Everything you always wanted to know about printing but were afraid to ask? Well, not quite. A more accurate title for the book would be Printing Photographs with Adobe Photoshop CS4. But since photos are most of what people are trying to print, the title will reach its audience.
Printing is a nasty subject to tackle. It blends the complexities of arcane topics like color management with the harsh, physical realities of ink, paper, printers, and all the manufacturers of each. The topic touches too many companies. It's tough to simplify when a person just wants the print to look like what is on the computer screen.
Author Tim Daly notes that a good print starts with a good image. The early chapters in the book encourage good habits both at the moment of capture and throughout the editing process. There are explanations for what makes a good image and a good print. Even more useful are the techniques for correcting an image based on the resulting print, so the reader learns to refine the image to perfection. I would've liked to see more examples of this. Problems in shadow areas are specifically mentioned multiple times, but didn't have accompanying examples.
A major problem with the book is the size of the screenshots for the dialogs. They are simply too small. The text is completely unreadable in the screenshots. Considering how many dialogs have to be used to make decent prints, the screenshots are an important part of the book. The accompanying text does not really give enough details to expand on what is obscured.
Adobe Photoshop is rightly the center of the book. But it was nice to see mention of other companies both in the software world, like Nik Software's plug-ins, and printer manufacturer's like Canon, which have a plug-in just for some of their printers. The author also mentions a few of the online options available for printing these days like Blurb's on-demand books. The printing eco-system is big with a lot of options to be found in many places. This exploration is a welcome aspect to the topic of printing.
Writing comprehensively about printing photographs in a digital world is not easy. Even showing examples can't be simple. Imagine trying to show a mistake on a specific printer, which is itself printed in a book using a different printing process and type of paper. Yet even a good explanation of solving just that would go a long way to educating people about the process of printing.
Printing deserves a book to explain it well. A clear guide is needed for the complexities of the whole process, as well as Photoshop's approach to it. The scope of this book is very good, but many times the details are not explained in enough depth. The book is an improvement on the other books that I've read, but ultimately is still not the book I hope for on this important part of photography.