Dan Margulis holds the keys to the digital darkroom. If you own a digital camera and a copy of Adobe Photoshop, you need this book, for it will show you how to get the most out of your photos.
Even if you’re shooting film and scanning the prints (or negatives), Professional Photoshop will show you how to extract the best picture from your scan.
The book contains over 300 pages of instruction, with hundreds of photographs illustrating the techniques. Topics include: removing color casts, extending dynamic range, plate blending, sharpening, contrast enhancement, recovering too-dark originals, photo restoration, conversion from color to black and white, and more. I’ve put together two quick examples to demonstrate the most important, and most immediately useful techniques.
Use Curves to remove color casts
Humans perceive true colors no matter what the ambient light is like. But cameras aren’t as highly evolved. See the left side of my example; the photo was taken at dusk, when the lack of sunlight made everything appear blue. The left side of the example photo was not doctored — that’s the raw original image.
Professional Photoshop describes in meticulous detail how to use Photoshop’s Curves tool to remove color casts. The right side of the image is the result of a single pass with the Curves tool, using techniques presented by Margulis. Although it is not perfect, the corrected side of the image is a huge improvement.
Use Curves to expand dynamic range
“Expanding dynamic range” sounds like a mouthful, but all it means is to make the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. Even high-end cameras don’t make full use of the available spectrum… but it’s a simple operation in Photoshop to do so. Margulis shows how to find the important parts of an image and make them stand out.
The left side of the example image appears to have been shot through a cloud of flour. The detail on the right side is much more pronounced; the colors are more vivid. It’s a significantly better picture. The improvement took two steps:
- Use Curves to increase dynamic range.
- Use Unsharp Mask to bring out detail.
This correction took less than one minute.
I will caution potential buyers that Margulis’ book contains more than most people want to know. The learning curve for some of the advanced techniques is steep. But you only need to climb as far as you want — and the basic techniques have immediate payoff, as evidenced by my quick corrections above.
In my opinion this book is essential for digital photographers, especially for people who use online photo printing services like PhotoAccess.com, OFoto, ShutterFly, etc. I printed images straight from the camera for a few months, but now I’m going back and re-printing them, because the corrected versions are so much better.
You can see one more correction example here: using channel blends to correct underexposure.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Non-Fiction
updated: 2004-05-25 19:41:46
