Scott Kelby’s new book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers is now available at amazon.com.
I really liked Scott’s book about Lightroom 1 and I am sure the new book will also be a great resource for everyone using Lightroom 2.
As soon as I get the book and finish reading it, I will write a detailed review here on my website.
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Photoshop expert Tim Grey has recently published his new book Take Your Best Shot: Tim Grey Tackles Your Digital Darkroom Questions.
The book is a little more than 200 pages of questions and answers about digital photography with an emphasis on digital darkroom techniques.
The book contains 10 chapters. Below is a basic outline of the book with some examples of the topics each chapter covers. This is not a detailed list of everything you will find in the book.
1. Digital Fundamentals
Here, Tim talks about topics like resolutions, dynamic range, RAW format or how a sensor works.
It’s a nice introduction with answers to questions many beginning photographers have.
2. Digital Cameras and Tools
In this chapter the author covers the advantages of a DSLR over a Point&Shoot camera, sensor dust, how many megapixels you need or how to take care of your camera.
3. Digital Capture
Topics in this chapter are JPEG vs RAW, how to expose for the highlights, color spaces and more. Tiim also covers some trends in digital photography that may play a major role in the future like light-field cameras.
4. Digital Darkroom
This chapter covers the basics of digital darkroom techniques including storage and backup, what you need for your digital darkroom and so on. He also address the question of Mac vs. Windows. Of course, he does not take one side and trashes the other. Tim recognizes that both systems have their advantages and disadvantages and you won’t feel the need to change your computer system after reading this chapter.
I liked that the author recommends external hard drives as the best solution for image backups. With the current prices, they are really the best solution.
5. Color Management
Color Management is a complicated topic for the beginner and even for many past this stage. This chapter covers the basics of color management including how to calibrate your monitor and how color management in Photoshop works. I found the explanations in this chapter very good and if you are new to this topic, many things will be easier to understand after reading it.
6. Optimizing in Photoshop
Here Tim writes about working with RAW files and when he uses Adobe Camera RAW and when he switches to Photoshop. He describes his personal workflow and yours may differ. Tim’s approach is to do only some stuff in Adobe Camera RAW (or Lightroom) and most in Photoshop. I prefer to do much more in Lightroom and use Photoshop only when it offers better tools than Lightroom. The author never tells you that his way is the only way to do it but merely describes his workflow and why he does it that way, but he never tries to convince the reader that this is the only way of doing things.
Other topics in this chapter cover the Curves tool in Photoshop or how to work with colors in your image.
7. Creative Effects
This chapter covers some interesting creative effects like Photoshop Filters, adding vignettes or how to create Black-and-White images.
8. Image Problem Solving
Not every shot is perfect in camera. Many need some corrections after the photo shoot on the computer. That’s the topic of this chapter. The author explains how to fix sky that is too pale, changing the white balance in JPEG images, how to apply noise reduction and more.
9. Printing
Here, Tim covers buying a good printer, how to fix some common printing problems and how to prepare an image for upload to a printing service.
10. Digital Sharing
The last chapter covers how to share your images on the web, how to create web galleries or slide shows or what to look for when buying a digital projector.
My final rating:
Overall I found the book very interesting and a good read. The writing style is easy and never boring. The author really knows his topics and also knows how to explain difficult subjects like color management to the reader.
I would have liked to see a little more coverage of RAW processing. A little more about Layers would also have been good, as this is a very confusing topic for Photoshop beginners.
Keep in mind that this is not a complete Photoshop book. This was not the intention of the author. You will still need an introduction to Photoshop beside this book.
If you are already an experienced digital photographer and Photoshop user, you won’t get much out of this book and I don’t recommend buying it.
If you are a beginner or an intermediate user and still have many unanswered questions in your head, then Tim’s book might be a good addition to your library.
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Also see my other photography book reviews.
Adobe Lightroom quickly became a favorite fool among photographers. It’s easy to use interface, it’s features for the management of large amount of photographs and it’s powerful possibilities to work with Raw files from all important cameras (including all DSLRs from Nikon and Canon) dramatically improved the productive of many photographers.
