The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
by Martin Evening
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Book Summary Information
Author: Martin EveningBrand: Pearson Education
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-10
ISBN: 0321555619
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Adobe Press
Accessories:
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Classroom in a Book
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques
Book Reviews of The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
Book Review: No, not all is great and glory in this book: poor readability, many open questions.
Summary: 3 Stars
It is true that a Lightroom user can learn great deal from this book. Thus I basically second the opinions of the many ah so positive voices about this book, why would I see a reason to put only three stars and to complain?
This book is written by an author being in close touch with Adobe design team. It is branded as Adobe Press and is thus literally the "missing manual," which should have been provided with every copy of Lightroom. Consequently it tends to be "Adobe centric": mentions only Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop. However, since these products have the lion share of the market, this automatically addresses the majority of readers. This is understandable. It is a common practice these days to diminish the competing products by ignoring them. Annoying are forms of "person cult," to which this writer tends. He imagines some members of Adobe stuff as godlike creatures, messiah visionaries, about whom he writes in first person "Thomas (Knoll) likes this, Mark (Hamburg) thinks that". Sit down now: On this team there is really someone with a function of an "evangelist." Oh dear... I hear violins playing. But, this self-admiration would be only a little annoyance.
My problem with this book lies mainly with the typography and the print. Every page uses approx. 4"/10cm for print and the remaining 2"/5cm are either blank, or contain "TIP" or "NOTES". It is whopping 33% of the surface provided on these pages. The book is littered by countless TIP's and NOTES. By their nature, they are breaking up the flow of the presentation into a kind of two prong reading. Furthermore, these notes are printed with a tiny font, to small to my eyes. I have genuine troubles reading them.
Equally troublesome to my eyes are numerous screen dumps, which are fuzzy, too small and have lots of compression artifacts. Probably author was using a lossy format, like JPEG and not a format like GIF or BMP for the screen dumps. Lets take a look at some examples: Can you read anything on page 123? Page 129 is my "top example" for a miserable, unreadable whole page screen dump. What about the figure 4.16 on page 129? Figure 1.13 on page 17 is a joke. It says: "Resource and Lightroom Community help pages," but can you decipher URL's of these pages? Figure A.17 on page 555 looks like 10 black rectangles. Sadly, this list could go on endlessly.
Generally, the entire color print/technology is of a rather moderate quality by present standards. All images look fade and grayish, many are tiny like a post stamp and are difficult to decipher. Do I have a bad print copy?
In some cases author seem to have made obvious mistakes, even such which were widely discussed and criticized in Adobe forums. An example is page 88, on which author claims that pressing "N" while in any module, brings Lightroom into a survey mode. Not true, when in Develop module, "N" enters rather the Heal/Clone tool, which I nickname "Noise Tool" for my own association with "N". Actually this "N" ordeal is one of many inconsistencies in Lightroom's interface, and I would hope for some insight or outright critique: Whereas "R" select the crop/rotate tool in both Library and Develop modules and transfers control into Develop module, "N" has a different function in these both modules. And why "N" for Pete's sake, how does this translate into "Survey"?? How to remember that? Lightroom is unfortunately rich in such issues.
Some passages in this book are mere repeats from the manual, and they do not bring any additional explanation about some features as to the very reason of their existence. Example: page 31, in Develop module use control-D to deselect an image. Why would a user do that, what is the purpose? To see empty screen? This seems to be the only function of this operation. And "control shift D" selects the most selected photo only. "Most selected"? I do not see this function do anything, not a thing. I tried it out in Library module with Grid and Lupe mode, and in Develop module.
I still have so many questions: Why is mouse wheel traversing from image to image in Library module, and yet it is dead in Develop module? Why do I need to click on a slider in order to use mouse wheel to move it left and right? What is the meaning of 3 little white dots on thumbnails in grid mode? What is the meaning of a white thin frame around thumbnails, which vanishes as soon I move mouse pointer over the thumbnails? Default brightness is 50 out of 100. Ok, I can see that. But for raw files default contrast is 25, whereas for JPG files it is zero. Why? What is the rationale? I still do not know. Lightroom human interface is somewhat of a mystery to me.
Controversial as always is to quote on many pages someone elses instructions: Pages 230-233 show basically how to use X-Rite Eye-One screen calibrator, but it is a waste of space. Once one gets the device, its use is obvious and documented. In another book about Lightroom the other author did the same with Pantone's Huey: pages of screendumps. I wonder what is the rationale behind this "fashion" to inject irrelevant data like that?
Looking beyond these issues reader will get indeed a comprehensive "users manual" with insider information, which I would really call invaluable. In that sense getting is book is clearly a must to everybody who would like to get a maximum use out of Lightroom.
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Summary of The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
While Adobe Photoshop has long been their choice for editing digital photographs, many photographers want a more focused tool. That?s where Adobe Photoshop Lightroom comes in. Designed from the ground up with digital photographers in mind, Photoshop Lightroom offers powerful editing features in a streamlined interface that lets photographers import, sort, and organize images. This completely updated and expanded bestseller, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book, was also written with photographers in mind. Author Martin Evening describes features in Photoshop Lightroom 2 in detail from a photographer?s perspective. As an established commercial and fashion photographer, Martin knows first-hand what photographers need for an efficient workflow. He has also been working with Lightroom from the beginning, monitoring the product?s development and providing feedback on the public beta. As a result, Martin knows the software inside and out, from image selection to image editing to image management.The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book contains 624 pages of comprehensive and detailed coverage of all aspects of Lightroom. In this book you?ll learn how to:
? Work efficiently with images shot in the raw or JPEG format
? Import photographs with ease and sort them according to your workflow
? Create and manage a personal image library
? Apply tonal adjustments to multiple images quickly
? Integrate Photoshop Lightroom with Adobe Photoshop
? Export images for print or Web as digital contact sheets or personal
portfolios
The book structure has been organized to match a typical Lightroom workflow. The introductory chapter provides an overview of all the main Lightroom features, showing how Lightroom 2 was used on a studio photo shoot that was specially shot to illustrate the book. The following chapters cover all the essentials, such as importing photos, working with the Library module, and managing the catalog database. The biggest section of the book is devoted to working with the Develop module and provides some unique insights into working with new features such as the localized adjustment tools. There is also a whole chapter devoted to image sharpening and another on integrating Lightroom and Photoshop, where you will learn how to devise the best workflow methods for working between these two programs. This is followed by a chapter on printing and a presentation chapter on the Slideshow and Web modules. Lastly, there are two appendix chapters. One offers a complete overview of the Lightroom 2 preference settings, while the other provides some in-depth explanations and background reading on how the Lightroom program works.
The book is richly illustrated, mostly using the author?s own photographs, and one of the nice features of this book is the way enlarged panel views are used throughout, making it easier for readers to follow the settings used in the various step-by-step examples. There are also lots of tips that will help you take your Lightroom techniques to an advanced level.
If you are looking for the most comprehensive coverage of Lightroom, written by an author who is closely involved with the development of the program, this is the book to get.
About the Author
Martin Evening is a London-based advertising and fashion photographer and noted expert in both photography and digital imaging. In addition to being a bestselling author, Martin is sought after for speaking and lecturing. He also works with the Photoshop and Lightroom engineering teams, consulting on new feature development and alpha and beta testing. He is one of the founding members of PixelGenius, a software design company producing automated production and creative plug-ins for Photoshop.
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