Jon Canfield, the author of several popular photography books, including “RAW 101: Better images with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements”, works as a consultant for developing Microsoft’s digital imaging products. He wrote Print like a Pro to teach photographers how to avoid their photographs with vibrant and brilliant colours turn into muddy prints.

Print like a Pro is a bit of a sloppy book. That’s not entirely Cranfield’s fault, but surely that of his editor. Especially in the beginning of the book, you have trouble discerning the bad quality photographs from the good quality ones, although the author insists there must be visible differences. But all in all, this book will teach you how to print on a number of inkjet photo printers, including the HP Photosmart 8750.

Cranfield’s book on printing photographs like a pro would have benefited from some careful attention to details. For example, on page 13, the caption below an image that is meant to show you how little colour can be conveyed in an 8-bit image reads: “8-bit images contain a maximum of 256 different colors… still very limited to what most printers are capable of.”

Yet on the page right before it, Cranfield has everything right. I doubt if many professional and semi-professional photographers are going to believe what the caption says, but amateurs who don’t know much about how colour depth works, might be confused.

More importantly, I found the book only covers colour management very superficially. I would have thought the author to at least offer some more information on that topic. The same can be said about printer profiling and device drivers. There’s extensive coverage, but it all remains stuck to the level of dialogue boxes that are explained into detail. If I wanted to know exactly how my Canon printer driver worked, I’d read the manual.

It’s sad to say, but I don’t believe the book is suitable for anyone but the absolute beginner.