Review of “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: Streamlining your digital photography process”

Without a decent workflow you’ll spend all your time tweaking photos and less time making them.

This is not where you, nor I, want to be.

Sitting in front of the computer fiddling with sliders is not my idea of fun. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that post-processing is an important part of the “imaging workflow”; it just isn’t my favorite part. In an effort to streamline my personal workflow before I was inundated with images from UMX 2009 I decided to purchase Nathaniel’s book.

Full disclaimer – I know Nathaniel Coalson personally. I use his company Coalson Editions for all my paper profiling needs and he’s done some large prints for me in the past. This hasn’t influenced my review of his book; I just thought you should know.

I was honestly a little leery of purchasing another Lightroom 2 book. I had a few kicking around the house already and I doubted there was anything left to learn that I couldn’t find for free online.

I was wrong.

If you’re in the market for a single Lightroom 2 book – buy this one. For those of you who have followed Lightroom from the beginning there are great tips and shortcuts to be found. For those of you who are new to the Lightroom work flow this is the book for you. Lightroom 2: Streamlining your Digital Photography Process
will help unlock all of Lightroom’s potential.

Ok, I know that sounded a bit like a commercial. It isn’t. I was just pleasantly surprised to be learning new tips and shortcuts that I will use and that will save me time.

So what sets this book apart from the others?

It’s simple really – Mr. Coalson sticks to one thing and one thing only; moving images through the Lightroom pipeline. He’s not trying to make you a better photographer, he just wants you to take care of your images, manage them and then reach your end goals. He wants you to be a more organized photographer.

The book starts off by laying down some basics of digital imaging. It serves as a nice refresher for those of us who have been shooting digital for some time. If you’ve just started with digital imaging or you want to take your post-processing to the next level this section is certainly worth a read.

Nathaniel presents his workflow in chapter 2. This workflow forms the basis for the rest of the book with each step getting its own chapter: Capture – Import – Organize – Process – Export – Present.

Each chapter begins with a paragraph or two summarizing what you’re about to cover and then the in depth information begins. Nathaniel’s ideas are presented clearly with plenty of examples helping to guide you through the many options that exist in Lightroom. Within each chapter you’ll find icons that highlight Shortcuts, Tips, Warnings and Reminders. I’ve always liked the call-out style of reference book; the reminders and warnings are especially helpful.

Everyone has their own style for working within Lightroom, or any post-processing program for that matter, and it can be tough to get people to change their ways. I’ve been working in Lightroom since Adobe released it and thought I had a pretty good method for processing my images. I appreciated Nathaniel’s approach to the Develop module – coaching that adjustments should be done in a certain order to prevent making one adjustment that counteracts another – but preferred my own way.

I wish I had been a little more open minded. I recently spent 45 minutes “fixing” an image with local adjustments only to see it all disappear when I played with the tone curve. The tone curve was more important overall than the adjustments I had done so I ended up backtracking to fix the mess I created. Nat – 1: Alex – 0.

Are there things I don’t like about Lightroom 2: Streamlining your Digital Photography Process
?

Sure there are – it wouldn’t be much of a review if it was all praise now would it?

There are some drawbacks when using icons to indicate important tips, shortcuts, etc. Some pages are nothing but icons – green arrows showing various Shortcuts (provided for both Mac and Windows) or light bulbs showing Tips.

In some examples that use before and after pictures it can be difficult to see the change in the image that Nathaniel is demonstrating. I’ve found this to be fairly typical in all instructional books so it’s hard to fault him too much for this.

Lastly the Slideshow and Print portions of the Present chapter felt tacked on to me. I might be a poor judge for this as I have yet to use the Slideshow module and round-trip to Photoshop to do most of my printing at home. For those unfamiliar with these modules there might be some good information to be found but I felt it wasn’t on par with the rest of the book.

The Bottom Line

In the long run the benifits of Lightroom 2: Streamlining your Digital Photography Process
far, far outweigh any nitpicking I might do. Mr. Coalson managed to force some new knowledge into my already packed head. I’ve changed the way I do some of my Lightroom workflow and that’s no small achievement.

If you’re in the market for a Lightroom 2 manual Nathaniel Coalson’s book is a winner hands down.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Reviews and tagged with book review, lightroom 2, planning, post processing, review, workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.