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The Creative Digital Darkroom | 
| Authors: Katrin Eismann, Sean Duggan
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
Buy Used: $24.99
You Save: $25.00 (50%)
Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 9064
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 429
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 10 x 7.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596100477
Dewey Decimal Number: 771
EAN: 9780596100476
ASIN: 0596100477
Publication Date: January 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Excellent condition, no highlighting or markings
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This tutorial takes photographers beyond the quick tips and gimmicky effects of many digital photography books. Author Katrin Eismann -- an internationally acclaimed artist, bestselling author, and gifted educator -- offers high-profile work, including her own, as examples for teaching photographers how to use the digital medium to create, edit, and output images that reflect their true vision.
Co-authored by photographer and teacher Sean Duggan, The Creative Digital Darkroom translates skills, concepts, and nomenclature of the traditional darkroom into digital solutions for photographers who sense that, despite the newness of the technologies at hand, there remains a timeless method for learning and practicing photography the right way. This is not a Photoshop book per se, but it does focus on the photographic aspects of Photoshop, something other books claim to do but rarely have the discipline to accomplish. The Creative Digital Darkroom includes: - Four sections that cover the black & white darkroom, the color darkroom, creative techniques, and production essentials
- Chapters that begin with a thorough foundation followed by numerous tutorial examples that apply the theory to real-world examples
- Examples and a layout that enables readers to find, understand, and apply the featured techniques quickly and easily
- The authors are both renowned photographers and Photoshop experts
Clearly, The Creative Digital Darkroom is not your typical digital photography "how to" book. It's ideal for intermediate and advanced photographers, artists, and educators looking for clear, concise, insightful, and inspiring information and techniques on how to make their photographs shine. The language, and techniques will immediately appeal to serious students and professionals, and the original tutorial images and high-profile work will make the book an important visual resource for educators and art appreciators.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...
 Solid Information September 6, 2008
Jo Ann Robbins (Left Coast, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We all know that film photography will likely be around to some degree forever and ever, but we also know that just as snapshot processing kiosks have disappeared from parking lots, the general public's dedication to film cameras is already dead. Computerized post-processing is now squarely in the hands of John Q., and ever-increasing numbers of people are learning how to take and produce better photographs. In addition, really excellent and complex cameras are finding their way into the hands of more and more people.
"The Creative Digital Darkroom" is for people who are interested in making their photos better than the ones in Uncle George's cell phone. It's thorough, solid, informative, and serious in its approach to photographic post-processing. Yes, it's Photoshop and Lightroom specific, but let's face it: despite the many good digital dark-room programs available, Adobe's are the flagship standard.
In my photo club, there are still the hold-outs who think that "photo-shopping" is cheating ... that the best photograph is the one that is perfect right out of the camera. While there's more than an element of truth in that, it's also true that what all of us shutterbugs are ultimately after is a compelling image. It's also true that plenty of chemical manipulation goes on under red lights and closed doors. This book does a wonderful job of explaining what Adobe software tools do and teaching how/why to use them. Anyone wanting to learn how to effectively approach digital photoprocessing professionally(there's a nice section on scanning film pictures or old family photos into Photoshop, too,) from workflow and choosing storage systems to the creative manipulation of photographic elements, will find this book a great place to start.
 How creative? August 31, 2008
S. Weinstein
The title suggests that the book will help readers to be more creative digital photographers. What I found is that it helps by providing useful techniques for developing digital images. I found the techniques well presented and quite useful. The creative part is the photographer's responsibility.
The Creative Digital Darkroom June 8, 2008
Marvin L. Gale (CHULA VISTA, CA USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I found this latest publication of Katrin Eisman very informative. It covers subjects of Photoshop I have never seen commented upon previously. I would recommend this book who want to learn more of photoshops abilities that have encouraged the field of digital photography.
bbest buy ever from amazon June 5, 2008
Lello Abbina
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is a complete guide with clear explanations, covering most of the actions possible in photoshop. Very usefulThe Creative Digital Darkroom
This will be a classic text for years to come May 24, 2008
Mark D. Segal
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This review is belated because as time permitted I wished to read this book in detail before commenting on it. I have now done so, and my overall perception is that The Creative Digital Darkroom (CDD) is destined to be a foundation text in many digital photography learning environments for years to come. While versions of Photoshop come and go, the fundamentals remain and get improved, so the techniques discussed here will be valuable for many years.
The market is over-flowing with instructional material about how to use Photoshop. This book is much more than that. It is a creative odyssey about vision and how to convey our vision with compelling images using effective techniques of digital photography. Vision is at the heart of this book. The authors stress the "what" as much as the "how", because first we need the photographic content, then the techniques for conveying it. When I look at a photograph - my photographs, any photographs - there is a filtering process: what's the purpose of this picture; what's it showing me, and how good is the graphic language. CDD, unlike so many other books on the subject, teaches a very skillful integration of exactly these considerations.
The authors treat the subject as photography - harking back to the days of film and wet process, showing how the same and new effects enabled by the new technology are created in the digital darkroom.
The book is organized according to the most fundamental themes of the photographic process. After an extensive, but necessary, introduction to the fundamentals of digital imaging and digital image management (which anyone serious about the subject really, really needs to know correctly), the content moves into managing tone and contrast, dodging, burning and exposure control, color correction, being creative with colour, creative image enhancement, working with focus (sharpness and blur), and finally there is an on-line chapter on printing, which I really wish had been included in the book for sake of completeness and convenience.
Those who have read these authors' previous works will recognize the painstaking attention to the clarity, completeness and logic of the processes they systematically explain and illustrate. It's hard to go wrong following these techniques on our own images, a number of which I have done very satisfactorily. I like to call this approach "Photoshop's Joy of Cooking", but it's really much more than that. The Joy of Cooking, clear as it is, doesn't need to explain why you need 2 cups of flour in a waffle mix, but this book does need to tell you, e.g., why you need a Curve of a particular shape to achieve a specific kind of contrast, and it does so. This helps us think about the "why" underlying the "how", which is so important to a true understanding of how to move beyond the book and use the program in ways of our making. One of the wonderful things about Photoshop is the limitless ways in which one's vision can be achieved. The authors have accomplished a very judicious selection by zeroing-in on the really important ones which help us do what we would most like to do with our photos very effectively. Highly recommended.
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