133 of 135 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Lightroom, May 7, 2007
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for Digital Photographers Only (For Only) (Paperback)
Here's another entry in the list of books about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the new software from the manufacturer of the leading image processing software. Although the software is far more intuitive than Photoshop, and is laid out to mirror the order in which most photographers develop digital photographs, it still requires more instruction then the small paper manual that comes with Lightroom or the complete but hard to use on-line help facility that Lightroom offers.
Rob Sheppard's book offers that instruction in a way that helps photographers who are interested in learning more than just the effect of each button and slider on the digital image. The author follows the workflow model of each of the modules of Lightroom, from the importing of images into the Library Module, through the Development Module that allows for overall adjustments to digital images, to outputs for slideshows, prints and web sites. The writing is accurate and easy to understand.
What makes this book so good is that Sheppard goes beyond just showing the functions of Lightroom. For example, before discussing the operation of the Library Module, he discusses the importance of creating a good logical file structure in one's computer for images outside of Lightroom, so that the file structure can be reflected in Lightroom. Similarly, he recognizes that there are certain adjustments to digital images that Lightroom is not capable of, and so require adjustment in the Photoshop, or other, program. He briefly describes those adjustments and the benefits of using them in a final chapter. This is not enough of an explanation to learn how to make such adjustments in Photoshop but it helps to make the transition. Experienced users will probably not learn anything new with this approach, but it will serve as a healthy reminder. The information will be most useful to the less experienced and those whose previous practices don't lend themselves to effective use of Lightroom.
Unfortunately, there is a lot about Lightroom that isn't covered. One of Lightroom's most impressive features to me is the keywording facility that allows for quick recovery of photographs from a large collection. It includes functions like synonyms and parent-child relations that are extremely useful, but not covered in this book. There are also Lightroom functions that are not mentioned at all. For example, the creation of JPG images to embed in e-mail is a common need of most photographers. Lightroom allows the creation of such images in its export function. Experienced Photoshop users will probably be able to figure out how to do this, but the menus involved in creating a preset to do this are complex, and I would have liked a little help.
Lightroom users looking for a good explanation of its functions, who want to do more than just know what the controls do, will benefit from reading this book. However, this is not the complete guide to everything Lightroom.
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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Old-fashioned, outmoded advice from times before Lightroom, May 18, 2008
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for Digital Photographers Only (For Only) (Paperback)
This is yet another very lavishly produced Lightroom book. It has lots of colorful illustrations (which are not really necessary), and lots of very old-fashioned "practical advice" based on outmoded practices from times before software like Aperture or Lightroom was available.
On the other hand, it's very thin on advanced features, and on things that Lightroom makes possible, even for a novice.
To give just a few examples: The author suggests (extensively) creating unnecessarily elaborate folder structure, meant to easily recognize what photos are in which folder (he names the folders by state in which photos were taken, and descriptive labels such as Tony's Birthday party). This is absolutely unnecessary, and in fact has many disadvantages, e.g., at the time of making backups to optical media (DVDs).
On the other hand, he merely mentions keywords and declares their use "tedious". But he clearly doesn't understand how they work in the software. There is no SINGLE mention of keyword hierarchies (and how they can reduce the "tedium" of entering multiple keywords), and of the numerous ways to assign keywords: the stamper / painter tool, MULTIPLE drag and drop options, keyword spell check, custom keyword sets, automatic recent keyword feature, or dynamic character of keyword hierarchies which can be easily re-arranged later as the library grows, without any loss of already assigned keywords. No mention of the fact you can easily export or import keyword sets. He points out that sometimes you might assign different keywords when you mean the same (like flower and flowers and plant); yet, fails to mention the fact that the SYNONYMS feature takes care of exactly that problem. Reading the book you would think that Lightroom's keywords work like those in iPhoto or other, consumer-level software (they do not - they are SO much better here).
Similarly, the author says he doesn't use all of available star ratings. He gives an example of using star ratings to winnow out the rejects from a large shoot. That's OK if he wants to do it that way, but this is not the best tool for that purpose. Unfortunately, he does not mention the one tool which WAS meant to do JUST THAT, i.e., the use of pick-flags, especially in conjunction with the "Refine Photos" command (which is meant exactly for that purpose, and works very easily and efficiently, without affecting the star ratings).
The book misses mentioning many basic keyboard shortcuts when they might be useful - to mention star ratings again - readers will not know that it can go much faster if you hold the shift key when you use number keys, which will move you automatically to the next, yet unrated photo. Yes, the author is right that rating, and THEN moving to the next photo is somewhat awkward and slow, BUT of course there is a much faster, and much more efficient way to do this.
That's too bad, because otherwise, this would be a sensible, very visually attractive, and mostly well written intro to the most basic features. Unfortunately it misses too many opportunities to give new users the efficient tools which are at their fingertips, and which they already paid for.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very helpful book, July 27, 2007
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for Digital Photographers Only (For Only) (Paperback)
Adobe products are not intuitive. I've used Photoshop for a number of years, but it's impossible to sort and edit a set of raw photographs quickly with Photoshop. Bridge is better for sorting, but it crashes fairly consistently. So I decided to try Lightroom. Turns out that Lightroom is also far from intuitive and its controls are similar to, but not the same as, their Photoshop counterparts. So I looked for a book on Amazon and settled on this one. This book is great for explaining how to use the Lightroom Develop controls and adequate for the other Modules. I upgraded to Lightroom 1.1 and most of the information in the book still applies. The reason I don't give the book five stars is that I felt it was light on explaining how Lightroom handles files (the Library Module) and how that relates to the underlying file system. If you're looking for a book to help you get started with Lightroom, I doubt that you'll find a better one.
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