Digital Photography Essentials: Point, Shoot, Enhance, Share

Rating:
Summary: Use your digital camera in ways you never thought about
Review: DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY ESSENTIALS
AUTHOR: Erica Sadun
PUBLISHER: Sybex
REVIEWED BY: Barbara Rhoades

BOOK REVIEW: The CD was the first thing I looked at. It contains 18 programs! WOW! Most are trials but some are shareware and the biggest plus is that PhotoDeluxe from Adobe is FREE! Yes sir! The whole program on the CD - no cost whatsoever and the programs are as follows: PhotoDeluxe, Photo Elements, Funhouse, Flip Album, Thumbs Up, CompUpick Pro, DVD PictureShow, GIF Animator, Genuine Fractuals PrintPro,HotText, Still Motion Creator, PhotoPrinter, PhotoImpact, PhotoVista Link, PaintShop Pro, Orasee Link, Nero Burning ROM, and JPEG Compress.

For the ability to try before you buy any of these programs, except, of course, PhotoDeluxe, this makes the book worth its price. Yet, by using these programs and using the tips and ideas from the book, you can create pictures that are worth a thousand words.

The best place to start is at the beginning and that is exactly what Ms. Sadun has done. Chapter one talks about the best way to get a good picture such as lighting and backgrounds. If you don't know which camera to buy in the first place, the next chapter will give you some good advice. Also, think your camera is only for picture taking? WRONG again. Ever go into the mall only to come out and you can't remember where you parked? Had you had your digital camera alone, you could have taken a picture of the locator markings and all you would need to do is look at the "review pictures" on the camera. Of course we all know the camera can be used for insurance purposes of accidents and the damage done but what about witnesses or even what was said if your camera has a sound-recording feature?

What else is your camera good for? Need stickers or how about a jigsaw puzzle to keep a child busy? Remember "Shrinky Dinks"? This can be used to make charms for a bracelet from photos you have taken. What grandmother wouldn't want one of a monthly recording of their newest grandchild? This list can be endless - just use your imagination.

Now that you have PhotoDeluxe installed on your computer, do you know how to use it? If not, check out Chapter 3 and 4. When a particular photo effect is discussed, there are pictures of before and after of how they should look. Don't forget to get motion into your photos with the Gif Animator.

Have I touched on the whole book? Not even close but you can by getting your own copy of Digital Photography Essentials today and see what I didn't tell you about.

Rating:
Summary: Use your digital camera in ways you never thought about
Review: DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY ESSENTIALS
AUTHOR: Erica Sadun
PUBLISHER: Sybex
REVIEWED BY: Barbara Rhoades

BOOK REVIEW: The CD was the first thing I looked at. It contains 18 programs! WOW! Most are trials but some are shareware and the biggest plus is that PhotoDeluxe from Adobe is FREE! Yes sir! The whole program on the CD - no cost whatsoever and the programs are as follows: PhotoDeluxe, Photo Elements, Funhouse, Flip Album, Thumbs Up, CompUpick Pro, DVD PictureShow, GIF Animator, Genuine Fractuals PrintPro,HotText, Still Motion Creator, PhotoPrinter, PhotoImpact, PhotoVista Link, PaintShop Pro, Orasee Link, Nero Burning ROM, and JPEG Compress.

For the ability to try before you buy any of these programs, except, of course, PhotoDeluxe, this makes the book worth its price. Yet, by using these programs and using the tips and ideas from the book, you can create pictures that are worth a thousand words.

The best place to start is at the beginning and that is exactly what Ms. Sadun has done. Chapter one talks about the best way to get a good picture such as lighting and backgrounds. If you don't know which camera to buy in the first place, the next chapter will give you some good advice. Also, think your camera is only for picture taking? WRONG again. Ever go into the mall only to come out and you can't remember where you parked? Had you had your digital camera alone, you could have taken a picture of the locator markings and all you would need to do is look at the "review pictures" on the camera. Of course we all know the camera can be used for insurance purposes of accidents and the damage done but what about witnesses or even what was said if your camera has a sound-recording feature?

What else is your camera good for? Need stickers or how about a jigsaw puzzle to keep a child busy? Remember "Shrinky Dinks"? This can be used to make charms for a bracelet from photos you have taken. What grandmother wouldn't want one of a monthly recording of their newest grandchild? This list can be endless - just use your imagination.

Now that you have PhotoDeluxe installed on your computer, do you know how to use it? If not, check out Chapter 3 and 4. When a particular photo effect is discussed, there are pictures of before and after of how they should look. Don't forget to get motion into your photos with the Gif Animator.