A few weeks ago, Adobe Lightroom 2 was released and several books covering the new version have already been published or will be published soon.
The first one is The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening. And it’s probably all you ever need to fully master Lightroom 2.
The book has about 600 pages full of information about Lightroom 2.
The author explains all the main modules of Lightroom 2 (Library, Develop, Printing, Slideshow and Web). The chapters are very detailed and explain everything you need to know. Many tips and notes on the sidebars contain keyboard shortcuts and other useful information.
After an introduction into Lightroom 2 and a chapter on how to import your pictures, the author explains in great detail how to use the Library module and how you can organize your photos. Martin gives many tips on how to best manage your images and also explains how he does it. But he never tells you that there is only one way and recognizes that every photographer will use it’s own system.
My favorite chapter is the one on the Develop module. In many books about Lightroom (or Adobe Camera Raw) you can either find explanations what all the controls do or how to apply them but rarely do you learn why you use a tool in a certain way. In this book, the author not only explains in detail what a tool does and how to use it but also why you would use the tool in a certain way (for example, the book contains the best explanation on how to set the Blacks in an Raw image that I’ve ever found in a book). All important parts of the Develop module are explained with step by step examples in which the author explains how and why he is applying the tools in the Develop module to improve an image.
A separate chapter covers black and white images and another how to apply sharpening and noise reduction. Again, I found the explanations in those chapters better than in most other books I’ve read.
Although Lightroom 2 is very powerful and you probably won’t need Photoshop as much as when you used to work with Lightroom 1, there are many situations when using Photoshop is still necessary. In a chapter of it’s own, Martin covers all you need to know about how to use Lightroom 2 and Photoshop together. It helps that the author is not only an expert in Lightroom but also in Photoshop.
The chapters on printing and presenting your work are equally good as the other chapters already mentioned.
Two appendixes cover the Lightroom 2 preferences and settings.
Beside all this, Martin also covers a lot of advanced topics like shooting tethered, using GPS or working with audio notes (if your camera supports it).
For those who also use Bridge regularly, the author also explains in detail how to use Bridge and Lightroom 2 together and how those two programs work together.
What’s not to like? The only thing that one could complain about is the fact that some screenshots of the Lightroom 2 dialog boxes or menus are not completely sharp. But this is the case only for a few screenshots and really no problem. Maybe this is just a printing problem in my specific specimen of the book.
This is one of the best technical books I’ve read in a long time (and I’ve read a lot!). The writing is easy to follow and always detailed. I read the book during one weekend and I learned a lot about Lightroom, even after I’ve been using version 1 for quite a while now.
If you want only one book on Lightroom 2 and want to understand what your are doing instead of just doing it, this is your book. This is the bible for every advanced user of Adobe Lightroom 2.
Highly recommended!
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I am constantly looking for new books that help me improve my photography. For me an inspirational book should either have great images or an interesting text. Concepts of Nature by famous British wildlife photographer Andy Rouse has both.
Although Andy sometimes mentions specific technical settings (like the AF mode used), this is not a purely technical book that only tells you what lens you should by or that a full frame camera has better high ISO performance than a non full frame camera. For those interesting in the equipment used for all the shots, Andy lists details like camera, lens, ISO, f-stop, shutter speed, etc at the end of the book.
As title of the book says, the book is about art. Good photography is art and so are Andy’s shot. But just describing them as good does not do the pictures justice. They are beyond good and I can’t remember any other book in what I’ve seen so many amazing wildlife shots.
Andy’s shots of gorillas, big cats like leopards and lions and his many great bird shots are simply stunning. The book contains the best shot of a Golden Eagle I’ve ever seen seen in a book. Andy’s shots of albatrosses are amazing, especially the one of the displaying Wandering Albatrosses on South Georgia.
Often Andy does not just show the animal, but also it’s habitat. In the case of the just mentioned shot of the Wandering Albatross, you can see dark clouds and a mountain in the background. The weather looks very harsh and perfectly shows in what tough conditions the albatrosses live.
Beside the stunning pictures, I really like the text that Andy has written. He is a very skilled writer and a great story teller.
