The Creative Digital Darkroom is more than just a how-to book on Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. It is more than just a book about camera use and the fundamentals of visual composition. It is about the creative journey of creating visual images that take you beyond what others may see.
According to the authors, "the eye is the lens, and the mind is the camera." The small, often overlooked details are just as important as the vista and the goal of this book is to teach you how to see, not only what lies ahead, but what might lie ahead so that you can be ready for it when the opportunity presents itself. The book is 429 pages in length and is divided into 10 chapters.
Chapter 1, "Silver to Silicon," is about the transition from the traditional chemical darkroom into the digital darkroom. As time marches on, fewer and fewer people have ever experienced a chemical based development environment, but there is still a lot that can be learned from the techniques and terms that were first; pardon the pun, developed there. This chapter is also about the workflow from capture to print. Chapter 2, "Digital Nuts and Bolts" shows you that just as with a traditional darkroom, a digital darkroom can go from very modest to state of the art. Here you will learn how to build a digital darkroom with Photoshop, set up preferences, and efficiently navigate your files.
Chapter 3, "Scan, Develop, and Organize," are certainly procedural formalities by nature compared to taking the picture, but they are none the less, important steps. Here you will work with the first part image processing in the digital darkroom workflow. This is the part that happens before you bring the image into Photoshop. This will take you from digital capture, through file organization, and then into Camera Raw/Lightroom. Chapter 4, "File Preparation," shows you how to prime your image by reducing and avoiding noise, how to develop a sharpening strategy, how to correct optical and dimensional distortion, and in general, how to clean up your files.
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