[.ca] George DeWolfe's Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop (ISBN 0072260874)

Set of digital recipes for photographic escape from reality:
As the cover introduction says, the author is a known lecturer whose Digital Fine Print workshop actually attracts many students. Indeed, this is a highly practical book written by an actual photographer, not a Photoshop software expert. Consequently, it contains a large amount of actual practical advice of perfecting a photographic image. The central concept of the book is based on the author's conviction that a 'closed loop' workflow wherein the photographer processes all his/her images from shooting to print in-house is the only way to preserve and accurately convey the exact artistic intent of a photograph. This obviously demands a serious capital investment in equipment and also implies a certain production volume as the current inkjet printers do not tolerate intermittent use well. Thus most of us, casual photographers, are left in the dust as no clues are given as to how to use printing houses to one's satisfaction. Most of the book is devoted to (somewhat repetitive) description of the author's own 'digital fine print workflow', which attempts to incorporate the relatively recent 16-bit capability of Adobe Photoshop CS2 as well as RAW file processing with Adobe Camera Raw. Part I contains the so-called 'overview', which is more like an extended list of Contents, spiced with author's comments about the importance of the artistic component in the evaluation and the eventual correction of an image. Early enough, the author introduces us to the fact that a great number of photographic circumstances (presumably, in landscape photography) results in a range of light intensities that are beyond the recording capabilities of current digital cameras, and describes the concept of software-assisted HDR (high dynamic range) digital recording, which is followed by a rather blatant pushing of Optipix software to the development of which he apparently contributed. As with the entire concept of the closed loop workflow the author never settles for a minimalist approach, as he further introduces a dedicated software for sharpening, although this control is quite often superfluous and is served pretty well by available options within Camera Raw and/or Photoshop. The printing section per se that comes as a culmination of a long list of image tweaks is surprisingly succinct. Basically it amounts to mentioning the importance of using printer/paper profiles in soft-proofing the image, otherwise it closely follows the printing software manual coming with the printer (in this case, only Epson Stylus Photo R2400 is deemed acceptable). A very useful practical concept of adjusting images is introduced in Camera Raw Workflow, when image luminosity is assessed and corrected on temporarily de-saturated (black and white) image which is then corrected for hue and saturation. This is an old Photoshop technique, but it places at your fingertips the control of image qualities only available to 'analog' photographers through a tedious process of selecting 'favorite' film(s). Once you have found the very personal Camera Raw settings, they can be saved as your 'digital film of choice'. However, apart from this early hint, it is easy to get lost in the author's recommendations, unless you consider that his concept of a 'fine print' apparently has little if anything to do with realistic reproduction of nature. Later on it becomes even more obvious that DeWolfe's 'digital fine print workflow' within Photoshop, yet another big point of the book, is not designed to reproduce the actual colors and light, but rather the current DeWolfe's vision or memory of them. Thus, one RAW file may receive a number of conflicting treatments over time and result in images that only share the same contours, but not necessarily other qualities. The closing notes of the book, particularly in Some Thoughts about Color Management section, made us think that the author actually does not believe such a thing as realistic color reproduction even exists. Despite this puzzling conclusion, the last third of the book and particularly section History Brush 101 deserves your precious time if even the rest of the book does not. It deserves your time not only because it is an ultimate demonstration of the author's approach to photography, but also because perhaps it may become one of the tools in your own artistic arsenal. If you are an 'analog' photographer seeking a transition to the digital workflow aimed 'only' at accurate reproduction of reality, IMHO, you should read another book.