The Little Book with Big New Ideas

By Ron Wodaski
with additional content by Russell Croman

Photoshop is a powerful tool, but it's also very complicated. The Zone System not only shows you how to process your images in Photoshop, it gives you a complete system for astro image processing. The book is in full color on every page, and it includes a DVD with video training, free software, and other goodies.

The Zone System grew out of the CCD Imaging Camps I held for the last several years in New Mexico. It is based on painstaking research into how Photoshop works - and why it works the way it does. You won't just learn some useful ways to use Curves; you'll learn the type of curve to use, the correct way to integrate Curves and Levels, and more. The most important thing you'll learn, however, is how to take the guesswork out of processing astronomical images.

The Zone System book is based on:

• Watching students learn how to work with Photoshop at the Camps
• Breaking down the steps in Photoshop to their fundamentals
• Putting the steps back together in a way that makes sense for astro image processing
• Showing how to process an image from end to end
• Developing new ideas on color, signal to noise ratio, and other topics

But the biggest idea that brings everything together is the Zone System itself. By breaking the image down into manageable zones, you learn how to get the most out of any image you process. For a breakdown of the zones, please check out the sample pages.  Note: The sample pages skip around a bit, to show different features of the book. They are not a complete chapter or section!

The sample pages include a preview of the Zone System, and highlights from a Photoshop tutorial.

Errara