The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio) / Peter Krogh

Can you find your digital photographs when you need them, or do you spend more time rifling through your hard drive and file cabinets than you'd like? Do you have a system for assigning and tracking content data on your photos? If you make a living as a photographer, do your images bear your copyright and contact information, or do they circulate in the marketplace unprotected?

As professional photographer and author Peter Krogh sees it, "your DAM system is fundamental to the way your images are known, both to you and to everyone else." DAM, or Digital Asset Management, in the world of digital photography refers to every part of the process that follows the taking of the picture, through final output and permanent storage. Anyone who shoots, scans or stores digital photographs, is practicing some form of digital asset management. Unfortunately, most of us don't yet know how to manage our files (and our time) very systematically, or efficiently.

In The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, Krogh brings clarity to the often overwhelming task of managing digital photographs, with a solid plan and practical advice for fellow photographers on how to file, find, protect and re-use photographs. Following a thorough overview of the DAM system and de-mystifications of metadata and digital archiving, Krogh focuses on best practices for digital photographers using Adobe Photoshop CS2. He explains how to use Adobe Bridge, the new CS2 navigational software that replaces the File Browser introduced in Photoshop 7, with full details on integrating Bridge, Camera Raw and Digital Asset Management software.

Compellingly presented in four-color format, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers brings Krogh's award-winning creative approach to a subject that could have been technically intimidating. Instead, Krogh's twenty years of experience and instructive visual storytelling make this material not only accessible, but compulsory reading for serious digital photographers.