Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24268 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781579908850
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

Excellent content, a lot of production errors
This is a beautiful book filled with lots of good information, in an easily digestible "one topic covered on each two-page spread". This makes the book easy to pick it up, read a couple of small sections, then put it down and go on to do something else. The writing style is more intricate than most mass-market books, which is actually refreshing compared to the more simplistic language that's used in books these days. The glossary is very good, covering a lot of jargon used in the book, and in the industry in general.

The one thing that mars this book are numerous production errors. There are missing illustrations, such as a caption saying "compare these two photos", and there's only one, or one that was comparing one scene with different lighting areas highlighted, but one of the photos was a duplicate of an unrelated photo appearing elsewhere on the page, and some pages there were words run together, like a badcutandpasteerror with InDesign. I would also be happier if some of the "compare these two photos" things had indications of the specific things to notice (see how the highlights of the llama's ears contrast with the bowler's tutu), so I know whether I'm missing something obvious, or it's a production error running the same photo twice.

Good content, but shoot the editor
My copy has the same ISBN number as listed above, but has a different cover and is listed "First Edition" 2007. I'm assuming that the book ordered here is virtually identical.

I found the content quite excellent. It explains light color well, bit depth and dynamic range well. It gets a tad bit repetitious comparing different lighting sources, although does point out important differences. The book does well to bridge the gap between Photoshop tuitorial and visual results; it will not tell you how to use Photoshop, but has many Photoshop screen captures discussing the effect of adjustments. There is a good section on High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging.

The book does have an undue amount of typos. If you can look past them then you can enjoy this book. In some cases the typos are extreme: there are four consecutive pages that show different lighting positions on a still life object; 80 images in all. However, the caption key for each picture describing the setup is exactly the same for each image! Somebody forgot to change the captions, so those pages are completely useless. I did email the author about this and received a nice reply and copy from the editor; they promised an update on their website. Time has come and gone, and the update page is still empty - I imagine they are either off slapping together a new book to sell to you, or maybe someone actually did shoot the editor...

Great book, needs editing
This is a great book, with lots of good ideas for how to set up lighting in differing situations. I've already improved my lighting using ideas from this book. What made this a tough slog is that the illustrations sometimes don't match up, and for a photography book, the illustrations tend to be kind of important.

I went on the publisher web site, and haven't found an errata, but will keep looking in the hopes, since cleaning up the figures (and adding the missing ones obviously referred to) would make this a great overall book.