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Book Review: Page (1) of 1 - 05/26/06

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Author Rob Sheppard is the editor of Outdoor Photographer magazine, and he brings his experience with outdoor photographers and their art to this book in an effort to help readers create better outdoor and landscape photographs. Photoshop CS2 serves as the main tool for this book because it is the standard application that most outdoor photographers, and photographers for that matter, use in their digital endeavors. Sheppard takes a different approach with this title in an effort not to make you a Photoshop technician, but to make you a better outdoor photographer. He helps to combine the power of Photoshop with the knowledge he has gleaned over the years as editor of Outdoor Photographer. Within this review, we'll cover the chapter topics in the book Outdoor Photographer: Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2 as well as some of the techniques that are found in it.

Chapter 1 through 5 comprise Part 1: Core Photoshop Skills for Landscape and Nature Photographers. This section includes Chapter 1 An Approach to Photoshop, Chapter 2: What Would Ansel Do?, Chapter 3: Start Right; and Chapter 4: Setting the Stage: Basic Steps; and Chapter 5: A Short Course in Camera Raw. This section sets the foundation for the rest of the book. Chapter topics include Ansel Adams' legacy, Art versus Science Expressive images, Variations on a Theme, The Exposure Challenge, Sharpness, Film Concerns, straightening horizons, Dealing with color, fixing colors that record poorly, comparing raw and JPEG, just to name a few.

In my college photojournalism course, I learned how not to shoot a beach scene with a horizon. An assignment called for me to do just that, and I thought I had composed a fairly neat shot of a grass hut beach scene in La Jolla, California. Everything was framed as best as I could frame it, and the black and white development of the shot was spot on. My instructor told me that everything was great, except the horizon was sloping down, instead of straight. This was in the pre-digital, pre-Photoshop days and the only alternative was to reshoot the scene with my new found knowledge. It took a few shots but I got the passing grade for the assignment. Seventeen years later and I've got that lesson ingrained in memory. Today you can straighten horizon shots in Photoshop. Chapter 4 has an exercise called Straightening Horizons that Sheppard walks you through, complete with full color screenshots and a detailed explanation on how to use the crop and rotate canvas tools to fix this common error, especially amongst amateur photographers. There is an entire chapter devoted to Ansel Adams that discusses his workflow. Sheppard believes that they way Adams approached photography and the composition of the shot applies even today with digital technologies such as Photoshop. 

Part II Layers and Other Essential Tools comprises chapters 6 through 11. This section includes Chapter 6: Layers 101; Chapter 7: Developing midtones; Chapter 8: Color adjustment refined; Chapter 9: Better Images through Local Adjustments; Chapter 10: Putting it All Together: An Approach That Works; and Chapter 11: Clean it Up. Topics covered in Part II include the layers and understanding layers, how Ansel Adams worked with layers, selections and layer masks, adjustment layers, and duplicating layers for effect control. Chapter 7: Developing midtones extensively covers the curves adjustment layer as well as the shadow highlight controls. Other tutorials include intensifying sky tonalities, and opening up shadows. The last page of each chapter includes a Q&A on specific topics not discussed in the chapter as well as potential workaround situations. Chapter 8: Color adjustment refined offers explanations on color, what is real color, a tutorial on color cast correction, adding warmth, warm and cold contrast, saturation issues, and correcting color with hue/saturation.  Chapter 9: Better Images through Local Adjustments offers tips and tutorials on a variety of traditional darkroom techniques, such as dodging, burning, and edge burning, to selections and layer masks, and the color range tool. This chapter also features a drawing of Ansel Adams' printing notes with that of the layers palette in Photoshop after an image was tweaked. There are a lot of similarities. Chapter 10: Putting it all together discusses tweaking the image in Photoshop to create the image that you wish to create. It covers the levels and layer tools, working with color, hue/saturation and brightness/contrast. Sheppard also emphasizes that you look at the photograph before you actually do any work on it with the tools. In this way, he says it will help you when you work on the image in Photoshop. Chapter 11: Clean it Up. This chapter focuses on cleaning some of the noise and other stuff that ends up in your images for whatever reason. Tips are given on how to remove unwanted elements in an images, stuff like cables, power poles, even people. Clone Tool workflow is given and discussed by Sheppard, including brush, modes, opacity, flow, airbrush, and aligned settings, as well as sample all layers settings. Other tools discussed in this chapter include spot healing brush, perspective correction and transform, and lens correction filters.

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Part III: Special Techniques for the Nature Photographer comprises Chapters 12 through 15 and includes Extending Tonal Range of Scenes (ch. 12), Classic Black and White (Ch. 13), Finishing the Image (Ch. 14), The better Print (Ch. 15), and Appendix A Photoshop Plug-ins for Nature Photographers. Topics discussed in this section range from Tonal Range Manipulation, Twice-Processed RAW files, High Dynamic Range Adjustment, Photographing in Black and White, Channels for Black and White, to Evaluating Print, Monitor versus Print, Adjusting for the Print, Sharpening Tools, Smart Sharpen, and Sharpening with Layers. The appendix includes discussion on the following Photoshop plugins; nik Software Color Efex, sharpener, and Dfine; Digital Film Tools 55mm; and Kodak ASF (Digital GEM, SHO, and ROC).

Sprinkled throughout each chapter are Pro Tips, encased in a pull out box highlighted in green and black. These Pro Tips are quick tidbits of information that enable you to better understand certain topics related to the chapter in which the Pro Tip resides. Sheppard also discusses the "ethical" issues that arise from manipulating photographs, challenging the so called purists who believe that images shouldn't be manipulated in an effort to enhance their artistic value. While the purists can accept the use of a flash to accent a bed of flowers, they won't accept an image enhanced with Photoshop, which is a contradiction. There is a lot to digest with Landscape and Nature Photography, and Sheppard takes a step by step approach writing style. As you proceed through each chapter's tutorials, the reader gets closer to the goal of shooting images and manipulating them in Photoshop for that perfect nature and landscape photograph. In addition, all the images that are in the tutorials are available for download at robsheppardphoto.com.

Outdoor Photographer
Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2
By Rob Sheppard
John Wiley & Sons
379 pages
$34.99
www.wiley.com/compbooks

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