The Creative Digital Darkroom | 
 enlarge | Authors: Katrin Eismann, Sean Duggan
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
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Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 14163
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
Publication Date: January 11, 2008
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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 24 more reviews...
 One Tip Could be Your Next Money Shot! January 16, 2008
T. Norris (Cleveland, OH)
64 out of 70 found this review helpful
Why another book on digital photography? Another book on CSx? Another book on RAW image processing? Another book on workflow? Another book on photo composition? Why?
Because it's ONE book! A cohesive litany of eye-to-print, not only "hows", but the "whys"..
This book is about photography. Well written, illustrated and laid out. The organization is like workflow should be, natural, easy to follow. It has gems for the beginner and pro alike. But let's be clear on what the beginner is.
- The book is digital SLR focused.
- The book is ADOBE CS(3) focused.
- The book is RAW image capture focused.
- The book presumes you have workflow needs.
- The book assumes you didn't take the picture you thought you did.
- The book assumes you care enough to fix it.
The beginner here is not someone who got a Canon Pro-Shot for Christmas.
Many photographers have moved from film to digital in the last couple of years, only to be smacked in the face by the EXTREME DIFFERENCE in the workflow of the two media.
Ms. Eismann and Mr. Duggan have done a wonderful job covering so much so well without turning it into a MAC vs PC or CS3 primer. Throughout the ENTIRE book I felt I was working with images and concepts, never sitting in a classroom learning the Adobe interface. Thank you, Katrin and Sean, for that and this book!
If you are a photographer that is buried by all the images, by all the post shutter-click "stuff" and are looking for a life-line of sanity to make sense of it all, this is THE book. The Creative Digital Darkroom is simply the best comprehensive book you can buy, especially for thirty bucks.
Other reviewers have dinged this as a beginner's book. Sure, it appeals to that market, because it is full of step by steps and screen shots and explanations of how and why in CS3, Bridge, Lightroom and third party plug ins that don't exist in such detail in ANY SINGLE SOURCE. This book also gives the reader something that so many others lack - THE PICTURES IMAGES TO WORK ON! Ms. Eismann has, like in her other books, given the reader the links to the photos she uses to demonstrate her experience.
Every concept, tool and technique can be explored implicitly and rotely as shown in the book, but also can be exploded into a vast field of self-exploration. Fun stuff. Cool.
Every section is chock full of ideas and tips that easily could rescue, restore or release that one image that makes the book worthwhile.
There are hundreds of topics explained and visually manipulated on the pages of this book. For example, chapter two, Digital Nuts and Bolts has a section on color space.
Color space. What is it? What is meant by CMYK and RGB and sRGB (not the words cyan, magenta, yellow and black or red, blue, green, but what is Adobe RGB (1998) or Apple RGB or the camera manufactures' sRGB). Color space clipping from different cameras. Color and luminance. For beginners? Perhaps, but I know many a wedding photographer that now straps a Canon or Nikon pro body around the neck and hasn't a clue about what color space, resolution, bit depth, ISO-noise relationships and how to handle them with all those sliders in the software: let the lab handle it...
Five Star Plus
A gem for artists moving to digital ... January 13, 2008
Darwin's Bulldog (Upstate New York)
48 out of 53 found this review helpful
There are a large number of books that provide an overview of Photoshop; most are for beginners and emphasize the tools and how to use them. If you are lucky and happened to buy one written by a working photographer, you likely also had a number of the author's really good photographs to work with. If you were unlucky, you had a book written by someone who was an expert, professional Photoshop user, but whose sample photographs were more snapshots than art. Perhaps you learned how to use the tools but not necessarily why. The good photos didn't need a lot of adjustmant, and the poor ones might not seem worth the effort.
If you were really unlucky, you might not have gotten any sample images, or 'color' was a small selection of small images bound together in the middle of the volume with the rest of the book in B&W... even the 'color' illustrations!
This books is well done... full color throughout. As far as I can tell, all the images used as examples in the book are available as downloads from the book's web site. This is important! Many of the examples are necessarily printed at a small size. You cannot esily see the outcome of the various editing steps. But with Bridge open to each chapter's image set, you can open and follow along with exactly what you are reading. (It's amazing how many authors do not do this!)
This book is written by a photgraphic artist who uses Photoshop as a tool to create works of art. So the emphasis here is to present Photoshop as a tool to achieve rsults that were either similar to existing film effects (cross procesing, grain, dodge, burn etc) and also things that are just so much easier and new in Photoshop.
This is no a beginner's guide to photography (digital or film), or a beginners guide to Photoshop. You should have experience in both. No explanation of f/stops and shutter speeds, and no elementary hand holding in Photoshop. You will learn how to color correct, balance tone & contrast, create film and digital effects, B&W conversion and much more.
