Review: Vision & Voice

Vision & Voice is David duChemins 3rd book in his series of vision related books. Within the Frame and Visionmongers introduce the importance of vision in your work, as well as making the leap into shooting professionally. Vision & Voice is a complement to these books, in that it teaches how to bring that vision into your post processing workflow. Not just any workflow, this book is specifically targeted at Lightroom users. While the principles apply to other programs, it is through Lightroom that David show us the process of taking his images from a zero Raw file, to the final image.

While the book is written as seven chapters, it’s really a book of 2 halves. The first half talks about the importance of vision, and shooting for your vision, as well as introducing the Develop Module tools. This book doesn’t relate to other modules, so it is very heavily a post process book. The second half of teh book takes 20 of Davids photos and guides us through the thought process used to bring about the final image. Examples can often be underexposed, lacking in contrast, and David talks through fixes, often making things worse, before they get better as he applies the tools.

The book is written with David’s very laid back style, mixed with massive amounts of encouragement. He’s owns up to mistakes he’s made in camera, making this a book for everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and have no hesitation in recommending it. One thing that I felt let it down a little is that the screen captures were from Lightroom 3 Beta, so the Noise Reduction panel is outdated, and there’s no lens corrections. Camera Calibration was barely touched, and I felt a mention of Camera Profiles would have been appropriate. Still, these are minor issues relative to the knowledge that can be gained from reading this wonderful book.

Get Vision & Vision from Amazon US, Amazon UK

-Related: David also writes a number of books for Craft & Vision.