Customer Reviews

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers

5 star:		(54)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 comes to using the technology of Lightroom, this book seems to be as good as it gets.


NOTE: Since this book was published, Adobe came out with a significant update to Lightroom (v1.1). Owners of this book may download a PDF file covering the changes in v1.1 by going to www.scottkelby.com and following the links.

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.

Whenever I see the reviews that talk about how they don't like Scott's humor, I immediately disregard them. Geez, Louise, lighten up! Learning a new piece of software like Lightroom doesn't have to be droll, pedantic and boring. Whatever. Scott knows his stuff. And he's a funny writer. You don't like funny, too bad. Buy another book. You want to learn Lightroom? Buy this book. You WILL learn Lightroom. He makes his point that to get the most out of the book you should read it from start to finish. The PC users won't have a problem doing it, but it is difficult for us Mac users, but it works. I learned a lot about the intricacies of Lightroom. Scott never ceases to astound and amaze with all his little tidbits of knowledge on "how to" or "isn't that cool!" Just learning how to get rid of a Metadata template I screwed up was almost worth the price of the book! I was about to unload on Adobe for not making it easy. It is easy...tricky and not real intuitive, but easy, thanks to Scott. That's just one small example of how helpful this book is. And he really brings it all together in the last two chapters. I read it all. I even read the chapter on wedding photography, and I absolutely detest anything about wedding photography, but I still learned a lot. It's a good book. Worth the money. I work faster, and smarter now, and have more time with my camera rather than "fiddlin" with Photoshop. I still use Photoshop a lot, but getting organized, selecting, evaluating, correcting and printing is much faster. Thank you Adobe. Thank you, Scott.

Update July 2, 2007: Adobe has recently released Lightroom Version 1.1. If you are a Lightroom customer you can download it for free from Adobe's site. I have played with V1.1 for a few days now and they have made some significant feature and UI changes. I personally feel they are great changes but they are significant enough that if you use V1.1 and read a book like this one, written for V1.0, I am sure you will be confused in many places. V1.1 has many more menu options, keyword editing is improved with new UI, touchup controls from the Library are different (and improved), Before/After developing and views have more options, more presets, etc. If you want a book that completely describes V1.1, you will need to wait for the V1.0 books (like this one) to be updated.

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Note: My review below is based on my expectations (you will see them below) about this book and how it's positioned as a book to unlock the secrets of Lightroom. If you are looking for a book that is a good book for learning Lightroom basics and some interesting mid-level tips, then this book might be what you are looking for.

The book is very well done from a graphics layout standpoint, i.e. the graphics are clear and well done and the text supporting them is fine (minus the humor).

My first reaction after I had read the first five pages was - ok, enough of the humor - when are we going to get to the secrets? I don't need humor to learn. I buy books like this to learn new scenarios and tricks that will enable me to be more productive while using the application. If I want a comedy book, I will look in the humor section. I estimate Mr. Kelby could have saved over 25 pages of this book by leaving out the humor, not to mention the 4 pages of ads in the back. I am no greenie, but I would have preferred he saved the paper, and my time, by dropping the needless humor.

The product manual that comes with Lightroom is a very high level overview of the product and has little value, so I was faced with the choice of either learning by doing, which can take hours and I end up missing a bunch of important things, as Lightroom Help is just reference material, or I could look for other sources. I had already spent around 15 hours using Lightroom and had played with all the features, imported photos, played with developing and printing, exported photos, etc. so I was familiar with the basic operations of Lightroom before I bought this book.

The header on the cover of the book says "Unlock the Pros' Secrets to the New Digital Photography Workflow...", so I had high expectations. But this book spends most of the time telling me things that are obvious if you spend any time using Lightroom before looking at this book. This book assumes you have not used Lightroom at all and walks you through each menu item and each dialog box in the order as they would appear as if you just installed the application and started using it for the first time.

UI dialogs and menus are the focus of each page, with text in the margins that explain the dialogs in a step-by-step format. Lightroom is a product where I found it easy to pick up the beginner/intermediate concepts - you don't need a book for that. Sure, Mr. Kelby spends a few words at the beginning of each "lesson" that are his words of advice and drops a tip in here and there, but these tend to get lost on me by having to go thorough the rest of the text. I could get the same result by clicking on every menu item and button and seeing the result.

