Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful application, so powerful in fact that it really never has been a program strictly for photographers. Today it can be used equally well for photographers both digital and film, web designers, game designers, multimedia authors and more. While flexibility is great for any program. If you’re a photographer and you are fairly new to photography as well as fairly new to Adobe Photoshop this kind of flexibility and the sure number of tools available can make learning how to use them and learn which ones are best for photographic work very confusing. To add to the mix there are literally hundreds of books available for Photoshop that cover almost as wide a range of possible uses as Photoshop has tools.

So what are you to do when you want to know how to use Photoshop in the context of photography, digital or film? Well one option is to spend hours on the internet looking for web sites with photography related tutorials. While this is a viable option you will spend more time looking for the tutorials than you will learning from them. A better option in my opinion is to find yourself a good book on Photoshop for photographers. There are a couple to choose from, the one that I like best is The Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan from O'Reilly.

This full color book is not only about Photoshop for Photography it is a very well designed, very easy to read and very easy to understand book on the use of Photoshop for photography. And, thanks to the down to Earth plain English used in it, it is a great book for all skill levels of both photography and Photoshop. It includes tons of illustrations and sample images to help you see visually what is being covered in the text, the sample photos also serve to inspire, which is always a good thing.

The Creative Digital Darkroom is very thorough and complete and is the perfect starting place for any novice or intermediate photographer that wants to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop for Photography.

Chapters:

Chapter 1: Silver to Silicon
Chapter 2: Digital Nuts and Bolts
Chapter 3: Scan, Develop, and Organize
Chapter 4:  File Preparation
Chapter 5: Tone and Contrast
Chapter 6: Dodging, Burning, and Exposure Control
Chapter 7: Color Correction
Chapter 8: Creative Color
Chapter 9: Creative Enhancements
Chapter 10: Enhancing Focus

As you can see from the chapter list The Creative Digital Darkroom is about Photoshop and Photography. It covers everything you need to know about getting your images in to Photoshop, organizing your images and then it moves in to the important photography part of using Photoshop, things like how to adjust tone and contrast, color correction, focus and more. It leaves all of the other subjects like how to replace a sky or how to cut someone out of one photo and put them in to another one, to other books with a less specific focus. After all that kind of trickery isn't really photography it is composition and collage which is not what this book is about. That is what I like about this book it is solely Photoshop for Photography, nothing else. Once you have these basics down the rest of the stuff found in other books will be easier. But, more importantly by the time you get to that place in your skill level you will know how to take a so-so photo and turn it in to something that is worthy of the other techniques found in those other books. Or, maybe by then you will realize that you don't have to revert to tricks to get incredible photos.

If you could buy a package that included a camera of your choice, Adobe Photoshop and one book, this would be the book I would want included in that package. It's well done and covers the most important subjects when dealing with Photoshop for photography.