Digital photography is finally coming of age as digital camera prices come down, image quality goes up, and inkjet printers produce true photo-quality prints.

I finally made the big switch from film to digital less than a year ago. It’s great. I no longer have to buy and process film nor scan my photos for the Web or emailing to friends. It’s also much easier to organize photos with a computer than with shoe boxes. I will never buy another film camera again.

Although digital brings many advantages and loads of fun, it also poses a whole new set of questions. Beginners will have to become familiar with image resolution, file sizes, etc. And serious shooters will sooner or later want to tweak their photos with a good image-editing program.

Enter Adobe Photoshop, the industry standard for image editing. This is a very sophisticated and complex program, but easy to use if you know what to do.

There are many Photoshop how-to books, and we finally have one written especially for digital photographers. The Photoshop Book For Digital Photographers is perfect for people like me who take pictures with a digital camera and sometimes need to use Photoshop to improve images. The book is for both beginners and professional users (Windows or Mac).

It’s a practical and helpful collection of step-by-step image-editing techniques. You’ll find quick and easy fixes for common ailments such as underexposed photos, red eye, color casts, crooked photos (especially horizon shots), and digital noise (colored spots).

There are also advanced techniques such as making a fat person look slim, erasing freckles on a face, and replacing a cloudy sky with a blue one. It even shows how you can turn a slight frown into a slight smile (Mona Lisa style). Too bad it doesn’t also teach you how to open the eyes of a person who blinked when the picture was taken. That’s my main problem. The smile is beautiful, but the eyes are closed. Nothing more frustrating than that.

The first piece of advice the author gives is, burn your digital camera photos to a CD even before starting up Photoshop or doing any editing. The original images will serve as your “digital negatives” which can never be accidentally erased or trashed.

You can also print out thumbnails of the photos for the CD jacket. And the Batch Rename feature automatically renames your image files from the unrecognizable 110_101.jpg, 110_102.jpg, and 110_103.jpg to something more familiar like huladancer1.jpg, huladancer2.jpg, etc.

Thus, the book starts out with the most basic things as it progresses toward more advanced procedures (such as embedding digital copyright info) to improve (or protect) your digital photos.

There are eleven chapters covering subjects like cropping and resizing photos, fixing digital camera photos (red eye removal, etc.), color correction, masking (to isolate a person or object from the background), retouching portraits (removing blemishes and wrinkles, etc.), editing the human body (erasing flab, etc.), applying special effects, working with grayscale images, image-sharpening techniques, and showing digital photos to clients. It pretty much covers all the things a digital photographer would want to do with his or her images.

Each procedure has an introductory paragraph that explains the purpose and strategy of the respective technique. Then the procedure is described step-by-step with full-color screenshots (taken from a Mac). It’s very easy to follow. The text, layout, and design are also attractive and the book is not too thick and heavy like other Photoshop books, making it less daunting.

The author also mentions all the little flaws of Photoshop and tells you effective workarounds. For example, the Dodge and Burn tools are “lame” so he offers an alternative. Photoshop is a great program, but it’s not perfect. To think that I’ve ruined so many images with these lame tools!

You don’t need to read the book from cover to cover, just read the techniques that you want to do. However, I would at least skim through the entire book just to see what techniques are possible for future reference. It’s quite amazing to see what’s possible.

If you have Adobe Photoshop Elements or the newest Photoshop CS, you can still use this book since most of the commands are similar or the same. I highly recommend this book for digital photographers willing to spend a little or a lot of time making their digital images perfect.