006

By Ken Walsh

Format:Paperback

Well, it appears that Amazon has folded all the 4th edition reviews into this new edition's page. I'm not sure what to think of that. This book is 90% new material, it is almost a new book entirely. It has similar goals to the previous editions though. So, here's a hint, if the review was written before the fall of 2006 it is about the older editions which are very different from the current edition.

What NOT to expect:

- Learn how to use photoshop, you better know this already

- Step-by-step how-to algorithms for you to follow, you are taught concepts and generic techniques instead

- 100% clarity on a first reading

- Gobs on CMYK (you'd only expect this if you'd read older editions). Thankfully the book is far more balanced to modern workflows where we often don't need to go there anymore. Older editions were more CMYK based. That said, he includes all the relevant old material on the CD and this book still has way more CMYK than anything else out there. He is very balanced in his approach in my opinion, very refreshing.

- The same as the old editions. Source and output technology change. Dan learns new tricks. Dan changes his mind on somethings. So does the rest of the community. There is LOTS that is new in this edition.

What to expect:

- Extremely powerful techniques. Their power lies in their flexibility, the problem is knowing when to use them and only experience will help you there. The book does give you some hints though, when it can.

- A bit of contraversy. Dan has opinions. He states them clearly. He usually has good facts backing him up.

- Having to play with actual images yourself to enitrely comprehend the whole. I personally have had no problems understanding each and every chapter just by reading, but you'll really need to start using what you've learned on real images to get a feel for what is needed where and when.

- Occasionally obfuscated writing style. Dan seems to like to hide where he is going to make the result that much more exciting. It is not the best way to teach. To be fair, though, the start of each chapter says where we are going and the end says where we have been. Nonetheless you'll occasionally find yourself reading something twice - and at times I think this has more to do with the writing style than the concept really being that hard.

Overall, if you are a photographer or work with photographs and are a experienced photoshop user (i.e. you know what a layer, channel, curve, and blend mode are and the very basics of using them) you will find a wealth of knowledge here not really available in any other resource. You will probably need to read it, or at least parts of it more than once. You'll probably need to read or refer to parts again after having tried them for awhile.

People like to say this book is really hard. I don't think it is myself. I think instead the plethora of really poor Photoshop books out there that have a hand-holding, show every dang dialog box but not actually teach you anything approach have set the standards very very low. Photoshop is an extremely powerful program, much of what experts do with it is well beyond what the makers ever intended. Many photoshop books could just be replaced by a CD with photoshop actions on it since the books don't teach the reader anything other than by wrote algorithms. This book assumes you are willing to think a bit about what is going on under the hood and use that knowledge intelligently rather than copying out some steps.

If you are new to photoshop this is not the book for you. I highly recommend Real World Photoshop CS2 by Fraser and Blatner as a well written in depth introduction to photoshop focusing on what photographers need from it. That said, Dan's book doesn't actually use very many Photoshop tools to begin with so you certainly only need to understand a relatively small feature set. You do need to be very comfortable with that feature set though.

Final notes: The CD is excellent, containing lots of supplementary material and images from the text to work on yourself. It includes lots of material from previous editions which is still very useful to some people. The production quality of my copy was very impressive. Apparently Dan actually slept at the press while it was being run to make sure it all went well. There are many, many cases where arrays of images are suppose to show very subtle differences. These differences actually made it into print!!! Gobs of books like this refer to figure 1.1A and claim dramatic differences to figure 1.1B but when you look at them you can see no difference at all because the press work was so poor. Not so in this case! Wonderful production work.

In short, buy this book, it might be too much for you now but you'll eventually want it later.

FINAL NOTE: As of the date of this review the "Search Inside" feature shows the previous edition!!! Ignore it!

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It's like a magic blue pill for limp color photos May 22, 2005

By Thomas Lundin

Format:Paperback

I've had people tell me my portraits look like they were taken in a studio, or with a high-end digital camera. The fleshtones are smooth and warm and the lighting is flattering. It wasn't always that way. I use a standard point-and-shoot autofocus/autoflash compact digital camera, and I used to have problems with skin tones in my prints being too red or green or blue -- you name it. But three simple secrets turned my dud snapshots into professional-looking portraits: create visual angles when posing your subject, use a bounce flash off the ceiling, and apply the techniques in this book to color-correct your images before printing them. Correcting by the numbers is a sure-fire way to remove the bluish color cast caused by a digital camera flash or to make flat lighting more dramatic. These techniques will let you make the most out of every photo you take. Simply convert your photos to CMYK, apply the corrections, and convert back to RGB. By focusing on getting the numbers balanced, you'll get powerful results without resorting to guessing. I can vouch for it -- nobody who has seen my pictures has figured out I'm color-blind.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Guide for the Pro December 4, 2002

By Martin L. Davis II

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Unlike most Photoshop "how to" books, this one wastes no pages defining the use of tools and features. It assumes the reader is a competent photographer who is comfortable using digital imaging editing programs, and begins with the author's philosophical groundwork for image enhancement techniques. The book utilizes "all 10 channels" in the RGB, CMYK and LAB models as appropriate for analyzing and correcting images. This is a book that repays repeated study. Outstanding.