darkroom and processing

I really have been enjoying Max Ferguson's Digital Darkroom book. For me, the book has been a well-written exploration of both the capabilities of Photoshop and digital tools, and more importantly, getting an image to photo. You know, composition, artistry, all the good stuff that great photographers are thinking about when they set up their shots.

Photography is changing these days, don't you think? I still love the film world, but have fully embraced the digital world. If you're going that route too, then this book is well worth your time to spend some time with. It's a quality book, spend some quality time with it.

In many ways, the ability to digitally manipulate your images potentially causes a fundamental shift in the way that you set your shots up, because you know that the ability of your downstream digital processing is much more powerful. Not so many books approach this thinking process as well as this book.

The CD is nice, it will get you started if you're a beginnner. It's a good reference beyond that. I believe somebody in an earlier review got worked up about having technical problems with the CD...I think you should just take the CD as more of a reference. The real information presented is in the book, not the CD.

I've been getting, and no doubt will continue to get, a lot of good information from this book.

(...)First. The CD contains a whole lot of Adobe liscenced demo software for Mac and PC.It would take you hours to download. I know I downloaded it. That's good value.
Second. I'm Mac based so the Director files are Mac based. Sorry about this but there is only so much room on a CD. I have PC emulation on my Mac. So no problem. My Mac can read PC stuff. Sorry it doesn't work the other way. Moan to Bill Gates.
Third.I can't include all the images from the book. They aren't my copyright. Most importantly if you are going to make images with this fabulous software, how about taking your own pictures. I thought that was the idea.
(...)

(...)The unsolicited (from me anyway) reviews from the British Journal of Photography, Hotshoe, Amateur Photgrapher in the UK, Professional Photographer in the UK, New Digital in Australia have described this book as a 'Classic' in the tradition of books about photographic techniques. The only reservation from John Tarrant was that software changes rapidly and the ramifications of that.

In all honesty I've tried to write a book that summed up nearly 30 years of darkroom practice that I've found a way of reproducing with Photoshop. It took 6 months of my life to work out how to make it readable and instuctive. I've tried to create a 'source' for image making that is not software generation specific. All the techniques work in any generation of Photoshop post Photoshop 5. This book is about pictures not computers. The photographers that allowed me to use their work only asked for a copy of the book in return for their images, as did the wonderful Jerry Hall.

The CD might not be of great use to some people, but it is after all a bonus. The content is the written bit. If you wish to complain first pay for the book, read it, try some of the ideas for yourself and if you are not happy I'll take on board what you say.

I believe I've written a useful book, with some great pictures taken by tallented photographers.

I was very disappointed that the Tutorial on the CD_ROM doesn't run on PC. I only found out this till I saw the Readme file on the CD-ROM. I was lucky because I borrowed the book from a library. The back cover of the book mentions about the content of the CD-ROM, but without mentioning that the Tutorials work only on Mac. The CD-ROM contains only 3 images for reader to manipulate. I don't understand why the author doesn't give readers all the images that he uses in the book. For these reasons, I gave one star. There are plenty similar books available. At least, for PC users, this book is not a good deal.