The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers
by Scott Kelby
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Book Summary Information
Author: Scott KelbyBrand: Pearson Education
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-16
ISBN: 0321492161
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Accessories:
- The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
- The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters
- The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2
Book Reviews of The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers
Book Review: Not my style...
Summary: 2 Stars
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.
Summary of The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers
This is the eBook version of the printed book.
Free Lightroom 1.1 update available. Simply visit peachpit.com/register to gain instant access.Scott Kelby, author of the world's #1 bestselling Photoshop book, The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, brings his same award-winning, step-by-step, plain-English style, look and feel to The Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers.
This groundbreaking new book doesn't just show you "which sliders do what" (every Lightroom book does that). This book takes you beyond that to reveal the secrets of the new digital photography workflow, and he does it using three simple, yet brilliant techniques that make this just an incredible learning tool:
#1) Throughout the book Scott shares his own personal settings and studio tested techniques he's developed using Lightroom for his own photography workflow since well before Adobe released even the first Beta version. He knows what really works, what doesn't, and he tells you flat out which tools to use, which to avoid, and why.
#2) The entire book is laid out in a real workflow order with everything step-by-step, so you can jump right in using Lightroom like a pro from the very start and sidestep a lot of productivity killing road blocks and time-wasting frustrations that might have tripped you up along the way.
#3) But what really sets this book apart from the rest, are the last two bonus chapters. This is where Scott visually answers his #1 "most-asked" Lightroom question, which is: "Exactly what order am I supposed to do things in, and where does Photoshop fit in?"
Scott teaches this in a manner we've never seen before in any book, by really showing every step of the entire process, from the initial shoot to the final prints. Both chapters start with an on-location photo shoot, including full details on the equipment, camera settings, and even the lighting techniques. You'll see it all as he takes the photos from each shoot (with you following right along using the very same images) all the way through the entire workflow process, to the final output of the 16x20" prints for the client. Plus, because he incorporates Adobe Photoshop seamlessly right into this workflow, you'll also learn some of his latest Photoshop techniques for portrait and landscape photography, which takes this book to a whole new level.
It's the first, and only book to bring the whole process together in such a clear, concise, and visual way. Best all, it's taught in Scott's trademark plain-English style that has won him legions of Photoshop fans around the world, and made him the #1 bestselling author of all computer books across all Computing and Internet categories since 2004.
If you're one of those people who learns best by actually doing the projects yourself; who learns best without all the complicated technical explanations and confusing jargon, and if you really want to start using Lightroom today to unlock the productivity secrets of "The new digital photography workflow,"----there is no faster, more "straight-to-the-point" or more fun way to learn than this groundbreaking new book, and you are absolutely going to love it!
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