I found very little "Unlocking of the Pros' Secrets" by the time I had finished the book. In fact, I found the free video tutorials on the Adobe web site for Lightroom, which I did watch before opening this book, taught me 70-80% of what this book covered. It was not until page 113 where I learned my first nugget about how to create a new library using the <ctrl> key when Lightroom starts up.

From a book like this, I don't want a Lightroom 101 tutorial that shows me every dialog box possible in the product, in the order they appear. I want to learn from an expert the cool new tricks, new scenarios I might not discover, ways to make me an expert with the product, ways to save time, etc. - for example - advanced developing techniques.

The first 100 pages of the book deal with basic importing and the library, which are great features of Lightroom. These first 100+ pages will be old news to anyone who has used a PC or MAC and is familar with file/document handling (naming, renaming and copying) operations or anyone who has dealt with digital media and you understand tagging, keywords and metadata. I already know these things - these are not the secrets of a Pro - so please don't spend page after page telling us how to use the Lightroom version of the File->Open dialog box. I would have preferred he started off with what this book advertizes and unlocked the secrets for me from the beginning. I would gladly pay $50.00 for a book that was a 100 pages long and every page had great information that saved me hours having to discover it on my own. This book is 400 pages where I had to hunt and hunt to find any secrets.

If Mr. Kelby would have organized the book by scenarios with follow-on instructions, that would have been a lot more useful to me as he includes some important scenarios but they get lost in the "page after page step through each dialog" style that he uses. I would have liked to see each cool scenario explained in full via text, explaining the reasons why a certain scenario is important, when I would use a certain technique or feature and then show the step-by-step instructions how to accomplish it. Tell me the secret first and why it would make me more efficent or make me better at producing the great photos we all desire to produce, then show me the steps to accomplish it.

Sure, I learned a few new tricks, but nothing that would warrant the length of this book or time spent finding the nuggets.

Mr. Kelby does spend a lot of time covering all the keyboard commands available in the product (and there are many), but he spreads them out all over the book. A nice addition would have been to include a quick reference section on all the keyboard commands in one place. Things like this would have made the book a lot more useful to me.

Sorry to disagree with those rating this book 4-5 stars, we all have our opinions and preferred styles - in my case - this is not my preferred style. I was hoping to be "shown the beef" and when I finished the book I was left hungry in many of the advanced areas.

Your call on if you like to learn this way or you want a book more for the basics of Lightroom and less on the secrets.

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.

A friend recommended I buy this book. I resisted because LightRoom is much more self-explanatory then PhotoShop. However, now that I have it I highly recommend it. Here is why: Scott tells you how to use Lightroom in the most productive ways possible. There are many functions and he puts it all together to maximize your "Workflow". Kelby is the master. This book has already enhanced my appreciation and usability of a wonderful software program. If you want to get the most out of LightRoom buy and use this highly readable and useful addition to your knowledge base. You'll be glad you did.

This book is the perfect companion for LIGHTROOM -- I would even go so far as to call it essential. It's very easy to read, extraordinarily thorough, and has helped me get the most out of the program. Some people complain about the author's writing style, but I wouldn't let that stop you from buying the book. The bottom line: it does what a good "how to" book is supposed to do -- gives you all the tools you need to understand and use with confidence every aspect of a great, but complicated, program. I highly recommend it.

I'm guessing that anyone who has a camera and at least gets the occasional Photography magazine will have heard of Adobe's latest additonal to their arsenal of software ... Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The software is without doubt a great piece of kit giving the photographer a 'one stop shop' from importing images to ending up with the final print in your hands. However...this 'great' piece of kit becomes 'awesome' once you've got your hands on the new book by Scott Kelby, "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book".

I'm very much the kind of person that likes books to bombard me with information, but that being said, if it's written in a clinical, factual style then I'd probably get to then middle of chapter one and be done with it. From then on, I'd jump in and out of chapters picking up on little things, but undoubtedly missing out on the big picture.

Scott Kelby's style of writing is sure not to suit everyone, but I for one find it a pleasurable read. Scott writes as if he's in the same room chatting with you, which serves to work extremely effectively. Some readers may not warm to his sense of humour, but you've got to ask yourself "Do I want to get the most of out of this book or not?" If you don't warm to it, then look past it, cos there's plenty of information there to take your mind away from it and onto the task at hand...learning.

In summary then, I really do feel that occasionally books get written and there's alot of hype about how good they are. Naturally the publishers are gonna 'beef it up' so as to increase sales, but believe me ... this just isn't necessary in this case. The book speaks for itself, and I genuinely believe that if you're a photographer then you need to be using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom; and if you have Adobe Photoshop Lightrooon, then you need this book.

