Mastering Digital Printing

by Harald Johnson

Book Overview

Providing an enhanced edition of the first, every page of this book has been reviewed, overhauled, updated, or revised with an emphasis on "current" and "changing" technology. This full-color guide... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592004318
• ISBN13: 9781592004317
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Length: 398 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Advanced Photographers Should Not Be Without This Book

My wife and I have just signed a contract to display our photography in a new gallery in Taos, New Mexico, that specializes in photography. I have been reading, Mastering Digital Photography, Second Edition, for a few weeks now, and have learned a great deal about printing. In some cases, it has reinforced what we were doing, and in others, the information has changed the way we do business with our printing. The net result is that this book has given us some of the knowledge we needed to present our work in a truly professional way, and has probably contributed to the success of our bid for our place in this gallery. -- -- Don & Bonnie Fink, outdoor and wildlife photographers, Cichon Fine Art Gallery, Taos, NM, April 2005

The best reference-book I've ever owned...

Everything's here. Whether you want to produce your own prints from real or virtual artworks and photos, or are wondering how to find and enable someone else to produce your prints for you, "Mastering Digital Printing" is THE book to buy to clarify all issues and help get you started. And if you're already involved in digital printmaking, this is the book to keep close at hand for its bits, pages, and chapters of information that will help you enhance your images, tweak your workflow, make choices about tools and consumables, and add historical interest to conversations with your patrons. How-To Heaven. From digital input of your images to signing, framing, and displaying your prints and shipping to buyers or exhibitions, the help is all here. Copious, user-friendly instructions with clear illustrations walk you through each step of the way...and further: "Mastering Digital Printing" points you to author Harald Johnson's digital-fineart discussion group at yahoo.com and his website at dpandi.com where digital resources continue to evolve as the new technology evolves. One fine book!

A Virtual Milestone

A Virtual MilestoneHarald Johnson's new book, Mastering Digital Printing: The Photographer's and Artist's Guide to High-Quality Digital Output (Muska & Lipman, December 2002) seems to me something of a milestone, not only for its prodigious content, but for its very concept. For Johnson has not only written the Bible of digital printing for fine-art printmakers and photographers, but he has also solved the abiding problem of people who write books on technical subjects: currency. Technology changes fast and books on technological subjects go stale just as rapidly. So Johnson has provided his readers/practitioners with the added support of both a website (http://www.dpandi.com) and a lively online discussion group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital-fineart) which he created a couple of years ago and conscientiously moderates. Into the Fourth DimensionThese online resources constantly lever the power and actuality of the book, providing instant access to current information on the ever-changing state of the art. More than a simple book, what Johnson has created is a "metabook" which extends its domain into the fourth dimension: time. This is a prodigious achievement for one man working on his own, one for which Johnson-the Prometheus of digital printing-is to be admired and congratulated.Have I made the book sound stuffy? Far from it! Mastering Digital Printing is written in a personal conversational style which is more like a chat with a friendly expert than a technical manual. It is wide ranging both in breadth and depth, of interest both to beginners and experts. Perhaps the most exciting thing about this new DP compendium is the guidance it offers photographers and fine-art printmakers-and there are legions of them-who are fascinated by the possibilities of digital imaging and printing but until now have not known how to get started. Johnson's book now provides them with a clear roadmap, and is destined to make many converts to digital. My reaction after a first look at Mastering Digital Printing was, "This would make a fantastic textbook on the subject," and less than a week later I see on the Digital-Fineart discussion group that someone is already offering courses based on Johnson's book. They are the first, but they will not be the last!In the BeginningThe book opens with a brief summary of DP's fascinating history, which extends back to the digital printing paleolithic: the year 1989. Johnson says: "... things didn't really take off until the paths of six people-a rock star and his best friend, an art publicist, a sales rep, a computer wizard and a silkscreen printer-unexpectedly intersected..." From these humble rock `n roll beginnings a little over a decade ago digital printing has already brought about a worldwide revolution in image making, and Harald Johnson very cogently explains how and why.The Who, What, Where, When, WhyPeople who like to know the underlying reasons for things will love Mastering Digital Printi

Comprehensive Guide to All Aspects of Digital Printing

I wish I had owned a book like this when I started doing digital drawings ten years ago, but the next best thing is to have it now. It is a engaged and loving explication of the many aspects of digital printmaking, starting with the basic building blocks of a digital image, the bits, bytes, and pixels, and finishing up with curating and shipping the final prints out the door. Along the way it explains the different digital printing methods (with great diagrams to illustrate how things like inkjets actually work), the pieces of hardware you'll need, how to capture and handle your source material (including scanning, digital cameras, digital drawing programs, and image editing), color space and the pros and cons of calibration, permanence, how to do your own printing from machines to inks and papers, and how to deal with an outside printing service if you decide not to print your work yourself. Especially if you're in the latter category, this book is an invaluable guide to an understanding of what's going on technically that will help you to make aesthetic decisions that translate onto paper more successfully and to better communicate with your print atelier. Lastly, the very useful appendices are a gold-mine in-and-of themselves - print service providers all over the USA, suppliers, online groups and sites, books, galleries, print exchanges and more.From the introduction on, the sense of excitement about the blossoming digital revolution is contagious. Fine art printmaking has not had a major new medium since silkscreen, and Harald Johnson does an excellent job of fitting digital prints into the history of printmaking in general. The book finishes up with a gallery showcase that gives an inspiring overview of the kinds of imagery that are being made digitally these days - ranging stylistically from realism to abstraction to manipulated photographs and from methods that rival traditional media to creations that could only be computer art.