Mastering Digital Printing, Second Edition (Digital Process and Print)

Description

I bought this book in the hope of becoming a better printer not a better comercial printer. This is definately not a how-to book, for do it yourself hobbyist like myself, but more of a reference manual for comercial printers. For the price I got to say the book is very well illustrated and contains nearly 400 pages of photos and print. However, Most of the pages are not dedicated to specific instruction on how to print, but on equipment graphs and printer specifications. It seems as if the author is beating around the bush. Out of the eleven chapters in this book, I think only 2 of them are dedicated to instruction, while the rest is dedicated to reference. For example take a look at a few of the Chapter headings "Navigating the Digital landscape", "Understanding Digital Printing", "Understanding and Managing Color", "Determining Print Permanence", "Selecting an Inkjet Printer", "Choosing your Consumables", "Using a Print Service, get the picture. This makes for interesting reading on a bad weather day, or when you are on a long trip to Honk Kong, but it sure wont make you a master printer. As a matter of fact most of the instructional material deals with one or two examples that did not really enlighten me whatsoever, since I had found the same information on the web prior to purchasing this book. The way I see it this book will make a great conversation item in my growing library of photographic books, but I don't see it as a working manual sitting on my desk or by my printer. Therefore, I am very dissapointed with and cannot recomend it for advanced amateurs like myself.