I’m looking for a book that covers all steps of image editing, preferably without sticking to a specific software, and at the same time a book that goes deeper into theory.
For me it’s a very good book to help define a good workflow from the camera to the final image. It also raise very good questions about how to manage digital file in time. What is needed to be done to be sure to be able to read all of our photo in the future.
To sum up, it is good for knowing how to handle digital file and be sure to have them for a long time. Because it’s a real problematic if we want to be able to access them for sure in ~30 years.
The editing part is very light and do not enter in any details. For this part I prefer the book of Anne-Laure Jacquart Retouchez vos photos pas à pas. The book is in french, apparently, there is no translation yet. It cover all the basics of editing without being heavily link to a specific software.
Spontaneously, I would say No to that book, even if I have not read it(!).
Why? I have a few reasons…
It is old, printed in 2010, and in today’s world, anything older than last Thursday is considered semi-antique.
General books are just general. I believe that those tied to a specific piece of software have the ability to dig deeper into the subject and give more practical advice.
Instead of buying a book, I would spend time to search the Internet, different forums, and YouTube. I can’t remember the name of the forum, but there is one that deals mostly with professional beauty retouching. They are skilled, and I have learnt many useful tricks from them.
Yeah, that’s what I have in mind in looking for a good book… not necessarily pre-digital, because I’d like it to address color space concepts, also, besides general tips. I stressed “also” because I don’t want to go that deeper (as the way recent discussions in the forum are addressing that. I can’t follow it. I don’t have the time to recall the math theory behind it).
The book that I mentioned seems to meet these requirements, but now @Thomas said that it is maybe too light.
I’ll look for the french book he and now @Wayne_Sutton mentioned. @Claes Concurrently, I’m looking heavily at internet material but, again, there’s the time frame I have to do so. (it takes a lot of time to do those searches, and to filter information).
Anyway, to those who answered so far, many thanks. _
Since this is the Lounge, I feel I can elaborate somewhat on your
Of course you are right. At least partly.
Let me give two examples from a series of books, written by Donald E Knuth at the end of the 1960s, The Art of Computer Programming.
Much of what he wrote is still perfectly valid - like his algorithms for Sorting and Searching.
However, he also advocated that if “he had 4K core memory and seven tape drives, of which four were able to read backwards as well, then he could do anything in the world”.
Yes, that is true. He could.
But his code would need a week or so to execute…
This book is absolutely about digital age. Surely the beginning of it were file sizes were smaller than today but all questions about how to plan carefully the archiving of photo for the future are addressed in this book.
I said it’s light on the editing part. I found the “workflow” and archiving part very interesting. It really depends on what’s more important for you.
To learn how to manage all the file created during the process from the camera to the print, the book you asked review about is the one to go for. To make it short, I would say it’s a very good introduction to DAM. I bought when I was setting up my Digikam instance.
To learn editing basics without going deep into the detail and the theory, my recommendation will be the french one.
I own both of them. Both teach me some thing but the overlap between the two is very narrow.
@gadolf
Did you take a look at the book by Juergen Gulbins & Uwe Steinmueller (2010): The Digital Photography Workflow Handbook ? I do not know this edition but I own their book on fine art printing, which I would rate as very good.
For an excellent treatment of the theory of image processing you might want to take a look at the book by Burger & Burge (2016): Digital Image Processing – An Algorithmic Introduction Using Java.
