Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos – Book Review

Full Title: Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos. 100 Essential Techniques for Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3 and Camera Raw 6

The blurb on the back of this book reads “… is a concise, current and affordable full color guide…” and in that short phrase lies the beauty of this book.

In this book, individual tips and tutorials are laid out over four easy to navigate “chapters”. I put chapters in quotes here because I think that they’re more ‘sections’. ‘Chapter’ makes me think of great swathes of text that I have to trawl through to find the information I need, and that most certainly isn’t the case here.

What we do have are easy to find techniques that you’ll be reaching for time and time again. They may not be things that you will use every time you load up a digital image but they are things that you’ll want to keep to hand. Things like localised edits, preview rotation, sharing images and prepping images for HDR pro are just a few of these topics.

Peppered throughout, however our techniques that you will want more often, like noise reduction using point occurs and sharpening. But like all the techniques in the book they are put before the reader in a very straightforward and concise manner, with clear and sensible screenshots.

What really appeals with this book is the complete lack of ‘clutter’. There are plenty of books that will tell you about colour spaces, the advantages of raw over JPEG and scratch discs but this isn’t one of them. It is exactly what it says it is, a collection of essential techniques. No more, no less.

With this stripped down book comes a stripped down price-tag, adding value for money to the list of reasons to consider this book along with readability and straightforwardness. With this book on your shelf you have a quick reference to those techniques you know you’ve seen somewhere but couldn’t quite remember where, until now.

You can find Dan On Twitter and Blog. He’s also a contributor for TipSquirrel.com