Have I touched on the whole book? Not even close but you can by getting your own copy of Digital Photography Essentials today and see what I didn't tell you about.

Rating:
Summary: Anyone can edit photos with this book
Review: Overview.

This book is definitely a book for beginners in the world of digital photography, and is for those with a low-end, point and click type of camera. Not everyone wants, or needs, a top-end expensive complicated camera.

Features.

This soft cover book has 249 pages printed on high quality paper, with clear images and a CDROM containing Adobe PhotoDeluxe 4.1, a full program with no limitations which can be registered.

PhotoDeluxe will enable image enhancement and manipulation and is a very good way to get the most from your snaps. It is a very simplified, but not a simple program, and is a major reason for getting the book.

Along with this program come a variety of time-limited demos that you can use to see if they will make your photography experience better.

Book Description.

Digital Photography Essentials is a book which is aimed at the new user to a new way of photography. It contains a colour section covering all the black and white images scattered throughout the book.

Chapter 1 is taken up with descriptions of how to go about taking the best shots getting the light right, and positioning either yourself or your subject.

Chapter 2 delves into which camera you should get, and more importantly, why. It also explains how and why things work, such as batteries and how to care for them, memory management etc.

Chapter 3 is the section on using the free Adobe PhotoDeluxe program supplied with the book, which you will use for all the exercises in the rest of the book.

The program gives great image enhancement and manipulation abilities to the photographer, so if the image is not quite how you wanted it to look, you can change everything about it.

This program is not complicated, but has many features of high-end photo retouching programs without having to learn industrial strength features that you may never use.

You learn to do things like swapping faces or backgrounds, and, more importantly, how to use layers. This feature allows images to be altered without destroying the original image if your selection does not suit.

Chapter 4 once again delves into the world of photo correction techniques. This is not as daunting as it may sound as PhotoDeluxe can fix things automatically. This leaves you free to dabble with settings once you know what each feature does. Sometimes automatic settings are not quite what you had in mind.

Here you start using filters to add impact, or remove unwanted parts from an image. Learn to remove red-eye, which is often a feature of images taken with a flash.

Chapter 5 teaches you to create panoramas, 3D images, and enlarge your images.

From this point on the book introduces the demo and time-limited plugins and filters, which can be experimented with.

Panoramas are used often, but what is not stressed is that panorama photos need to overlap by at least 25%, or more. This gives a much better chance of lining up features when joining the images. Use a tripod for getting good panorama shots. Tripods can be cheap but they do keep your photos level.

Chapter 6 is all about printing, printers and paper, and presenting your images for someone else to print them for you.

The resolution of an image is important when printing, or sending to the web. Both use opposite ends of the spectrum for their purposes, and you need to know which to use, luckily this is not complicated.

Chapter 7 is about presenting your images on CD and DVD, and on interactive photo albums and slide shows. A lot of this chapter is about different commercial programs for the burning and display of your images.

Chapter 8 is about sharing images over the web, and introduces the ideas of screen size etc, but resolution is also important as monitors only show at 72 dpi.

Chapter 9 introduces a lot of different ideas for using your new digital camera remember photos cost nothing, so there is plenty of scope here.

It is possible to use your digital camera to make a slide show presentation, document your belongings, or the contents of a box, or an accident. You can even photograph documents instead of using a scanner.

Chapter 10 is dedicated to craft ideas that you can create with your camera. The list here is really extensive.

Chapter 11 teaches how to transform images and create new and exciting things that you hadn't considered, check magazines and see how ads are manipulated for inspiration.

Using PhotoDeluxe you can make slide shows and share them with friends. You can even make a colouring book from your photos using the filters in the program, make calendars, or animate images.

Chapter 12 is spent introducing you to third-party programs so you can see what is available.

Bottom Line.

Not a book for an advanced photographer, as it is aimed at the beginner, which it does admirably, like a text book.

The inclusion of Adobe PhotoDeluxe is a compelling reason for purchase, but the book opens up many exciting possibilities that you may not discover by yourself.

The lessons are simple to follow, you don't have to learn new skills. Non computer-literate people can cope with the fun things that they will find to do. This book is like a text book on the use of PhotoDeluxe.

Learn to correct faults in photographs and create something new. All you have to do, as the author stresses, is to take as many photos as you can. It will cost no more and you have more choices to play with later.

Too much emphasis on commercial programs has reduced the rating, but the book is good, and the bundled software is great to start with. You may find you never need to get another program anyway.

© Tim Skyrme, 2003...