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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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 4419
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 429
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
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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 20 more reviews...
 How creative? August 31, 2008
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
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
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
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.
The Why and the How April 4, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book for what it is, and what it isn't. First, the book IS a great read for the philosophy and background of creating wonderful photographic images as art. The first part of the book takes you through a cursory, though better than average history into how film photography was not only developed but enhanced in the darkroom.
This book IS well laid out into themed chapters on ideas and tools you can use to enhance a photo from something average or good into something great. This IS NOT a recipe book with impressive yet funky and unusable Photoshop tricks. No, you will not learn how to make a page peel or ghost in your image. What you will learn are very practical and useful techniques that I find myself using everyday.
There are those that call themselves "purists" and believe any Photoshop work to an image is wrong. Hogwash I say! Difficult techniques that have been a part of the darkroom for years are now much more accessible to the photo enthusiast and should be used to their fullest. That said, I am very pleased with the efforts this book makes to teach enhancement techniques more than outright modification.
I highly recommend "The Creative Digital Darkroom" for any budding or serious photographer that is looking to learn some of the best ways to bring out the best in their photos. The WHY and the HOW are both covered effectively for each technique taught with full color examples and practical screen shots. This title will get an arsenal of arrows in your quiver when approaching the development stage of your photo workflow.
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