Product Description

Can you find your digital photographs when you need them, or do you spend more time rifling through your hard drive and file cabinets than you'd like? Do you have a system for assigning and tracking content data on your photos? If you make a living as a photographer, do your images bear your copyright and contact information, or do they circulate in the marketplace unprotected?

As professional photographer and author Peter Krogh sees it, "your DAM system is fundamental to the way your images are known, both to you and to everyone else." DAM, or Digital Asset Management, in the world of digital photography refers to every part of the process that follows the taking of the picture, through final output and permanent storage. Anyone who shoots, scans or stores digital photographs, is practicing some form of digital asset management. Unfortunately, most of us don't yet know how to manage our files (and our time) very systematically, or efficiently.

In The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, Krogh brings clarity to the often overwhelming task of managing digital photographs, with a solid plan and practical advice for fellow photographers on how to file, find, protect and re-use photographs. Following a thorough overview of the DAM system and de-mystifications of metadata and digital archiving, Krogh focuses on best practices for digital photographers using Adobe Photoshop CS2. He explains how to use Adobe Bridge, the new CS2 navigational software that replaces the File Browser introduced in Photoshop 7, with full details on integrating Bridge, Camera Raw and Digital Asset Management software.

Compellingly presented in four-color format, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers brings Krogh's award-winning creative approach to a subject that could have been technically intimidating. Instead, Krogh's twenty years of experience and instructive visual storytelling make this material not only accessible, but compulsory reading for serious digital photographers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133868 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-22
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

About the Author
Peter Krogh is a commercial photographer in the Washington DC area. He is an Alpha Tester for Adobe, helping with the development of workflow and asset management tools for Photoshop and Adobe Bridge. He is on the board of directors of ASMP, the American Society of Media Photographers, and speaks frequently on Digital Asset Management to photographers' groups and other computer users. You can see his photography work on his website, www.peterkrogh.com, and some of his work promoting digital standards at www.digitalphotographystandards.com

Customer Reviews

A solid foundation for any photographer...
This book was recommended by several people before I purchased it. I thought I had a good grip on my archiving and management system...I was wrong.


This book is a tad dated now but its principles are still standing strong.

I would recommend this to anyone who is making images.





Fashion Photographer David Paul Larson
[...]

good ideas, but specifics are dated
Overall, this is a good book that thoroughly covers all the essentials of putting together a system and practices to organize and preserve your photo collection.

On the hardware side, he shows excessively expensive harddrive setups, when 2TB Western Digital MyBooks are dropping under $500. (Such statements are always relative to the date they're made -- 18 months from now that might be 4TB for $400.) I do agree with some comments he makes about RAID not being such a hot idea. The increasing size of individual drives is making the time it takes to reconstruct a failed drive in a RAID configuration reach absurd levels. When it took five or more drives to assemble 1TB, RAID seemed pretty clever. It's time has passed.

On the software side, he pushes Bridge plus iView MediaPro. That may have been the hot setup when the book was published, but Lightroom is gaining converts at a high rate. A 2nd edition revised to center on Lightroom would be good. At the very least, he'd need to explain exactly what Bridge + iView MediaPro can do that Lightroom can't and why it matters. I believe Lightroom alone offers a much less convoluted system then that combination.

Finally, for a book whose entire point is organizing and preserving photos, it has a curious hole. If your photo archive is all of your family's pictures, as opposed to a wedding photography business, how do you ensure it will outlive you? He makes a few remarks about how having things well organized will make it easier for your family, but that's it. Thinking about such things proves I'm getting to be an old fart, but it strikes me as a major omission in a book on this subject.

My criticisms shouldn't detract from my original statement -- it's overall a good book. Even if I don't follow his exact hardware and software recommendations, he made me think through whether my combination was completely sound. I've changed how I was doing some things, and changed some of my ideas about what I plan to do in the future, as a result. It's the best and most thorough book on the subject available to date.

Confused about managing your photo collection? Start here.
If you're an amateur or a professional getting into digital photography you need to sit down and read a book like this. Managing your photographs (your "assets") is necessary and it will help you find, print and publish your work.

This book isn't 100% up to date but the book's web site is a nice supplement with active discussions.