The text describes his evolution as a wildlife photographer, how his style changed and what he prefers when designing a wildlife shot. He writes a lot about the importance of good light, especially what he calls “Red5″. These are the 5 minutes of really warm and red light after dawn and right before dusk.
In his images, Andy often breaks the rules of composition that are so often told in beginners books. Those rules are important, but great photographers know when to break them.
Beside the light he calls Red5, Andy also writes about shooting at home, how he likes to capture the relationship between predators and prey or how he likes to give his pictures a certain atmosphere that makes them special.
For many shots, Andy tells how he made them. He describes how he spend countless hours in a hide for several days to wait for a Golden Eagle or how he risked his life to get an unusual shot of a lion.
Andy cares more about being out in the wild and spending time with animals than about technical details of cameras or lenses. Sure, he uses good equipment, but unlike other photographers who think that having an awesome camera is more important than knowing your subject, Andy understands that his equipment is just a necessary tool to get his shot.
I myself am interested in good equipment and I am glad that I own the equipment I’ve always wanted. But when I am out and pressing the shutter button 10 meters away from a European Hare in Austria or 5 meters from an Arctic Tern in northern Germany, it doesn’t matter which camera I have. It’s the excitement of being close to an wild animal and capturing the moment.
Andy also cares deeply about the conservation of our ever more endangered wildlife and often encourages the reader to think about it.
Concepts of Nature has been the most inspirational book for me in a long time. The images are so good that I will take this book out of the shelf much more often than most other books I own.
This book makes me want to try even harder to constantly improve my skills and I think this is the best thing one can say about a photography book.
If you are interested in wildlife photography, then this book is a must read!
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Layers are one of the most important features of Photoshop. In fact, without layers Photoshop would be pretty useless for many image editing tasks.
The problem for Photoshop beginners is, that layers can be pretty intimidating at first. There are many different ways to work with layers and the possibilites of what you can do with them are practically endless.
In many Photoshop books, layers are either explained without enough detail or in a too complicated way that leaves the reader wondering what this stuff is all about.
Recently I finished reading Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop’s Most Powerful Feature by Photoshop Guru Matt Kloskowski (author of great websites like Lightroom Killer Tips or Photoshop Killer Tips).
The book has about 250 pages and is writtin in a tutorial style. Matt describes many useful aspects of layers in a stey by step style with many examples. To get the most out of this, you should try the examples for yourself (the sample files are available for download) in front of your computer and Photoshop.
The book does not cover absolutely everything there is about layers (that would require much more than 250 pages) but it probably covers more than 95% you as a photographer are ever going to need.
The writing style of Matt is very readable and often also very funny. The book never gets boring (and this is something I rarely say about a technical book). The examples are easy to follow and after working through them, you should have a solid understanding of the power of layers. I certainly learned a lot by reading this book and found it the best explanation of layers I’ve come across so far.
Highly recommened!
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Recently, I’ve read several books on how to photograph people. One of my favorites is Face to Face: Rick Sammon’s Complete Guide to Photographing People.
The book has about 280 pages and is full with stunning pictures of people from many places around the world. The pictures are a great inspiration and alone would be worth the price of the book.
But beside the pictures, Rick Sammon also shares many of his tricks and secret on how to get better images of people.
The book is divided in five parts:
Parts 1 gives an overview of Rick’s top tips on photographing people and also explains what equipment he uses.
Part 2 covers Rick’s Photo Philosophies. This is my favorite part of the book and full of useful stuff. For example, Rick explains why placing the subject in the center is normally not a good idea, why you should shoot both horizontal and vertical frames of a subject, or when and how to pay people.
Rick urges you to always be aware of opportunities, explains how to dress your subjects, how to think creatively and how to take funny pictures.
Part 3 covers outdoor photography. Here, the author explains how to get the best light using reflectors, diffusers of fill flash. A very interesting chapter covers how to turn your garage into a photo studio without the need for expensive studio equipment. A very good and detailed chapter is the one on how to photograph festivals (using a Chingis Khan Cavalry Ride performance in Mongolia as an example).
