The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers

As a seasoned Lightroom user, I was skeptical that this author - known for hoary jocularity and being first on the scene with the cream skimmed off the top - would have much to add to Martin Evening's 'Bible'. A casual bookstore browse, however, made me reconsider. I read the book module by Lightroom module, and picked up some slick workflow tips that came in mighty handy in the transition to version 2 [LR2]. This book was written with hands-on insight and fire-in-the-belly passion by a gifted photographer. It's much more than a comprehensive tutorial covering the fundamentals, for it it is laced with pearls for pros, and offers glimpses of the powerful engine under the glossy hood. The writing is smoothly professional, the numerous color graphics are crisp and on point (as well reproduced as any I've seen of Lighroom's low key screens). The layout is attractive, printing is clear, and paper is top-grade for stunning color rendering. Mr Kelby deserves great credit for the spirited upbeat writing of an even-paced and consistently thorough introduction to Lightroom-2. Adding to the sense of author redemption is that his oft-distracting 'jokes' are now relegated to a chapter's introductory page that you can skip over; the many filler pages of thank-you's have been shortened to just two; the downloadable tutorial photos, many of RAW quality, have a tastefully subdued copyright watermark (no longer disfigured by Kelby's trademark diver's flag); images are zipped in chapter-by-chapter packages, rather than the tedious individual downloads of the past; the instruction style is based on a well-honed step-wise photograph flow [intake, processing, output] rather than on picking an isolated topic ('botoxing wrinkles') as in the past. Paced deliberate workflow, of course, demands more of the reader (as well as of the author) as it builds on preceding skills. Beginning or intermediate LR2 users will get a flying start using this book. Once you feel comfortable with the LR2 basic workflow, add Martin Evening's "The Lightroom2 Book" to your library to broaden your skills and learn of advanced techniques; I doubt that you'd find much new not covered by these two books that complement and supplement one another surprisingly well.

I'm one of the people that owned the first version of the book and still coughed up the $29 for version 2. I don't regret it one bit. There's an entire chapter on the new Adjustment Brush, and that chapter alone has made me my $29 back. If you're new to Lightroom, I can't help but think Scott's workflow and descriptions of the tools is the best out there. They sure helped me last year when I was starting out. However, if you're experienced in Lightroom, yes, you'll definitely find some of same "basics" stuff. But the updates (importing and sorting chapters, adjustment brush, new workflow chapters, and customizing) are worth $29 and I'd spend it again in a heartbeat. Highly recommended.

I am a very experienced computer user, and have read countless books. This is the best yet. It is extremely well organized. Each section is written in a step by step fashion of what to do. It is written by a photographer - not a computer geek, so the steps are really practical to improve your workflow. I'm not a pro - just an amateur. But with my digital SLR, it's not unusual to generate 200 - 300 images at a shoot. Scott Kelby's tips on improving workflow are awesome. Further, using Lightroom with the tips from this book will make me a better photographer. The entire book is beautifully printed in color! It is divided in to very manageable sections, making it a breeze to use. If you want to learn Lightroom, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

Some folks have suggested that Lightroom is so intuitive that you don't need a book to learn to use it. Maybe my intuition is weak, but the more I read about Lightroom, the more I learn it can do, and the more I begin to like it. Although Scott Kelby's book covers all the basics, from importing digital images into Lightroom to outputting them to prints, websites and slide shows, he also shows how to use a lot of other controls and capabilities that I had not come across elsewhere. Now I'm often put off by Kelby's breezy style of writing (e.g., "that way, when no one's around, you can ...play slide shows until it's time for your weekly therapy session") but here when he uses it in a book that's meant to be read from start to finish, it helps keep one from getting bored. And this book is meant to be read that way by a new user of Lightroom. What makes the book even more useful is the step-by-step screen saves. The language for each illustration appears exactly adjacent to the illustration, even if that means leaving a lot of white space in the writing. Moreover, to overcome the problems of the Lightroom interface being harder to read on a printed page than on a monitor, Kelby directs your attention to the right place on the screen with a red circle. This may not seem like graphics enlightenment, but it's not a common technique. I've said that Kelby goes beyond the intuitive. For example, I never would have guessed that Lightroom could be set up so that you could transmit an image directly into your e-mail from Lightroom, but Kelby shows how. I've also been puzzled by how to move a photo from my internal disc drive to an external drive for archiving with Lightroom. There's no "Move" in the Edit dropdown menu. Then the author explained that I could create a new folder on the external drive from within the Folders Panel, select the image, and just drag it to the new folder. Presto, the image is moved and Lightroom updates its database to show the new location. It may be, with its excellent keywording and metadata facilities, that Lightroom will become the digital asset management solution for a lot of photographers. I also appreciated the fact that the author was not afraid to say how inadequate the sharpening facility of Lightroom is. But he didn't stop there. He showed how to easily move a picture into Photoshop from Lightroom, sharpen it and then move it back. It still means purchasing both Lightroom and Photoshop, but at least there is a better way to handle sharpening. Given the advantages of Lightroom over Adobe Bridge and ACR as a front end, serious photographers will certainly consider using both pieces of software. In the last chapters of the book, Kelby takes two different types of photography, wedding and portrait work, and landscape photography, and follows the workflow through Lightroom and Photoshop to tie everything that came before together in a fitting summary. There's not much talk about art here, but when it co

This book is about "Lightroom", which is a workflow tool aimed at digital photographers that don't want to take the time to become familiar with the mammoth application that Adobe Photoshop has become because it really isn't necessary for the scope of their work. The book gives you step-by-step directions on the detailed tasks of: 1. Importing your photos into Photoshop Lightroom 2. Sorting and organizing your photos using the Library Module 3. Making minor adjustments to photos using the Library Module's Quick Develop panel 4. Performing major adjustments by editing in the Develop Module 5. Fixing common problems such as red eye, noise, chromatic aberrations, etc. 6. Changing color photos to black-and-white using several different methods 7. Sharing your photos via the Slideshow Module including adding music and choosing playback options 8. Using the Print Module to print your photos in a variety of ways such as adding text, setting up color management, and printing multiple photos on one page. 9. Using the Web Module to create a gallery for your photos viewable via the web. There are two final chapters that act as capstones. The first of these final chapters takes you through the steps you have learned in this book to produce a wedding portrait workflow whose ultimate goal is to have photos that the clients can proof on the web. The second of these two chapters has a workflow that is specifically for outdoor photographers. All through the book the author leads you through his formula for working through each problem. His method doesn't allow you to go off and take several paths. By working through the author's method of doing things, he hopes you will walk away with a clear idea of how to use Lightroom his way and use that as a jumping-off point for your own investigation of the tool. The photos that the author works with are downloadable so that you can follow along with him using exactly the same photos as he does. Overall, I really liked the author's approach and I thought it was quite clear with plenty of screenshots so that the reader does not get lost. The only thing I did not like about the book is that it has a jokey style that is done to the extreme in places. In particular, the first part of the book has a largely bogus Q & A session that does answer some serious questions but also wastes some serious space just joking around. Likewise, the first page of just about every chapter has a conversational "surfer dude"/Andre Lamothe verbal style before the author gets down to business. However, if you can overlook this, the book is very good at teaching the reader how to work with Lightroom.