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(23 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Fisher Page
ISBN : 1937538133
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Format: PDF, EPUB
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About the Author
Robert Fisher is a commercial and fine art photographer and freelance writer based just outside of Toronto, Canada. His love of photography began nearly 15 years ago when he was first exposed to the impressionistic style of photography. This style captivated his imagination and served as the red pill for his journey into the photographic rabbit hole.
Robert holds an honors Bachelor of Administration degree from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, and his photographic knowledge has been gained through trial and error, asking questions, and informally studying photography and photographic techniques.
Robert has held several solo and group shows and his work has been exhibited in a number of local galleries. He has traveled as far as the Czech Republic to cover events and has drawn upon his education in business to publish several articles in finance industry publications.
Outside of photography, Robert is an enthusiastic and experimental amateur chef, gardener, player of really bad guitar, and owner of two adopted dogs he affectionately refers to as The Idiots.
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- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Rocky Nook (December 28, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1937538133
- ISBN-13: 978-1937538132
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 0.4 x 9.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download The Digital Zone System: Taking Control from Capture to Print
Ansel Adams and Fred Archer designed the original Zone System to extend the range of light of film and to better control tonalities within the print.
The Adobe Corporation, over time, designed Photoshop and related raw converters, like Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom, to extend the range of light of digital images and better control tonalities in a variety of output media,
Now Robert Fisher offers what he calls the Digital Zone System (DZS) which applies the tools in Photoshop and related raw converters in ways never contemplated by the designers to fit into the schema of the original zone system.
In reviewing books concerned with image post processing, I usually consider the effectiveness in the explanation of the use of the software, but in the case of Fisher's work I wonder if the underlying concept is worth the work. Essentially, Fisher constructs a number of masks, each of a zone of tonality and then adjusts them, claiming this method creates better images. It appears to me that the DZS adds unnecessary complexity to the use of post processing software with no advantage.
Even with DZS it appears that one must still recover the data at the extremes of a digital image's tonal range by manipulating the image with ACR or Lightroom's basic sliders, and manipulation of tonality within a zone must still be accomplished by using a curve function. Although he alleges that DZS can be more precise, nothing convinces me that careful use of, say, the curves panel can't achieve the same thing. Moreover, one will not be fighting against the design of the software, which I conclude one is doing when Photoshop repeatedly warns that no pixels are more than 50% selected, a warning which Fisher tells us to just ignore.
In spite of what the title says, this book is about luminance masks not the zone system. The author provides a set of Photoshop actions to generate a set of masks that cover the various zones of the zone system. In keeping with the ideas of the zone system the masks are separated by a factor of 2 in exposure. The masks area combined with adjustment layers in Photoshop to fine tune an image by confining the effect of the adjustment to a limited area.
The author provides a nice color image showing the advantages of using the masks. The demonstration would have had more instructional value if the author had provided the same same kind of detailed descriptions that are used in Oz to Kansas.
The color chapter is followed by a chapter on black and white conversions. The best part about this chapter is the discussion of the importance of color in the black and white conversion. This is a valuable discussion. The color image used in the color chapter is used to demonstrate the author's black and white conversion method. This is followed by a second demonstration using red peppers. Then a comparison between the zone system system conversion and a Lightroom conversion.
One drawback to the demonstrations is that the author doesn't provide sample images that you can use to follow along.
The black and white discussion is followed by a discussion about using the digital zone system in high dynamic range (HDR) applications. I don't know enough about HDR to comment on this chapter.
The book concludes with a discussion of printing and the importance of soft proofing and color management. This is a clear and useful discussion.
This is one of the few books where the screen shoots showing layers/etc. are printed large enough to read. The reproduction of the the photos is good.