Photo Finish: The Digital Photographer's Guide to Printing, Showing, and Selling Images

Rating:
Summary: A Must-buy for all Digital Photographers
Review: "Photo Finish" is an extremely well-written and clear guide to 3 major ways of presenting your work; prints, website and slideshow. Each section is as strong as the other, so if you need to find out about at least one of them, then this book is worth buying. And even if you already print your own images or run your own website, "Photo Finish" is well worth reading to see the processes that experienced working photographers recommend and follow. Being so recently published (August 2004), it is also very up-to-date in terms of the products and techniques that it talks about, so you won't be reading about anything that has already been superceded (not for a while anyway!). If you want to get up to speed and learn how to present your photographs in the best possible way from a digital point of view, then "Photo Finish" provides plenty of shortcuts without leaving out any valuable content. A must-buy for all digital photographers.



Rating:
Summary: It's About the Output
Review: One of the co-authors of this book is Tim Grey, who has apparently become the publisher's utility infielder, appearing as author or co-author of a whole series of new books. Fortunately Grey, who also publishes the daily on-line newsletter, DDQ (Digital Darkroom Questions), writes clearly and succinctly. The publisher has apparently decided to launch a series of books that deal at a micro-level with digital photography. For example one of Grey's other recent books is "Color Confidence, which tells the digital photographer how to match up the tones, tints and hues of his camera, monitor and printer.

Perhaps a better title would have been the Output Book, since the book is concerned with the output of the digital photography process: printed images; on-line displays; and slideshows. The book is a strange potpourri of information, some of it easily available elsewhere and other information harder to find. For example, the authors tell you how to use outside print services, either in the form of a local lab or an on-line service. Most of this information is readily available by walking into a lab or going to an on-line printing site. On the other hand, some of the information on setting up a web site was completely new to me. Oh, I knew a little bit about coding, but I certainly didn't know that search engines were more likely to index your site if you included alternative text in the HTML "img" tag.

If your eyes glazed over after that last sentence, don't worry. The authors don't advocate HTML coding for most people. Instead they recommend programs like Dreamweaver and Front Page for the development of full-blown websites and even provide a little instruction, although no one should think that they could use these programs without some more study. But they don't ignore PhotoShop's Web Photo Gallery facility that can turn out a professional web site with very little effort.

There is a companion website to the book, where one may examine more detailed examples and even download some templates.

Even though the book's subtitle says it is about selling images, that section of the book is very limited. It really only talks about finding galleries to show your work, and selling on the Internet. There is no mention of stock sales. Given that John Shaw's "The Business of Nature Photography", which is probably the premier book in this field, was published in 1996, there certainly is a need for a volume that goes into more details on marketing in the digital age.

If you are looking for a book on preparing your photos digitally for output, Barry Haynes' "PhotoShop Artistry" series is one of the best, although it may require augmentation by books like Mikkel Aaland's "Shooting Digital", or Bruce Fraser's "Camera Raw with Adobe PhotoShop CS" and even Grey's "Color Confidence". But for a book about the output of the digital photography process, while some parts of this book will seem elementary, other sections will make you reconsider your approach and probably teach you a thing or two you didn't know.