Practical Color Management: Eddie Tapp on Digital Photography: Eddie Tapp on Digital Photography

Practical Color Management: Eddie Tapp on Digital Photography (Eddie Tapp on Digital Photogra) This book is the next best thing to being in a classroom. Color management is a huge undertaking for even the best of professionals, and this book is an excellent place to start. There are many books on color management, but this work by Eddie Tapp is truly outstanding!

One of the major hurdles of the digital imaging revolution has been learning a whole new set of concepts and their associated language. It's a very different science from the analog, silver-based photography of the last hundred years or so and it takes a certain amount of serious concentration and persistence to master. One of the core threads running through all of it is the concept of color management - the control of color data from start to finish so what you end up with is as close as possible to what your eyes saw in the first place. This is no small order as it includes multiple input, editing, and output devices along with completely different methods of gathering and displaying color information. In addition, there's as much art as science in the process, and agreement on standards has been slow to evolve. Fortunately, we've reached a point in the technology stream where a serious photographer or graphic artist can now do a very credible job of keeping colors on track with a modicum of specialized tools and the purposeful discipline to use them. For the average digital photographer, color management theory can be mind-numbingly arcane, even though it is crucial to setting up an efficient and effective overall workflow. If you want to color manage properly, you have to assimilate a certain amount of theory or the whole process will fail to make any sense. This is where Eddie Tapp does an excellent job of simplifying the information as much as possible, presenting it in a logical order, and is able to pack a very thorough discussion of the topic in less than 150 pages - a real feat. The book is laid out in an interesting fashion with text on the outside third of each page and the center section filled up with colorful pictures and screen shots. Some of it's eye candy, but that's what sells books these days I'm sure. Many of the screen shots and other illustrations are valuable though as they answer important questions regarding particular selections in critical software dialog boxes, and the explanation of terms and methods is very lucid and direct. The author does an excellent job of going deep where it's important while avoiding unneeded complexity for its own sake. There's a certain amount of technical heavy lifting that one has to do to become competent in this arena, but Eddie's made it as easy as any document I've seen. In addition, the appendix contains a highly useful excerpt from the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines and extensive additional resource listings.

How do you make sure that the color you're seeing on your screen is what the rest of the world will see when you distribute your finished work? That is the question that Eddie Tapp attempts to answer in his latest book Practical Color Management. Practical Color Management is divided into five chapters and one appendix. "The Search for Consistent Color," covers where the concept of color management came from and why it has evolved into what it is today. "Understanding Key Color Management Concepts," explains the difference between calibration and profiling. "Establishing a Color Management-Friendly Workflow," guides you through developing a efficient workflow. "Three Stages of Color Management," describes breaking the basic color management into their three stages. "Technically Speaking," brings in color expert Rick Lucas to explain in-depth color management concepts. At first look, it almost seems that the approach will be too basic, but it builds quickly and will be of benefit to newcomer and professional alike.

Plenty of how-to books discuss color photography basics - but how many narrow the focus to assuring that color will retain uniform features when viewed across mediums and on different desktops? PRACTICAL COLOR MANAGEMENT is the key to assuring such continuity of quality, using simple language to provide solutions to common color challenges. Chapters tell how to calibrate devices, convert device output more effectively, prepare files for printing, and more. Plenty of color screen shots and examples emphasize the step-by-step technical explanations, which require no prior knowledge of either digital photography or color - or art - to prove accessible. General-interest library lending collections will find PRACTICAL COLOR MANAGEMENT a very popular pick, offering not only a more visual approach than most, but including easy instructions even novices can readily understand. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

I was looking for a book to expand and hone my knowledge of colour calibration and management, since I do retouching and art direction professionally and I want to better control my press output. I was a little worried that this would be too basic when I started the book, since it delves into the fundamentals like what a colour gamut is, but thankfully it builds on those basics quickly to provide very helpful techniques that professionals can use to actually improve their work. Setting up a fully-calibrated working environment, from scanner to camera to screen to press, can be a daunting task since each piece of the puzzle needs to be right for it to work but the author does a very good job of explaining these techniques while keeping the tone light. More people should be reading these types of books since getting what you want from an image or design is so critically linked to unfortunately technical-looking things like IT8 and ink-limit charts. Titles like this will hopefully help make this knowledge more commonplace. My only criticism is that the book should have covered more about CMYK, dot gain and black generation since it mentions that you can create a custom CMYK profile in Photoshop but doesn't show any practical applications like making a low-colour CMYK profile for rich greyscale conversion. Many people will still be just hitting CMYK thinking that if the profiles for their devices are right, then they will be set for ideal saturation without understanding they can control the plates. Hopefully this will be addressed in coming editions. Still, a great book.