The Digital Printing Handbook: A Photographer's Guide to Creative Printing Techniques

I found the sections on color management to be a little thin. If you are looking to graduate to the next level, and want more in-depth knowledge and a better interpretation I'd recommend Photoshop Artistry.


Beyond LPT1   December 3, 2002
 42 out of 44 found this review helpful

As the age of digital photography has dawned, more and more serious photographers have begun to use Photoshop software to manipulate their photographs. But even after going through the arcane tricks of "levels" and "curves" they sometimes have difficulty transforming what they see on their monitor to what comes out of their printer. Even more committed digital photographers wonder if there are alternate ways to use the technology to create art. This book is aimed at the audience of advanced Photoshop users.

This is not a tutorial for photographers to learn Photoshop. For that I recommend "Photoshop 7 Artistry by Barry Haynes". Instead, this book is aimed at what happens when a file manipulated in Photoshop gets sent to the printer.

The section that I believe will be of most interest deals with printer color management. Photoshop users want to insure that what they see on their monitor will be what they get on their printer. Most Photoshop books discuss using Adobe Gamma to adjust a monitor but few give the details of calibrating a printer. In just 8 pages Daly tells exactly how to set up a profile for your printer so that your monitor and printer will match up. That alone makes this book worth the price.

For photographers interested in going beyond sending the command to print a photo, this book will offer a number of ideas. Some will be quite practical, like a discussion of monochrome printing techniques, or instructions on how to make a CD cover for the CDR on which you might save a photo file. Some will be of interest to the photographer looking to push his work into a more artful stage, like a discussion of how to create a rough-edged negative border around a print. And some will serve to remind us of just how far we can push our photographic art, like discussions of overprinting old manuscripts or creating a hand-bound book of photographs.

The book is not without fault. The discussion of custom printing modes is much too cursory. And even though printed in 2002, the book only refers to the 6.0 version of Photoshop. On the other hand, given the general nature of the discussions, in most cases, this is not a serious limitation.

If you are not interested in tinkering with your computer to get a better digital photograph, this book isn't for you. But for the Photoshop user who wants to get more out of his or her printer, this book focuses on that task more clearly and concisely than any other I've encountered.