Digital Scanning and Photography (Eu-Independent)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735610126 ISBN 13: 9780735610125

Publisher: Microsoft Press, 2000

This fast-facts reference offers an engaging, easy-to-understand introduction to the tools and how-to's of digital scanning and photography. Home users learn the basics for using the latest digital imaging technologies -- including the built-in capabilities in the new Windows Millennium Edition operating system -- to take, scan, edit, print, and e-mail digital pictures. Coverage includes converting pictures from conventional point-and-shoot cameras and other media to digital format, selecting and operating a digital camera, manipulating images on the PC, adding special effects, and sending pictures electronically.

Review:

Dan Gookin explains the latest consumer trend in PCs in Digital Scanning and Photography: specifically, how to choose, buy, configure, and use scanners and digital cameras. The book addresses both Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS, and general information (what resolution is) intermingles with specific instructions (how to resize an image in Adobe PhotoDeluxe). The illustrator of this book deserves great praise. The technical drawings, which showcase such details as where you plug cables into a scanner, are razor sharp and almost photo-realistic. Maybe they're ink-enhanced photographs--it's hard to tell; but, in any case, they're far better than the grainy photos that usually populate books that have a hardware angle.

Gookin, a pioneer of the trend in lighthearted writing (as in DOS for Dummies), communicates lots of facts and well-reasoned opinions without being dull; often, he's downright funny. But sometimes the flip shtick goes a bit too far, as when he remarks that all scanners should come with some kind of software that makes them go: "If you haven't found the scanner software," Gookin writes, "search the scanner box again." Okay; but less obvious advice would be to go to the scanner manufacturer's Web site to see if they have the software available for download there. --David Wall

Topics covered:

• Digital imaging for home and small-office users of scanners and digital cameras
• Consumer information on equipment features and pricing
• Instructions on hooking up a scanner
• Information on alternative image-file formats
• Tricks for getting the effects you want by using image-editing software