The Creative Digital Darkroom
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.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Excellent content, bonus customer service
This review briefly covers two things: The book, The Creative Digital Darkroom, and the customer service experience I’m having with Amazon, O’Reilly and one of the book’s authors, Katrin Eismann.
About me: I’m an amateur photographer and an engineer. I shot film with a Nikon FE2, then spent some time with a digital point & shoot. Now, I have a Nikon D90 and hope to do the things with a digital darkroom that I could not do in color film because I didn’t have a chemical darkroom.
First, the book review. This is based upon a quick read. The book is 400 pages and has high information density. This is the sort of book that I read once to learn what is available to me, and then use it as a reference for deep dives. I spent a few weeks perusing books in local shops and the local library. Here’s why I picked this one:
– It is a beautiful book that is well-illustrated. The photos are available online. The writing is clear and the examples are well thought out. The overall structure/organization makes good sense.
– The book does a good job of covering both technical (objective) and artistic (subjective) elements of “developing” a digital photo. To me, it felt like both subjects were covered well, and were not confused.
– On the objective side, you are taught what is technically good, and how you get there. The process can result in intermediate steps in which the picture looks worse than when the process began. The authors patiently explain the entire process for a series of varied examples. If you are looking for a book that informs at the level of, “slide the slider to adjust color”, then this book is not for you. Personally, I found the level of depth to be at the appropriate level–a good bit of info I can put to immediate use, and a lot of info that will challenge me in a productive way to reach the next level of digital photography.
– On the subjective side, the amateur in me was introduced to a wide range of digital photographs that were developed in a way that was non-obvious (at least to me).
As for customer experience, I had a problem others here have recently posted about: the book arrived with a color jacket but low-quality b/w print inside. Because I had held several copies of this book in my hand prior to purchase, I was certain that something was clearly wrong. At the time of this writing, I can tell you:
– Amazon MAY be stocked with bad copies
– I contacted Amazon about a return and they were very accomodating–the process could not have been easier or more pleasant.
– I then contacted the book’s publisher and one of the authors–they, too, were very helpful, offering to replace the book themselves.
– The Amazon replacement arrived, again in b/w. I am now returning the book to O’Reilly so that they can examine it. Katrin is sending me a replacement. They are going to great lengths to accomodate me in every manner. At this point, my principle emotion is that I feel bad for them having to sort out the apparent problem with Amazon’s stock.
5 Stars Must read for anyone starting out with Photoshop or Lightroom
I’m half way through this book and already I’ve learned more about how to use Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 than I’ve gotten out of any other book or website. The authors’ style is very straightforward and provides not only directions on how to use the tools in the applications, but also explains why you should use them. Also, there is a special download-only chapter on printing that does a marvelous job explaining how to configure photoshop and lightroom to get the most out of your printer.
2 Stars Prepare your photos to view on your monitor.
This book is chock full of great information. After a quick scan of the entire book I was excited to really delve into it in-depth in spite of the really lousy page design. On closer study, I was fairly appalled at the errors throughout this book. None of which are listed on the companion web site’s errata page. When I’m following someone else’s step by step work flow, I expect it to be correctly laid out for me. This book does not do that.
The largest problem with this book is that it seems to operate on the assumption that one is going to go through all of these processes only to have one’s photographs appear better on the monitor’s screen. The fact that to learn anything about printing one must read the “printing” chapter online is ludicrous.
All in all, a very good book information wise, graphically a disaster, and a true challenge to decode some of its step by step methodology. But seriously folks, we do all this work to our files so that we can print. This book falls flat.
2 Stars Newspaper-print photo quality really kills this book, sad to say
I’m puzzled by the enthusiastic reviews of this book. I agree that the writing and concepts are quite good. But the book design and the printing quality are a real negative for a photography book (so to speak…). It made me think I was looking at a low-grade newspaper: all the images and screenshots are printing in low-res, low contrast B&W with significant banding and streaking. In addition to looking shabby, it makes it hard to see the effect the images were supposed to illustrate. It’s so bad that I thought I was reading a cheap rip-off of the original, possibly published by pirates in some far-off copyright-ignoring country (which shall remain nameless), since it’s inconceivable that writers and photographers the quality of Eismann and Duggan would tolerate this shabby presentation of their work. I’m also amazed that O’Reilly, normally a very-high quality publisher, would put their name on this thing.
The book design is also a head-scratcher: huge swaths of small type with little white space. Just looking at it gives me claustrophobia, and reading it is tiring.
I wouldn’t normally rate a book primarily for these kinds of faults, but sheesh…this is a photography book! It’s supposed to have at least half-way decent photos in it, not images that look like an old newspaper! And for $49.99 list, it should have GREAT images and printing!
I returned it almost immediately.
All in all, I was left with with the age-old question: What were they thinking?
5 Stars Knows whereof she speaks
The author of the classic digital retouching and restoration handbook is back with an updated “digital darkroom” book for the latest version of your favorite image editor.
This one covers topics that really need explanations for the ambitious photographer/image editor. It covers RAW processing, workflow, image correction, and software options such as Lightroom and various plug-ins. You’ll learn about color spaces, file preparation, and other essential topics. Although I expect that few readers of this book have ever actually worked in a chemical darkroom, they’ll find the digital orientation of this book useful and informative.