One more thing ... do as Scott suggests and read from cover to cover; you'll be glad you did, despite the overwhelming temptation to skip to the last 2 chapters which bring it all together.

First, try to see if you can borrow this book or check it out from the library. It has some good points, but those are well bracketed by an endless parade of the author's self-gratifying piffle.

I purchased it because at this point in time (mid-April 2007) there are darn few Lightroom books out there. Hopefully something better will turn up in a few months and I can send this volume to the recycling center.

This book is literary onanism at its extreme. And while author Kelby may sell a lot of books and have a well oiled machine to present his workshops, he apparently can't make the intellectual distinction between what you would SAY to an audience (perhaps hundreds of people trapped in a large, darkened room -- praying they'll get their money's worth and not drift into sleep) and what you would WRITE in a textbook or guide. In fact, it almost seems like the text is a transcript of a workshop presentation, with all the sophomoric asides and lame humor that usually manages to keep people awake and marginally focused.

Examples:
-- The entire three-page introductory Q&A is worthless. You get suckered into it because the assumption is that sooner or later some real information will be passed. Three pages later you're at the end -- and none the wiser.
-- The beginning of each chapter is a little more subtle: For one or a few sentences you almost feel like he's going to address a topic...And then it's back to the drivel. The intro to Chapter Eight (Printing) is especially insulting, implying that a referenced individual is regular user and purveyor of controlled substances. Bad enough the Mr. Kelby believes this passes for humor, but don't foist that off on us, please.
-- There are numerous parenthetical remarks in the step-by-step descriptions. Some are used to clarify a point. Good. Some are used to identify the difference between Mac and Windows commands. Good in concept, but those could have been better presented by effective use of conventions in the text. The third category can only be described as stupid comments. The problem is that the good use of parenthetical comments gets diluted by the other two uses. (See how to deal with this below.)
-- Based on the heavy-handed way that Mr. Kelby touts Nikon and LaCie, my guess is that he doesn't buy his own equipment. (And I shoot Nikon, BTW.)

If you decide that you really need this book you can improve things a little. For large sections of text I recommend a black Sharpie pen with the ULTRA fine point. You can line out hundreds and hundreds of works with no detrimental effects. This includes all three pages of the introductory Q&A (if you decided not to just rip those pages out) and every word of the intro section to every chapter. The ultra fine Sharpie won't bleed through (if you keep it moving) and won't smear. For those shorter sections of drivel that pollute the rest of the book, I recommend one of those tape type Wite-Out pens (such as the BIC Exact Liner). It takes a little practice and a firm surface, but you'd be amazed how much useless junk Mr. Kelby manages to get onto some pages -- and that you can easily cover up.

This book was apparently rushed to publication. Just in my skimming of the book I encountered "The bottom line is white balance is a creative decision..." in the last step on page 133. In the last step of page 135 we find "The bottom line is white balance is a creative decision..." Maybe this wouldn't stand out in a lecture, but when you read it in a book you take a start and wonder if you mis-turned the pages.

There is no glossary, and no illustrations of the filing conventions unique to Lightroom.

Scott Kelby is without doubt one of the best authors and instructors for all things photographic. Although Adobe Lightroom has been available in Beta version for a couple of years, it was recently released as Version 1.0 ( V 1.1 is reported to be released "soon"). Lightroom is nothing short of being a beautiful digital image workflow management tool. Of all the Adobe programs, it is probably the easiest to learn and most intuitive of their entire line. If you are new to Lightroom, Scott's book is a must inorder to learn and appreciate the power of the program. If you have used the Beta versions, as I have since 3.0, the book is a must.
What sets Scott Kelby's book apart from other Lightroom texts is his teaching method and clear explanations. Unlike, say Martin Evening's Lightroom book, Scott does an actual shoot then walks the reader through the entire management process including involvement of some images in Photoshop CS3.
Along the way, the reader picks up many tricks and tips on features of Lightroom that aren't generally known or explained clearly in other available books. Although the book is designed to be read from cover to cover to truly appreciate what Lightroom is and isn't, the book also is an excellent reference for those who have some comfort level using the program.
I would strongly recommend Scott's book as your first choice if you are using or are considering the purchase of Lightroom ( say, versus Aperture ) and want a clear, concise learning tool in your hands.