Corrective Lighting, Posing & Retouching for Digital Portrait Photographers

I agree with the other reviewers so I will not repeat what has already been said about the book. I own a bunch of Jeff Smith's books and consider them all a good investment. This was the first book I purchased on the Kindle app on my iPhone (yes the pictures are in color and not too downsampled). His head and shoulders book had been my favorite but now it is his new Corrective Lighting, Posing & Retouching for Digital Portrait Photographers. Some of his books have a bit of recycled content in them. However, the two aforementioned contain manly new and extremely valuable content. One key thing Jeff Smith tries to teach the readers is that if you are in the business of photography then you are shooting and creating products for the client, not yourself. You must create products that the client will want to buy (get to know what each clients wants) and you must do it in an efficient and cost effective manner. The things you learn is this book are very particle, will improve your photography, your workflow, and business practices.

A great book for beginners, but OK for more seasoned photographers. The author explains 'some' (this is a key word here, as he only demonstrates a few techniques to help some problems) posing techniques to hide certain flaws or less than desirable features in the subjects. Beware though, he does not teach you a lot or more than a few tricks, you will have to build your own knowledge from several sources. The author does however, point out that fashion magazines are a great source for poses. In terms of digital retouching, the book only discusses a couple of tools and only shows how to do a very limited number of things in detail. Like whitening teeth, smoothing skin, and adding blur. The book only briefly discusses how to use the liquefy tool to correct overweight issues and the like. Not the amount of detail I was hoping for. The author does tend to speak a lot from personal experience, he talks a lot about how he runs his business, how he likes to do things, how he..... and so on, so forth! This can be a bit annoying. The reader is looking for more of an objective view on the subject. Books by Mr. Bill Hurter tend to do a better job at that and explain posing much better. One thing that really annoyed was certain terms he used throughout the book, terms like "seniors" referring to senior high school students, at first I thought the author was talking about senior citizens but the pictures in the book were mostly of teenagers, I kept thinking 'what on earth is the man going on about!?' I then remembered that the book is American! The book seems like it was written in a hurry, not that it lacks cohesion, but it's full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Its worse when you consider that this is a second edition, which means that it was reprinted for a second time and no one bothered to recheck it. All in all, the book does offer good advice on posing and retouching techniques, but don't expect it to be the ultimate guide to posing nor retouching. I would say that is worth the moeny spent and worth reading more than once, but it seems to me that this is more targeted towards photographers who run their private studios.

This is a very good book. It is advice aimed at say the town photographer who is taking senior portraits. Its aimed at photographer who are running a business and are a tight deadline where time is money. You won't find any super fancy photoshop techinques in here- instead you will find techniques that quickly let you produce a marketable print to your customers. He also spend a good deal of time on how to cover up problems when your taking the photo, rather then trying to cover them up in photoshop later. While I may not agree with everything in the book I think it a good primer on how a business side studio would have to run, as opposed to a more artistic based studio, where you could perhaps work at a more relaxed pace.

I bought this book because I take a lot of pictures of my family, and a lot of us are overweight. There are several tips for the amateur photographer on how to angle lights and cameras to hide flaws of all sorts from balding heads to belly bulges. It doesn't go into too much detail on different lighting setups, but it does show corrective lighting and corrective posing. For the amount of useful information that you get out of the book, it's worth a whole lot more than the $30 or so that I paid for my copy. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to improve the quality of their picture taking skills.

Mr Smith gives practical guidelines for posing and the reasons they work. He discusses what doesn't work and why. He emphasizes the human quality in a photographic subject. Very enjoyable and enlightening.

I am really new to portrait photography and I LOVE this book. Easy to read and follow, great tips and suggestions. I would say this book is definitely a beginners guide, so it was perfect for me!

While I don't agree with the business perspective of the author, that does not mean I did not like reading this book. It contains a ton of useful pointers and advice that even if you don't agree with it, it will make you think about your own approach and that's always a good thing. The author does not like using photoshop so do not expect a ton of photoshop tutorials. Aside from that it is a book that every professional photographer would benefit to read.

I am a photographer and I used this for one of my recent photography classes! This book was great and just what I needed for insight into my skills and techniques for lighting photography.

As a photographer, I need to highlight the beauty of my clients. This book gave me information what I should do.

Also für blutige Anfänger ist es vielleicht geeignet - aber wenn man schon ein bißchen Erfahrung hat erfährt man jetzt nicht wirklich groß was Neues. Der Bilderstil ist halt auch eher zurückhaltend und einfach.

It's a book that covers the basics and gives you the techniques, hints and tips from the author. If you're new to this the it's essential reading, if you have some experience then it's useful and if your experienced it gives a quick refresher. I liked it!

Condition as described/good price/good read.