Digital Photography Books

I might disagree with a few minor things that I read in this book, especially in the section on digital manipulation. However, that is understandable as there are a million ways to create different digital effects. What's more, digital techniques go stale very quickly because Adobe and others keep changing the software on us.

So despite my occasional disagreements, I found Tim Gartside's book a extremely inspiring and helpful guide. With tips, step-by-step instructions, and stunning images throughout, Tim's book is beautifully designed and easy-to-read. If you are interested in landscapes and digital manipulation, this will take you up to the next level on your path to successful landscape photography.

With this book, Digital Photo Projects for dummies, you start out learning the basics, then progress to expert projects. The book gives the basics to get good results from your digital camera, without assuming you are an "expert", by overloading you with lots of technical background. The book takes you from the first step of shooting the photo, to starting the appropriate software for your camera, to how to retouch and enhance your photos.

This is a step-by-step book for those of us who need training from the very beginning. This book covered everything from finding the right camera, printer and software to taking you into shooting a photo; where it explains exposure, color and focus. After taking the photo, it explains how to download the software that belongs with your camera onto your computer. Then, it talks about simple photo-editing tools, retouching photos, tips on red-eye, covering blemishes and whitening teeth. I learned how to add text, take out people from my photos and add new backgrounds. I was amazed at how easy it was to fix a photo that I thought was a complete loss, and turn it into a photo that I could print. It was easy to do simple tasks on a photo, but also get creative and turn photos into digital collages, postcards and calendars.

The best selling point about this book is that it comes with a DVD that contains video tutorials that show you how to accomplish projects in the book and a few additional ones that are not in the book. The DVD is about two and a half hours long. The DVD also has some free trial versions of photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop Elements that you can try before you buy. The DVD was easy to follow right along with the book. The book also gives tips as a sidebar and warnings of potential pitfalls to avoid. There are even technical tips for the more advanced; making the book useable by the more advanced photographer.

Overall, the book and DVD were of great help to me in learning the basics then incorporating them into my photo editing skills and giving me an end result that I was
proud of. I would highly recommend this book to all digital photographers and scrapbookers.

This book can seem a bit overwhelming at first. It is not a book you read quickly and completely understand. It can be time consuming. The software that is included is decent though, considering the book was a hundred bucks.

I have read a lot of books on PhotoShop Elements but this is probably the best for my skill level (beginner - intermediate). The 220 pages are packed with great ideas and techniques - all well displayed and simply explained.

Digital photographers handbook.

This book is about the preparation that goes into planning trips, the digital darkroom, file maintenance and to a certain extent the composition of the photo.

The photos in the book are ok but not great. They are normal day to day shots that most people take but I think thats part of the concept of the book was to use photos that most people could take so that they don't think to themselves "I cant take that shot". As an example there are shots of kids playing on a beach.

Where this book hits the mark is in it coverage photo manipulation, the hardware involved and how it works, cameras, computers, memory cards and card readers as well as software applications used in image manipulation. In detail it covers how a camera works. How lens's work. The book also describes how to compensate for environmental and lighting conditions and what can be done upfront while taking the picture to minimize any negative effect of light or environmental condition.

One of the helpful things about this book is that he uses the same photo in various stages of manipulation so that you can see what the effect is going to look like in all the stages of manipulation that he describes.

Also covered in the book are different conceptual ideas of photography like photo journalism, architectural photography, macro photography and landscape photography to name a few.

Overall this is a good book for the person just getting into digital photograph but I'm not sure that it will be of much use to the intermediate to advanced photographer thats already familiar with digital image manipulation.

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.

This is a good starting point for someone looking to get into digital photography. Some of the references are now a little outdated, but the core information is still relevant.

I am a technical writer for educational products. I chose this book to be included with our digital photography module for middle and high school students. I think it is a great book for those who are beginning to learn and explore the basics of digital photography. It is very readable and the color pictures used in the book are very expressive and help explain the concept discussed. Students should have no problem with grasping the beginning concepts of digital photography as explained in this book. It worked well for me to use to coincide with Adobe Photoshop 5.5. The book covers a variety of functions you can do in Photoshop-color controls, straightening a picture, duplicating, montaging, and so on. I highly recommend this book for beginners and students.

I'm in my early 40's and have been an avid photographer since my teens years. I took a plethora of photography classes in college, and have owned a 35mm w/ multiple lenses and two digital cameras. Not until I purchased my most recent, fairly complicated digi-cam did I realize that I'd forgotten a lot of photographic theory and needed a refresher course, and this book, with it's user-friendly layout and simple one- or two-page explanations of various topics, was just perfect for my needs. I didn't want an in-depth textbook - just something fairly basic that would explain the basics in simplified terms, [e.g., two pages (in a nice, easy-to-read font) on Depth-of-Field, rather than twenty]. I recommend it for that very purpose. If you're wanting a more meatier, encyclopedic text, I'm sure there are others out there to suit your needs.

One note: this book appears to have been written by and for Brits, so if you're an American, be prepared for a few colloquialisms, mainly cropping up in reference to currency (prices).

The authors cover essentially every command and procedure possible in Elements 3.0. They have a great method of locating the relevant information with the section just inside the front cover. The explanations are clear for each procedure. The book covers Organizer as well as Editor.

I would give it 5 stars except for the lack of GOOD relevant color photos and the fact that there is somewhat of a cookbook feel to the text. However it is an excellent text for someone like me that started with only the rudiments of how to use Elements 3.0