The Complete Guide to Digital Photography

The book covers all aspects of photography from actually taking the pictures (probably the most important part!) through digital enhancing (the main part) to printing, including the necessary theory of each stage. I've been a photographer for many years and managed to find much useful information in here.

It is well designed, well laid out, and diagrams and illustrations are generally of a high quality. I agree that sometimes it is difficult to see the difference between "before" and "after" shots but this really is a minor gripe and close scrutiny will pay off in this respect.

This was also one of the few that didn't waste 30 pages showing what you can do with the "artistic" and "3D" effects that come with most photo software.

As earlier reviews have said, the author is clearly first and foremost a photographer and this shows.


Very useful synthesis of creative and technical   May 14, 2004
ALEXANDER (Farnham, Surrey United Kingdom)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful

There are many digital photography user manuals out there which go into great detail about how to use digital cameras and imaging applications, but without showing what creative uses they can be put to. The beauty of this book is that it does both. The author is obviously first and foremost a photographer, he sees the technology as a way of extending creativity rather than an end in itself, which cannot be said of many other books in this field. The book is well laid out and clearly written. There are lots of helpful user interface sequences showing you how to achieve particular results although some of the images (eg thumbnail comparisons of images with different resolutions)are too small to be of any use. Obviously such a book cannot be a substitute for a dedicated software user manual, but you will at least know why you might want to create for example a layer, not just how to. Overall I'm very pleased with this book - it's an easy read and will inspire you to get to grips with an area that is often over-complicated and needlessly cluttered with technical jargon.


Excellent Introduction   January 15, 2003
47 out of 48 found this review helpful

An excellent introduction to all aspects of digital photography. Divided into four sections: hardware, working digitally, techniques and next steps this book covers the basics and terminology in all aspects of digital photography. If you are thinking of getting into digital photography, either via a digital camera or scanner & PC this book will help prevent you making costly mistakes.

One downside is that the book is not fully up to date e.g. it does not mention the USB 2 interface. Other annoyances are that the book has odd spelling mistakes and several page cross references refer to the wrong page. These minor problems aside it is an excellent introduction to the complex subject of digital photography.