Book Reviews

Michael Freeman has done a fantastic job producing a very useful, albeit quite tiny field guide for low light photography. In his book, aptly named "The Low Light Photography Field Guide, Freeman touches upon a great number of issues effecting low light photography. It should be noted however that this book is not necessarily for beginners. The book mixes photographic techniques with post-processing methods, which may be over the heads of some beginner photographers. This book is aimed at the intermediate to advanced photo crowd.

I enjoyed this book by author and photographer Alexandre Buisse. “I felt as though I had just been on my first mountain climbing adventure”. In his book, Remote Exposure; Buisse shares his experience and passion for mountaineer photography. Traveling to four continents to capture the wilderness and majestic beauty of the mountain ranges. Buisse covers a wide range of topics from his choice of photographic gear to offering advice on the many challenges & difficulties associated with mountain climbing. This book is not an instructional guide to learning camera exposures for beginners but rather for the audience of photographers who have mastered those basic skills. Buisse's focuses more on what makes mountain photography different from other types of urban photography.

As with the entire "Revealed" line from Delmar, The Video Collection CS5 Revealed is a textbook.  In this case, it is designed to help you pass the Adobe Product Proficiency Exam for Adobe Premiere Pro.  For the most part, the book assumes you have little to no experience with any of the Production Suite products, although there are places it does assume you have some familiarity with Adobe products in general.

I consider myself to be an intermediate level user of Premiere, and a bit more than beginner level with both After Effects and Encore.  I'm a rank amateur with Soundbooth - at least until this book came my way.  Even with having made some short films previously, I found that this book offered me a continual learning experience by providing me with good, useful information even in the early projects. 

 Greetings. I've only been to three D-MAG meetings as an official member and I've won two awesome prizes. If you're just now stumbling upon our little tribe here, I highly recommend coming to check it out. Awesome prizes like this one are just part of the reason why...

                Creative Photoshop CS4 Digital Illustration and Art Techniques (Focal Press, ISBN: 978-0-240-52134-3) was the first fortune to befall me as a D-MAG member. I call it a fortune because it approximately four-hundred pages of pure gold. Yo-ho-ho...

I Love this book and wish I had studied it during Illustrator CS4 class. Included is a DVD-ROM that contains video tutorials and downloadable art that can be used to follow along with examples enabling readers to fully digest the concepts present by Von Clitschka. While it felt like an insult to learn that I am a tooler, "someone who doesn't neccessarily want to improve her drawing skills", I am thankful to learn successful vector building techniques.

How to Cheat in Photoshop CS5 is an great book and I would recommend it to any experienced Photoshop user. The title “to cheat” refers to working smarter, faster and with more believable results. This is not a beginners how-to book, it is definitely for the intermediate to advanced Photoshop user and there is the assumption that the reader already has basic knowledge of Photoshop.

Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-On-One provides a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the unique world of Adobe Illustrator.

Learning Illustrator can be a challenge for those who are used to Photoshop, but those looking to get accustomed to Adobe’s vector graphics package need look no further than Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One. At nearly 500 pages, Illustrator One-on-One covers all of AI CS5’s core features, from starting a new file, to using Illustrator’s diverse toolset, all the way to preparing artwork for print. Illustrator is more than just the pen tool, and One-on-One provides an excellent introduction to dynamic effects, gradient mesh, and OpenType, among other features.

3D in Photoshop: The Ultimate Guide for Creative Professionals is a fantastic introduction to creating 3D images in Adobe Photoshop CS5. One of my favorite things about this book is the fact that it covers, in length, each feature of the 3D menu, describes the different materials and mesh features, how cameras and lights function, and gives many examples of each before even starting the first tutorial. There is a wealth of information here, especially for users who have never operated with 3D mechanics in Photoshop or other programs.

Adobe introduced 3D tools to photoshop in Creative Suite 3. Since then, each release has improved upon and included new 3D tools and features. In Photoshop CS5, Adobe introduced a new feature called Repousse, which is used to extrude objects in 3D in new ways. This book covers the Repousse feature in-depth. As a part of this review, I completed one of the Repousse tutorials, and will be sharing the beginning steps and the final product.