| The Official Nik Software Image Enhancement Guide: The Photographer's Resource for Professional Workflow Techniques | 
enlarge | Author: Joshua D. Bradley Publisher: Wiley Category: Book
List Price: $39.99 Buy New: $21.33 You Save: $18.66 (47%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (8 reviews) Sales Rank: 116016
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published) Media: Paperback Edition: Pap/Cdr Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 272 Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5 Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0470287632 Dewey Decimal Number: 006 EAN: 9780470287637 ASIN: 0470287632
Publication Date: October 13, 2008 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description Designed to save time in the digital workflow, Nik Software's entire suite of products (Dfine 2.0, Color Efex Pro 3.0 and Sharpener Pro 2.0) were conceived with the single goal of helping photographers use products such as Adobe Photoshop easier while offering numerous editing capabilities not found within Photoshop. These powerful and highly successful digital imaging products have been written about extensively in trade magazines and publication's, however, to date no one has taken on the task of compiling techniques into a book on how best to utilize these highly popular products. The Official Nik Software Image Enhancement Guide: The Photographer's Resource of Professional Workflow Techniques is a product designed to resemble the way photographers think. The idea is to make sure the readers can apply techniques discussed in the book such as retouching, understanding the importance of light, and exposure, while learning all of the features and functionality of this family of products. The CD included with the book will have a trial version of Nik's most popular program, Color Efex Pro Standard Edition.The book will appeal to any and all owners of Nik Software products who have been asking for a book on this topic almost since the company's inception.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
  Nik Software December 21, 2008 Fine introduction to most of Nik's software. It's a shame that it doesn't cover Sharpener 3.0; there have been significant changes in the upgrade.
  Painful November 29, 2008 I have to agree with the other one star reviews. I tried to get through this book but it has very little to do with images other than the samples presented. I've been using photographic software since Photoshop 2 and am currently using Aperture 2 and the entire Nik software collection plug in's. This book covers none of the Aperture plug in functionality and marginally covers the Photoshop version. Nik software's website and tutorials while sometimes tedious do a much better job and for a lot less money. The spelling and grammar errors are painful as well. This one is going back.
  Guide? Humbug November 26, 2008 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Don't waste your time or money. You'll get more from NIK's website and it will be spelled correctly. Illustrations OK, coverage (filters for example) spotty and incomplete. Personally, I got nothing from it at all. Want to buy a used copy?
  Save your money November 6, 2008 10 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book is truly awful. First of all, it is unreadable. Almost every illustration is a full screen screen-shot reproduced at 4 1/4" x 3 1/4", two on a page, with plenty of white space. The Nik screens use light gray text on a dark gray background, which is fine on the screen, because it doesn't corrupt your color vision, but it is totally unreadable when printed at such a small size in the book.
The text itself is bad. It is so full of typographical and grammatical errors that it is jarring to read. For instance, on page 106, what does "In steps the Reflector effects, and their ability to bring back an image." mean? Is there a verb in there that I missed? Is "reflector" a proper noun?
If the copy were redeeming, the book might be worth the struggle; but it isn't. I was hoping for a reference book that would help me figure out what the various filters do and how to use them. Instead, the book is a random walk through the filters that the author particularly likes, with a description of how he would apply them to specific images. Color Efex Pro contains 52 filters, with variations on many of the filters. The book covers fewer than 20 filters.
These comments apply only to Color Efex Pro, which is the only product that I own and the only part of the book that I slogged through. By the way, Color Efex Pro is a great program, even though it is not well documented. I bought this book to try to fill that void.
  Not very in-depth, poor sizing of images October 24, 2008 11 out of 12 found this review helpful
The author too frequently breezes through some of his applications of the Nik filters. In his attempt to cover all the filters and give examples of the use of many of them, he makes his discussion of the applications too brief.
Although he often explains what you're seeing in the accompanying images, the small size of the images makes it difficult to read some of the parameters he's set in the screenshots. There are times when he refers to what are supposed to be obvious parameter differences between screenshots, expecting you to read them from the screenshots, but the size and colors used make it impossible to do so. Both Josh and the publisher should have realized that the light gray-on-gray and white lettering-on-gray UI that Nik insists on using do not improve readability on the scales used in the book.
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