A Look At : The Digital Photography Workflow Book

The Digital Photography Workflow Book – From Input to Output
Written by Juergen Gulbins and Uwe Steinmueller
Published by RockyNook
ISBN: 978-1-933952-71-0

Fitting Photoshop into your digital workflow seems easy enough, take the photograph, pop into Photoshop and then print it off, surely that’s all there is to it, right? Well, anyone that has ever spent more than five minutes in Photoshop will know that that is far from the truth.

The order in which you tackle certain problems or use certain aspects of Photoshop can make a huge difference to the speed and dexterity in which you use the software, so this book is a great start to defining your own workflow.

Of course the workflow starts long before the image reaches Photoshop and this book tackles some of the confusing issues along the way. For example, what are RAW files, using the histogram on the back of a DSLR and getting the images from the camera to the computer. But this isn’t a photography book and by chapter 4 we’re already in Photoshop and editing our images.

Probably the best way to understand the layout and emphasis of this book is to give you the chapter headings;

1. Introducing the Digital Photo Workflow
2. The Basic Workflow
3. Colour Management Know How
4. Image Processing Basics
5. RAW Editing and Conversion
6. All in One Workflow Tools
7. Photoshop Layers
8. Advanced Photoshop Techniques
9. Multishot Techniques
10. Turning Colour into Black and White
11. Printing and Image Presentation
12. This Useful Photoshop Plug-Ins

Each of these chapters is then split into 15 to 20 subheadings such as 5.1.1 How Much Editing in the RAW Converter? and 5.1.2 Integrating RAW Editors/Converters into the Workflow and make this book extremely easy to navigate and digest.

As you might expect from a book like this, there are plenty of screenshots and explanatory diagrams all very clear and well labelled or the language is concise and easy to understand the added bonus of having coloured text to help with navigating around Photoshop.

This is by no means a pocketbook measuring approximately 10 x 8″ and having 527 pages its weighty! You’re not going to break the spine however trying to keep the page open to where you want it, it flops open and stays open. This may not seem like a very important point, but when you’re trying to work through examples and have the book to one side of the computer this is extraordinarily helpful.

In summary, a very well organised and colourful book . It’s small bite-size chunks delivered the information to me and moved on. Primarily aimed at photographers it has handy tips and tutorials for every Photoshop user.