Complete Guide to Filters for Digital Photography [BOOK REVIEW]

Here’s a book that should take a lot of the angst out of digital photography – Complete Guide to Filters for Digital Photography.

For the ‘ole film gang’ there used to be numerous books published that explained the use of camera filters. With digital, as many are increasingly discovering, you have can create the effect of a filter after the shoot, at the point of software manipulation. Tempting but somewhat dangerous.

It’s invaluable to restate, as this book does, that the principle and effects of lens filtration applies when the image is first committed to the film or the digital film the image sensor.

All the fundamentals are there: colour temperature, exposure corrections when filters are used and the effect on the subject.

About a third the way through Joseph Meehan’s gorgeously illustrated book you begin to get the message that care in capture is fundamental.

An example: correct setting of a digital camera’s white balance at the moment of capture is critically important and, if you decide to later correct a colour cast at the software stage, you could be asking for trouble.

The colour correction filters, the 81s, the 85s etc and their uses are described; so are the colour compensating (CC) filters, as well as the grads, the NDs and so on.

Meehan also includes an interesting chapter on colour correcting RAW image files, then moves on to the tricky tasks of software removal of colour casts and how to enhance skin tones.

Naturally, the book’s later pages dig into digital filtration with the use of software and offers some techniques on how to successfully simulate B&W images from colour originals, make faux versions of Cyanotype, sepia, platinum processes etc.

For a step away from the ordinary in the current flood of books on digital photography, this book deserves notice. Ideal for the pro or advanced amateur.

Get a copy of Complete Guide to Filters for Digital Photography at Amazon.

• Author: J Meehan.
• Publisher: Lark Books.
• Distributor: Capricorn Link.
• ISBN: 1 57990 447 5.
• Length: 168 pages