Most Helpful Customer Reviews
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Filling the Gap, April 27, 2007
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide (Tim Grey Guides) (Paperback)
Lightroom is here and the blizzard of Lightroom books is upon us.
Lightroom is Adobe's new software for digital photographers which offers a built-from-the ground-up approach to enable photographers to turn their images into prints, slide shows or web graphics. While the program itself is not without flaws, the interface is much more intuitive then Photoshop, and allows somewhat faster handling of files.
Grey's book takes the reader through all of the steps a photographer would use from importing his or her pictures from a camera into a computer to printing the pictures or creating a website using Lightroom.
He describes what each of the buttons and functions provided by the software does, in the order that the average photographer would use them. His writing is concise and what he describes is for the most part clear. A photographer who picks up this book and follows it while processing pictures will have little trouble creating satisfactory output. The book certainly makes using the software more clear than the rather thin instruction manual that comes with Lightroom.
On the other hand, nothing that Grey tells you will help you create a great photograph. The book is aimed purely at the technique that it is necessary to use to create output, and little about the art. One of the great things about image processing software is that it can allow you to create not just images but art; to convert zeros and ones into the photographer's vision. You won't find that here, but maybe that's asking too much of this work.
I can complain about some of the shortfalls of the description of technique. For example, one of the great advantages of Lightroom is that it is a powerful asset management tool (although not as good as some standalone products). It has a well designed scheme for creating keywords that allows for easy recovery of images that I hope Adobe will eventually incorporate into the Bridge portion of Photoshop. It includes so-called parent-child relationships. But this powerful tool is hardly described. Similarly, Grey points out that the software allows for the creation of either HTML or Flash web galleries. I would have liked to know the advantages and disadvantages of each.
The Lightroom interface uses a combination of light grey and dark grey on many of its menus. That works on a monitor but the printed screen captures of the interface are often almost impossible to distinguish. While I commend the publisher for getting this book to the public so quickly, in the rush several typos seem to have slipped in.
Many photographers have been hungry for more information on the use of Lightroom. Grey's book is one of the first detailed explanations. It's useful, but hopefully even better volumes will follow.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Kind of basic, should have been in the box, May 1, 2007
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide (Tim Grey Guides) (Paperback)
This rather disappointing 200-page book reads like the manuals of old that used to come in the box. The author methodically describes every step of using Lightroom, going through every preference menu, viewing option, menu bar and so forth. While it's nice to get a comprehensive guide to the program's various nooks and crannies, there's very little real advice about using Lightroom to best effect.
A great example is the export feature. Because Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, as you make adjustments to your photo it's just storing a list of changes to the actual file in its database. Only when you export a picture are the changes combined with the original pixels to create a new file. There are several possible format choices, each with a handful of critical settings, in Lightroom's export feature. This book lists them all with a few half-sentence, off-the-cuff recommendations ("I suggest using JPEG for basic image review and TIFF when the images will need to be Printed"). There's virtually no discussion of the many other settings or the implications of choosing one or another.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent intro to using Lightroom, May 28, 2007
This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide (Tim Grey Guides) (Paperback)
Most folks who've been around digital imaging for any length of time know Tim Grey. An engaging, energy-filled, computer whiz who used to teach for George Lepp at the Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging and then got hired by Microsoft to head their professional photo expansion effort, Tim has a rare talent for clear, insightful writing about complex subjects. He's parlayed that skill into a whole series of books, of which this is one of his latest, and it carries on the tradition of being very thorough and easy to read and understand.
The topic of this book is one of a new breed of image editing tools that takes a fundamentally different approach to working with digital photo files from the King Kong of the industry, Adobe Photoshop. While Photoshop still is the industry leader by far, it has several serious drawbacks, including expense, complexity, and a very steep learning curve.
Enter Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The concept for this new tool is to provide a more user friendly, efficient end-to-end workflow within one program that includes editing, optimizing, cataloguing, and output, allowing the photographer to spend less time in front of the computer and more time actually taking pictures. There are competing programs from other companies with a similar goal - Apple's Aperture (strictly for Macs), and LightZone from Light Crafts (for both platforms), but only Lightroom has near-seamless cross compatibility with Adobe's other creative products.
Lightroom has strong promise. One of its leading attributes is that it works nondestructively. When you make editing changes to images you are not altering actual pixel values within the image file but only adding a set of instructions for changes you wish to make and shows those effects on the fly. This makes files much smaller than when you create multiple variations in Photoshop, many times with many layers resulting in huge files. Many of its tools are both clever and intuitive as well, speeding the way to a polished product in less time.
There are some limitations however. While image adjustments are well mechanized, there is no provision in this version of the program to apply them selectively to parts of the image. For this type of work the file must be exported to another editing program. Also, there is no means for working on more than one monitor. A favorite approach for many who use Photoshop is to use two displays with the image on one and the palettes for various adjustments on the other; can't do that at this point with Lightroom.
Will Lightroom catch on? Very likely, especially for those photographers who yearn for a tool that gives good, quick results that increase their productivity. And when the global adjustments available within Lightroom aren't enough, it's easy to export to another tool for that kind of work. In addition, the simple digital asset management capabilities may be enough for someone whose file storage and cataloguing needs aren't too great. Furthermore, this is version 1.0, and there is every expectation that the program will grow and improve as the new conceptual paradigm gains acceptance, particularly with serious competition from at least two other quadrants.
So, how valuable is Tim Grey's take on the subject? About as good as it gets, I'd say. Tim has a rare talent for clarity of expression that leaves little doubt about what's being described. Throughout his books he makes suggestions about settings and states his personal preferences so someone new to the program has a place to start, which is far preferable, in my view, to just describing all the choices and leaving one hanging without a clue where to begin. If you purchase Lightroom, or are even just considering doing so, you should also acquire this book. It will save hours and hours of figuring it all out on your own and give you a running start toward becoming an expert with one of the best new editing programs.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
