If the fastest-growing market in high tech is in digital photography, then the same is true for the market for digital photography books. Every publishing season brings out a range of them, for beginner, intermediate and professional photographers.
Three new books offer the entry-level photographer some needed help. Digital Photography Field Guide: All the Essentials You Need for On-the-Spot Digital Photography, by Cynthia L. Baron and Daniel Peck (Peachpit Press/Pearson Canada, 130 pages, $21.99 Cdn.), covers a lot of ground made necessary by the fog of marketing hype.
It starts with a rundown of the kind of icons camera-makers use on their digital displays and what they mean and goes through basic stuff such as white balance, LCD displays, power consumption and resolution settings, all of which are peculiar to digital cameras. One thing I liked here is the presence of a section on "latency," a fancy word meaning the time it takes for a digital camera to commit the photograph to memory, which can be surprisingly long and for which there is no equivalency in analogue photography.
The book then moves through the kind of photography basics similar to all photographers (shooting with the sun behind you, cutting off people's heads and so on), before getting back to final digital issues such as storage, e-mailing pictures and printing, as well as a trouble-shooting section.
The book is inexpensive but very well produced, with illustrations that explain the text rather than show off the authors' brilliance and a fluid writing style. It's an excellent choice for those who want to be introduced to the basics but are sensitive to condescension.
Get the Picture You Want: Essential Digital Photography Techniques by the Element K Journals Creative Team (Peachpit Press/Pearson Canada, 196 pages, $35.99 Cdn.) is a glossier version of the Field Guide mentioned above, with high-quality illustrations and coloured graphics throughout. It's also organized like the Field Guide, starting with a comparison of analogue and digital photography, followed by four chapters of basic shooting techniques that can be applied to any system, and then finishing up with storage and printing guides.
It's a "friendlier" book than the Field Guide in that it's more explicit and the photographs are copious. Choosing between this volume and the Field Guide is a matter of budget and how much you want your hand held.
Blue Pixel Personal Photocoach: Digital Photography Tips from the Trenches, by David Schloss and the "PhotoCoaches" (Peachpit Press/Pearson Canada, 304 pages, $37.99) is the most polished production (and therefore the most expensive) of these three books, but it spends a more time on the digital aspects of photography and less time than the others on standard photography tips. Only three chapters are dedicated to stuff you should already know, such as how to take good family photos, sports photos and artistic photos.
Blue Pixel, an industry group dedicated to promoting digital photography to such clients as Microsoft, Best Buy stores and others, results in a very slick book with a strong penchant for the kinds of pictures you see being taken by advertising agencies, including many section-break shots of an annoying fellow who seems to be shouting a lot.
For intermediate photographers, three books are guides to what you do after you've taken the pictures and start running them through the computer. Two of them are guides to the new version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 photo-editing software package, which is an excellent way for amateurs and advanced amateurs to manipulate digital images.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3: 50 Ways to Create Cool Pictures, by Dave Huss (Adobe Press/Peachpit Press/Pearson Canada, 345 pages, $42.99 Cdn.) costs almost half the price of the software, but is essential if you've never worked with PE before.
After a chapter called "Just the Facts," the book leaps right into the business of fixing photos by cropping correctly, quick fixes, enhancing lifeless pictures, sharpening and, of course, fixing red-eye problems. A chapter each is spent on understanding colour and organizing photo files before the book gets into the dazzling things you can do with the software, such as creating montages, panoramas or adding painterly effects, and adding type.
The two chapters on repairing and retouching photos are perhaps the most useful things people will want to know - as soon as most people understand that digital images have some technical problems that most sales people don't tell you about.
A very long section at the end offers advice on sharing pictures either by e-mail or by printing them and passing them around the old way.
A more professional approach to PE is The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby (New Riders/Peachpit Press/Pearson Canada, 431 pages, $49.99). Kelby, editor of Photoshop User magazine and president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, reveals his enthusiasm for the product up front, but he can boast one important quality: He knows how to explain PE in simple language.
The book, says the jacket copy, "tells you flat-out which settings to use, when to use them, and why." As a result, Kelby will walk the reader through various editing processes instead of aspects of the program's features. For instance, he will show you how to make eyes sparkle, brighten teeth, remove skin blemishes and cover over "hot spots" - those annoying light glares that bounce off the skin.
Intended for intermediate users, this book will take you through such challenging lessons as body sculpting (making your subject look leaner), turning photos into sketches and repairing such things as rips and tears in old photos you've scanned in.
There's a lot of satisfying stuff in here, neatly laid out with copious illustrations.
How to Wow: Photoshop for Photography, by Jack Davis and Ben Willmore (Peachpit Press/Pearson Canada, 269 pages, $57.99), is an introduction to sophisticated techniques for users of the full version of Adobe Photoshop. Covering Adobe Photoshop 7 and later, the book offers lessons in workflow, optimizing settings and retouching before it moves into the sexy stuff: How to manipulate your photos for maximum effect - the Wow of the title.
Part of the book's appeal is in the accompanying CD-ROM, which has more than 250 custom presents for use with Photoshop, including actions (such as automating tasks), custom shape tools (from framing, ghosting and tinting), border treatments and wrapping patterns for things such as web page backgrounds.
This is an excellent book, but one that requires a commitment: It's the kind of thing you sit down with, study as you walk through its projects, and then try to apply them to your own material.
The PhotoshopWorld DreamTeam Book, Vol. 1 by various authors (New Riders, 304 pages, $42.99), offers tips from 19 professional Photoshop users for other Photoshop professionals. There is a lot of stuff in the front of the book about the National Association of Photoshop Professionals convention of 2003, including a lot of pictures of various Photoshop "celebrities" standing at microphones, which makes the book look more like a souvenir program of the event for people who can only dream.
But the main thrust of the book is to offer the authors a chapter each to explain how they do certain procedures, such as emulating studio lighting, photographing products for advertising, creating DVD menus, adding photo-realistic tricks to flat graphics, the subtleties of colour management and (my favourite) bringing back the look of film (a study in using the curves tool).
Not surprisingly, two of the most prominent authors here are Scott Kelby and Ben Willmore, both of whom have helped produce other books this season (see above). But the one I was most excited to see here is Vincent Versace, a Hollywood photographer who takes a no-holds-barred approach to glamour and is a splendid teacher as well (I took a course from him a few years ago, and have never forgotten it). By the time he's finished showing you how to recreate studio lighting, Versace has marched you through a lot of the subtleties of Photoshop.
This book is extreme high gloss, and the only reason it doesn't cost more is because it does not come with an accompanying CD-ROM full of instructions.
Adobe Creative Suite All in One, by Mordy Golding (Sams Teach Yourself/Pearson Canada, 739 pages, $49.99), is a terrifyingly thick book, but it does cover the entire Adobe Creative Suite - Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, GoLine CS, InDesign CS, Acrobat 6, ImageReady CS and Version Cue - seven parts of the suite, meaning each gets just over 100 pages on average.
This is a no-nonsense book - there's not a single colour picture in it - that will walk the user through every step needed to learn the basics of each one of the programs. Aside from some tips and tricks, author Golding's basic approach is to explain all the tools and how each works, making this more of a reference book than an inspirational guide - perhaps as a complement to the manual that comes with the Creative Suite.
I'm not sure about the precise market for the book - few people outside of professionals would buy the entire suite, and the professionals would have their own way of approaching the different programs. Still, if I know professionals correctly, they will all occasionally need a source of simple explanation for something they inexplicably missed, and it's always more soothing to the ego to find it in a book than to stoop to calling a colleague and admitting your ignorance.