People always ask me, "where do you find the time to do all that you do?" The truth of the matter is that there are only so many hours in the day. While I do love technology, have a full-time job and a family, there really isn’t enough time to do all the things that I want to do. So that means that I do have to give some things up. One of the things that I almost never have time to do is to read books. I write them, but rarely have time (make that, never have time ) to read any. So when I do read a book, it better be good and I better learn something.
That leads me to my buddy Scott Kelby’s latest Lightroom 2 book for Digital Photographers. While I do work for Adobe and use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 almost daily, that doesn’t mean that I know (or remember) everything there is to know about it. I got a chance to spend some time with Scott’s book this past weekend. Scott’s new book is a complete rewrite of his first book. Lightroom has changed in so many ways and Scott wanted to make this edition even better than the first, so he pretty much started from scratch.
The step-by-step instructions are clear and to the point. The photography is great too. However, the one thing that really stands out for me in this book is that he ends each chapter with a page or two of "Quick Tips." Like I said, I already know how to use Lightroom. I use it all the time. So these tips are the little things that are often missed when you’re self-taught.
For example, here’s a Grayscale Conversion Tip from page 288:
If you click the word "Grayscale" in the HSL/Color/Grayscale panel, it converts your photo to grayscale, and it’s kind of a flat-looking conversion, but the idea is that you’ll use the color sliders to move when the photo is now in black and white? Try this: once you’ve done your conversion and it’s time to tweak those color sliders, press Shift-Y to enter the Before & After split-screen view (if it shows a side-by-side view instead, just press Shift-Y again). Now you can see the color image on the left side of the screen and the black and white (grayscale) on the right, which makes it much easier to see which color does what.
It’s little tips like this that I love and this book is full of them.
The Bottom Line
If you’re using Lightroom 2 and you want to learn more about it, this is your book. Amazon has it for $29.69.