Part 4 is all about indoor photography. Here Ricks tells the reader how to get the best lighting indoor, how to shoot silhouettes, basic flash techniques for indoor shooting, how to get great studio lighting without spending all your money, how to use mirrors or how to practice with a mannequin.
Part 5 covers Rick’s ways to enhance a picture with Photoshop. This is not a detailed introduction into Photoshop (there are ton’s of other books out there about Photoshop), but a summary of how Rick uses Photoshop to get the picture he wants. Techniques covered include how to make great Black and White pictures, softening skin, removing distracting elements and more.
In the epilog Rick repeats some of his advice and encourages you to get out and shoot and try the techniques covered in the book.
I really like the book and the authors writing style. It’s easy to read and the text is a perfect fit for the beautiful images. It’s never boring or too technical. From reading Rick’s book, it’s clear that he absolutely loves what he is doing and this is reflected in the quality of his images and his writing.
If you want to take your people photography to the next level, I highly recommend this book.
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Scott Kelby, famous for his books on Photoshop, Lightroom and other topics has also written 2 very successful books on digital photography itself. The first one, The Digital Photography Book
In this post, I want to review The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2
The book has nine chapters:
As you can see, Scott covers many different topics. He does not cover nature photography, except landscape photography and some macro photography. But covering nature photography would probably require a whole book of it’s own.
In each chapter you find a lot of useful tips on how to improve your shots. For example, Scott explains why you should avoid the pop-up flash of your camera and how to use a dedicated flash unit to get much better results, for example through getting the flash off your camera.
Chapter 2 shows you how you can build a professional studio without spending all your money.
In the chapter on portraits, Scott explains how to use light that shines through a window, how to photograph groups of people and much more.
Another great tip I found in the book is in the chapter on landscape photography: “Find the Great Light First” is about finding great light first and then finding a subject to photograph. Many photographers always search for great subjects and then photograph them in mediocre light.
Other useful tips are what book to read next, how to shoot at night, how to choose a macro lens and much more.
I found the writing in the book very easy to follow, full of information and often very funny, too.
Who should buy this book?
If you are a full time pro, you may already know all the stuff in the book.
But if you are just starting with digital photography or already have been photographing for some time but want to learn how the “Pros” do it, then this would be a wonderful book to purchase.
Summary: For most beginning and immediate photographers, I highly recommend Scott Kelby’s book.
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In this post I want to review the book Digital Nature Photography: The Art and the Scienceby John and Barbara Gerlach.
This book, written by professional nature photographers, is a no nonsense book about how to photograph nature in the digital age. It contains twelve chapters, covering all important topics on nature photography, including the following:
and more.
The book has almost 190 pages and contains many wonderful pictures who alone are worth the price of the book as they can be a great inspiration. Most of the pictures were taken in North America, but there are also shots from other places of the world, like Africa.
This book is not a book about using Photoshop to improve your pictures. And thats a very good thing. There are already many books out there doing this. Instead, this book focuses on the photography part, on how to use your equipment most effectively to get the shots right not on the computer but when you are out in the field.
I won’t cover all that’s in the book in this review, but pick just a few things that I especially liked.
One of the best tips in the book is to became a better naturalist. Many beginning nature photographers make the mistake to think all they need is a good camera and an expensive lens. But equally important is to know your subject, be it a bird, a dragonfly or anything else. The more you know about the biology of your subject, the better your results will be. Many books don’t mention this, so I was very glad to find it in this one.
In the chapter about getting sharp images, the authors stress the importance of a good tripod. I’ve seen photographers carrying heavy lenses like a 2.8/300 (or heavier) and then mount it on a really cheap and bad tripod. John and Barbara Gerlach convince the reader that tripods are important and also explain how to choose a good one.
My favorite chapters are those on using light and on composition. Again this is not found in many other books or only treated shortly there. The image examples in those chapters are a wonderful selection of great shots that really show the various ways to use light and to compose your pictures.
A very practical chapter is the one which covers how to carry your gear in the field. The tips there are very useful, even if not all can be used by all people (like using mules and horses to carry large equipment).
I’ve read many books on nature photography and this one is definitely among my top five. I highly recommend it.
You can get if from amazon here:
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