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The Art of Photoshop for Digital Photographers Review by Conrad J. Obregon
Split Personality
I was really excited when I first looked at this book. I regularly complain that many ostensible photography manuals are really picture books that have had some language added to make them look like photography instruction books. Here was a book that had plenty of beautiful pictures of Tuscany that were really used as a framework for instruction. Then I discovered the book's split personality.
The first part of the book is aimed at beginning to intermediate serious photographers. Using the author's own digital pictures, Giordan explained the basics of photography, including exposure, focus and composition. The pictures were not only lovely, but they were tied to the text so that they illuminated the teaching points. Giordan has a tendency to photograph details rather than the big picture, but perhaps that's also a useful lesson to learn. He also seems willing to tolerate over-exposed skies to get shadow details. But he passed my litmus test for any book maintaining it's about digital photography by explaining the use of the histogram, blinkies and even the zone system.
Unfortunately, he also put out some wrong information. For example, he states that digital cameras achieve exposure compensation by adjusting ISO ratings and so one should shoot in manual mode if one expected to compensate exposure. But that's certainly not true of the Nikon D2H, which Giordan used for the pictures in this book, or any other digital camera I know. Most digital cameras compensate with the aperture when you are in shutter mode and the shutter speed when you are in aperture mode. Moreover, while the author acknowledges that an important role of lenses of different focal lengths is to adjust perspective, he also preserves the old myth that depth of field is a function of focal length.
Still, even with inaccuracies like that, this book looked like a four-star book. Then the second section came along. It deals with the use of Photoshop and is aimed at very experienced users of the software rather than the beginning to intermediate audience of the first section. Here was an ideal opportunity to use the photographs of Tuscany to show how to control exposure, lighting and color with the basics of Photoshop. Instead he chose to use some very advanced techniques to create pictures that were far removed from the basics of digital processing. For example, in a chapter telling how to use Photoshop while preserving the photographic nature of the image, he shows how to simulate twilight or do the equivalent of hand coloring of photographs.
In the following chapter he explains how to modify images so they look like paintings or drawings. He finishes up with detailed descriptions of how he manipulated certain photographs to make them look like they weren't photographs.
I tried to put aside the philosophy that one should capitalize on the nature of photography when using Photoshop. I downloaded images from the companion website and tried to follow along with the author's description of how he was manipulating the pictures. I consider myself an experienced Photoshop user, but often the instructions were too sketchy or ambiguous for me to follow on a first try, and sometimes after several tries, I still couldn't follow Giordan's instructions.
This book had the potential to be really effective by taking a different approach to photography instruction. Unfortunately, the first part is filled with a few landmines and the second part is only for the most experienced Photoshop users for whom the first part might prove too simplistic.