If you have experience with earlier versions of Photoshop, and are moving to CS3, I would also recommend Fraser & Schewe's excellent book, "Real World Camera Raw", coverage of which would have made this book another 300+ pages longer.
So yes, this book does have, in part, some resemblance to other Photoshop 'recipe' books, but is written at a much higher level. Even more impressive in this book is the close attention to non-destructive image editing techniques. That is, techniques that do not commit changes that can't be later adjusted, removed or changed. The smart object abilities of CS3 are emhasized.
So if you want to move you digital darkroom techniqies to a higher level of artistry, this is great book to learn from!
This will be a classic text for years to come May 24, 2008
Mark D. Segal
10 out of 10 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.
If it's clarity and user-friendliness you're after ... February 4, 2008
Aroha Mahoney (New Zealand)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
I'm a multi-media artist and I've used Photoshop since PS 6. I consider myself an intermediate to advanced user, and my library includes "specialist" books by John Paul Caponigro, Dan Margulis, Daniel Giordan, Vincent Versace, Eddie Tapp ... I could go on. I also have Katrin Eismann's other books, and when I was first coming properly to grips with Photoshop, her earlier collaboration with Sean Duggan, on digital photography, was my bible. So I eagerly awaited publication of this one.
The strength of this book, as with the earlier volumes, is its clarity and user-friendliness. As the Amazon book description states, it is aimed at those photographers in the transition from film to digital, as well as those who want to take further steps to realise their creative vision. In my experience, it's unusual to find a book that successfully marries both objectives, as I found this one to do. There are short sections on the architecture of Photoshop and the RAW settings, the suggested workflow and the basics of file preparation. The bulk of the book is about how to come into relationship with the captured image and develop its potential to the point where it finally says what you wanted it to say. Along the way there is a lot of how-to, and a great deal of why, and a concentration on photographic concepts as opposed to plain Photoshop technique. There was little in the book that was mind-bogglingly new to me, but the layout, the lucidity of the text, and the underlying philosophy made it, for me, greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps this had something to do with the accessibility of the authors' thought processes and the way their personalities came through.
You won't find flash and dazzle in this book, just a lot of solid, workable methods for improving your workflow and fine-tuning your images. If you're hesitating about buying it, read the authors' Preface. I found that the book delivers what they promise, so for me it's 5 stars.
Creating the Vision January 28, 2008
Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA)
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
With the exception of photojournalists, most serious photographers do not aim at trying to create photographs that are "real". Instead they aim at creating an image that will convey the photographers' vision. Photoshop software allows the manipulation of the image to accomplish that purpose, and this book shows photographers techniques for doing that.
This book is aimed at intermediate and advanced photographers who already know the basics of Photoshop. Anyone interested in an introduction to Photoshop would do better to read a book like "Complete Photoshop CS3 for Digital Photographers (Graphics Series)" by Colin Smith and Tim Cooper. There is little here about downloading pictures with Photoshop tools, or placing windows on the screen, or even, except in tutorials that may require their use, about making selections in Photoshop. There is an online chapter available on printing.
Instead the authors concentrate on adjusting tonality and color to reveal the photographers vision. Some of the content discusses the role of these factors in revealing vision. There are a large number of tutorials that present the ways to adjust tonality and color, and in fact, often there are explanations of multiple ways to achieve the same result. The authors provide downloadable images on a website that can be used in conjunction with these tutorials. Many of these techniques may be familiar to advanced image processors, but I encountered many that I had never seen before.
The book deals not just with Photoshop and its included stand alone plug-in, Adobe Camera Raw, but also with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a separate piece of software that provides a different (and in my opinion, easier to use) method of processing images that also integrates with Photoshop. Eismann and Duggan usually deal with Photoshop in a manner that will allow users of older versions than CS3 to benefit. At the same time they provide detailed instructions on the newest tools, including, I'm pleased to say, the new sharpening facility provided in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom that is so useful for input or capture sharpening.
This is not an easy read like a narrative novel. Most of the tutorials follow step by step instructions on using Photoshop tools that are not very exciting to read, and unlike some other Photoshop authors, Eismann and Duggan use little humor to ease the way. All of the tutorials seem to be written in accurate steps that easily enable the reader to understand how to use the tool. There are no sweeping tutorials that take the reader from beginning to end of the processing of an image. Many readers will not want to actually try all of the tutorials as they read them (although I found myself stopping to use many of the tutorials that deal with image problems on which I was currently working). Instead this is a book that I expect to keep next to my computer to consult as I seek to improve my images.
One of the hardest tasks photographers will face will be deciding just what adjustments will help in realizing their vision. The authors provide some excellent suggestions. Readers looking to develop this skill may also want to look at Rob Sheppard's "Adobe Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only (For Only)".
This book will prove extremely useful to advanced photographers interested in learning techniques for communicating their vision.
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