Stephen Johnson is considered an absolute authority on all things related digital photography – his book scored a rave review on TamsPalm a few months ago. Now, he wrote the foreword for another O’Reilly book with the bold title “The Creative Digital darkroom”: is it as good as his own?
Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan divided their book into ten chapters that each look at a typical problem that plagues images. For example, two chapters focus on color, while another takes a detailed look at file management(see the freely available TOC for further info).
Each chapter is subdivided into a few ‘recipes’ that cover specific workflows. Usually, more than one approach is provided for each “topic” – fans of choice will definitely enjoy browsing the book…
Like most O’Reilly books, The Creative Digital Darkroom is well-written and easy to read. The processes are described in extreme detail and focus on Photoshop. Adapting them to GIMP IMHO is possible, although some things take a bit of time to figure out. As for the sample images – they alone make owning this book worthwhile.
In the end, this book is NOT intended for people who want to learn photo editing from zero upwards. Instead, it is a excellent ‘dictionary’ of image editing techniques: if you have a bit of free time and feel like spiffing an image up up, leafing through this tome is likely to uncover a bunch of gems. If you are looking for ‘cookbook/trick tome’ and already know how to handle your image editor, get this by all means. The price of 31$ is acceptable…
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