The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Scott Kelby is Editor-in-Chief of Photoshop User magazine, President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Executive Editor of the Photoshop Elements Techniques newsletter, and one of the leading seminar instructors in the country today.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (April 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321492161
• ISBN-13: 978-0321492166
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #50,298 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

121 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and/but Breezy, May 16, 2007

By	Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

61 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very instructive and clear book on working with Lightroom, April 5, 2007

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wanna learn Lightroom? Buy it! Don't like Scott's humor? Buy it anyway., May 16, 2007

By	Bob Fields "Bob Fields-Photographer" (San Antonio, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.