Product Description: Your digital camera can do so much! And Digital Photography For Dummies, 6th Edition helps you shoot, edit, and share great photos. This full-color guide is packed with stuff that’s not in your camera manual — tips on upgrading your equipment, working with focus and exposure, shooting like a pro, organizing and enhancing your images, and printing them or getting them online.
Are you already you’re hip-deep in images? Here’s how to manage them. This guide helps you learn what you need for the way you take pictures, how to prolong battery life, the pros and cons of digital SLR, and more. Baffled by the lingo? The glossary explains all those terms and acronyms. You’ll also learn to:
Set up your camera for basic shooting and learn to use automatic mode, common scene modes, and all the camera’s features
Manage depth of field, exposure, and white balance, and make easy fixes with your photo editor
Compose your photos for better pictures
Easily transfer your pictures to the computer, print them, or distribute them electronically
Edit your images and fix common problems like dim photos and red-eye
Send photos to a cell phone
Organize your pictures so you can find what you want
Decide if your camera needs updating, what equipment you need, and what your digital darkroom should have
Rich, full-color examples show what you can achieve. Digital Photography For Dummies, 6th Edition will make your digital camera a lot more fun!
Amazon.com Review: If you're comfortable with the concept of photography but find the digital part a stumbling block, Digital Photography for Dummies will get you over the hump.
Author Julie Adair King, a photographer and graphics-software specialist, deftly explains such concepts as resolution, f-stop, and compression. She is also refreshingly upfront about the differences between film-based and digital photography, spelling out the latter's shortcomings early on. Her advice on all aspects of the field is well thought out and simple without being condescending. She informs readers, for example, that you needn't use high-pixel resolutions simply for placing images on a Web page. Such tips will come as a relief to fledgling photographers on a budget, or novices who may have thought they had to use the highest-quality settings at all times.
Aside from the technical concerns of working with the camera and computer, King also gives sound tips on composition and lighting. And since retouching is one of the principal benefits of digital photography, she spends a fair amount of time discussing photo-editing software. And while most of the examples are in black and white, the most important examples, gratefully, are included in a 16-page color plate section in the middle of the book.
For those of you considering jumping into the world of digital photography, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better guide to getting started than Digital Photography for Dummies. --John Frederick Moore
Helpful and timely The seller was very helpful and timely in sending this product in time for class.
Reviewed by Robert King , Alaskan Apple User Group
Pros: This book covers the basics of taking pictures with your digital camera plus managing them on your computer--with everything well illustrated and clearly explained.
Cons: No real cons, although the 2005 publication of the book made me wonder if some parts were somewhat dated.
This full-color, 380-page book provides great information for shooting, sharing, and editing digital photos. Like other "Dummies" books, it is very well written in clear English for beginners and intermediate users of digital photography. Its tips and well-organized information also make it a good reference book for advanced users who will certainly discover things they didn't know. As a book especially for the beginner, it is structured to cover a great variety of subjects, including providing an introduction to the subject of digital photography that places it in historical context with film-based photography.
The book is conveniently organized into five parts. Part 1 is "Peering through the digital viewfinder" and is an overview that also introduces topics that are explored in greater detail later in the book. These include what digital photography is and how it works, type of cameras and how to operate them, saving and displaying digital information, plus what you can do with them on your computer.
Part 2, entitled "Ready, Set, Shoot!," builds on information in the first part by explaining how to achieve the right camera settings, how to control exposure and focus, and in general, how to get optimal pictures.
Part 3 takes your digital photographs from your camera to your computer and beyond into ways to display, share, and print them.
Part 4, called "Tricks of the Digital Trade," provides a great overview of how you can use your computer and various programs to manipulate your digital image to achieve things virtually impossible with older film-based photography. Here you learn important skills like how to sharpen focus, cover flaws, create "new" photos by adding or removing elements, and a lot more.
Part 5 is a review and extension of what you have learned previously, with information structured as a series of "tens": 10 ways to improve your digital images, 10 great ways to use your digital images, and 10 great online resources for digital photographers (at least through 2005).
The book also includes a nice-done glossary explaining the terms used in digital photography that can make the beginner's eyes glaze over. Also helpful is a nice easy-to-use index. In addition, there is a companion website for the book listed on the back cover that would help keep its information current, for those wanting to take the additional time and effort to use it.
My initial approach to reading this book was to thumb through it and view subject headings, illustrations, and whatever caught my interest. Doing that I learned a lot and got a good sense of the subjects. Then I went back to ones of particular interest.
I especially liked the easy explanations of how to set up your camera and choose the right file format to achieve the quality of picture needed for the size photo you want. There were good illustrations of what too much compression does for a photo, and more, for example.
In sum, I found this book quite helpful, well organized, and will be going back to it whenever I have questions about how to use my digital camera to make great photos.
Digital Photography for Dummies An excellent book for beginners and intermediate photographers. Clear, concise and easy to read. 10 of 10
Great For Newbies This was the first book on digital photography that I used when first starting out and I'm grateful I found it. It provided a solid foundation on which to build. I still refer to it occasionally. It does devote considerable space to image editing but I personally like this. Let's face it, 99% of people who do digital for very long end up using an editor. I don't use Photoshop, but the information is still useful.
The book has undergone many editions, and I noticed the latest version now in stores is by a different author. I took a look at it and in my opinion Adair's version is better, the fourth edition is anyway. There are a lot of crappy and totally useless books on digital photography out there. I can recommend this one for newbies without hesitation. It gets you started, then you'll learn on your own mostly from trial and error.
Step by Step Having been an early adapter in digital photography, it is still hard to keep up with techniques and newly availablr formats. This book is great in taking you as far as you might need to go or further if you need to.
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