Photoshop Lightroom Adventure: Mastering Adobe's...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 350 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; Ill edition July 25, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 059610099X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596100995
• Book Dimensions: 9.9 x 8 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 2.2 pounds

Book Description
This gorgeously illustrated and eminently practical book is the first to offer a complete tour of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.2, the integrated digital photography workflow application that allows serious photographers to import, select, develop and showcase large volumes of digital images. Augmented by photographs and case studies from a demanding road test in Iceland, award-winning photographer Mikkel Aaland explains how Lightroom 1.2 can improve the way you work.

After watching -- and often helping -- Adobe create Lightroom entirely from the ground up, Aaland (author of Photoshop CS2 RAW) was ready to see how well it would do in the field. He organized a group of 12 top-notch photographers for a trek to "Nature's Light Room", the pristine Icelandic landscape where each summer day is bathed in 22 hours of horizontal light -- and where the only studio was Lightroom on a laptop. In Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, Aaland uses hands-on knowledge from the trip to demonstrate how Lightroom 1.2 can help you create the best possible image under any conditions.

This unique tutorial walks you step-by-step through Lightroom's:

• Library module for uploading, sorting, tagging, ranking and adding keywords to your images
• Develop module with Adobe Camera RAW for complete non-destructive color and tonal adjustments
• Slideshow module, where you select and size images, and export the show to HTML, Flash, or PDF formats
• Print module, which includes several templates for printing contact sheets or full images
• Web module, where you can create Flash or HTML web galleries

With many gorgeous examples shot in the soft natural light of Iceland, this book lets you see the results for yourself. Mikkel Aaland's trademark ability to teach complicated topics on digital imaging with straightforward, easy-to-follow text makes this book a valuable learning tool for anyone serious about digital photography. This is not an update of previous Lightroom versions, but the first book that's completely up-to-date for Lightroom 1.2.

About The Author
Mikkel Aaland is an award-winning photographer and and the author of nine books, including Photoshop CS2 RAW (O'Reilly 2006), Shooting Digital (2nd edition, Sybex, 2006), Photoshop Elements 4 Solutions (4th edition Sybex/Wiley, 2006), Photoshop for the Web, 2nd edition (O'Reilly, 1999), Still Images in Multimedia (Hayden, 1996), and Digital Photography (Random House, 1992), Since 2001 Aaland has been a regular guest on G4's Call For Help TV Program with Leo Laporte. In 2003 he was a guest columnist for newsweek.com. In 2004, Shooting Digital was named the best "Digital Photography" book of the year by the Designer's Bookshelf.

Aaland's documentary photographs have been exhibited in major institutions around the world, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the former Lenin Museum in Prague. In 1981 he received the National Art Directors award for photography. He has contributed both text and/or photography to Wired, Outside, Digital Creativity, American Photo, The Washington Post, and Newsweek, as well as several European publications.

Aaland has been a pioneer in digital photography, an interest that dates back to a 1980 interview he conducted with Ansel Adams. When Aaland asked Adams what he would be pursuing if he were just starting out, Adams discussed at length his fascination with digital photographs of the planets. Aaland has pursued this new technology since its infancy. During the 1980s he reported on digital photography as west coast editor of the Swedish FOTO magazine, and wrote a column on the subject for American Photographer magazine. Aaland is one of the few orginal Adobe Lightroom's alpha and beta user, and he served as an unpaid advisor on the project for over a year.

Reader Reviews
As Mikkel Aaland wrote such splendid guides to Adobe's Photoshop and Elements, I looked forward with high expectations to his Lightroom (LR) manual - appreciating the deliberate delay in publication so as to update the text to LR's 1.1 version. The illustrations, some double-paged, are stunning images of colorful summer-time Iceland, photographed by a dozen pro's field-testing LR prior to release. Equally well-done are the technical aspects for using the numerous sliders and menus of Lightroom's Develop and Print modules; as the title intimates, the illustrations serve as the engine for color mangement instructions. If only the book's masthead had represented the actual content ("... Color Management with Lightroom"), rather than as a master guide to a versatile tool, I would have top-rated it. Instead, the title proves misleading, for this book comes not even close to being a comprehensive user guide to Lightroom. Regrettably, it appears that Mr Aaland over-reached, or was pressed for time, adding the first three chapters on Workspace, Importing and the critically vital Library module as seeming afterthoughts -- and not very good ones at that. I found the first two chapters to be rather superficial, but became aghast by page 45 (Library Module) where you are told to hold down the Alt/Option key when clicking on the LR icon/alias to bring up the 'Select Catalog' dialog box - as described (for a PC at least) you'll merely get the desktop icon's Properties box - no savior there. The proper command (for PC) is to hold down the Ctrl-key while clicking the LR desktop icon. That may sound trivial - but just wait till you get the dreaded "Catalog Corrupted" or "Can't find Catalog" death message - LR won't even start. What a panic ... until you can locate either the current or a backup catalog database to retrieve your thousands of images. Nearly as bad is the author's recommendation to enable the 'Write XMP to image file' box during Import, an infamous bug (see User Forum) that can bring even a quad-core gorilla to its knees, and is best left disabled, updating XMP files manually only when needed for Export. These no-no's apart, the Library module is treated more like a casual aside than the critically important find engine it ought to be. Here's where you import images, then name, rate, flag and tag them. One target for LR (great color management aside) is for professionals to find the pictures they want from among literally tens of thousands. To find those needles in a haystack, you have to spend considerable time on planning, and a lot of effort, on suitably tagging each image so that you may retrieve it readily at a later date. LR offers numerous ways, including the date of a shoot, but for most users keyword tags and suitably-named folders are vital to retrieve those photos of Jill's wedding, or that little chapel in Italy. The author treats keywords in just one column of half-page text without any hints at organization as by (for instance) WHAT, WHERE, WHO, WHEN at the very least. One reason must be his own apparent lack of structure: using a three-part tag like 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom' (as he does), then searching on the term "Adobe Lightroom" is bound to miss his photos labeled 'Adventure' or 'Iceland'. Having tightly organized one-word tags is essential to avoid misspellings, or variations on a tag - 'church', for example, might miss 'temple' or 'mosque'. The Find pane, likewise, gets brushed off - leaving the reader pretty much at the mercy of the 'Help' section. Adobe's downloadable 'User Manual' for the 1.1 version, by the way, is a marvel of clarity. As mentioned, the Develop module is where the Aaland of yore shines, and would make a colorful hands-on companion to Martin Evening's "The Lightroom Book" [better yet with the latter's free ver 1.1 supplement]. It's the tedious but oh-so-critical Library module that gets short shrift - a bit like the tail wagging the dog. All told, this is a sumptuous coffeetable travelogue, but a disappointing lightweight in terms of mastering Lightroom's complexities. Let's hope that the version 1.2 (or 2.0) edition brings back 'the old Mikkel'. Comment | | (Report this)