Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not my style...
Comment: 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 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: dry humor but still the best guide for photographers
Comment: I did not mind Scott's conversational style of writing; if you can get past his omni-present dry humor, you will find one of the most practical and informative guides available at this time on how to get the most out of this piece of software;
it is a thoughtful, intelligent, and yet very practical guide detailing the things most photographers really need to know about Lightroom for everyday use;
the book is well written and well illustrated showing and describing step by step how to use the various features of Adobe Lightroom; it includes virtually all the essential facts that a digital photographer might need to know to use Lightroom to its best advantage
If you can withstand Kelby's attempts at humor, you will find underneath one of the best conceived guides that will take you from a beginning level user to an intermediate and even, some cases, an advanced user of Adobe Lightroom
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great guide - very informative with common sense information and opinions
Comment: I'm a professional photographer and I've read several sections of the book and plan on reading the entire thing cover to cover. I bought Lightroom before it came out and have used it frequently. In the sections I read Scott has showed me how I can do things faster and easier. He's explained things I didn't understand and confirmed some observations I've already made. I love his comments about how useful he thinks things are. They really help in deciding whether to do something in Lightroom or Photoshop. Very useful book for photographers in learning how to use the tool to make their life much much easier. I also enjoyed Scott's humor and examples. I find cut and dry manuals a pain to get through, I start nodding off. I found myself laughing and smiling as I was reading this book and I can't wait to have time to read the entire thing. I can't say there have been many technical manuals I've felt that way about. Not only is this book chalf full of useful stuff to make my life easier, it's also great fun to read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Like Lightroom Itself - Not A Bad First Effort
Comment: I had enough free time on my hands this weekend to read completely through Scott Kelby's "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book." On the whole, I thought that it was a very good book. It was well written and informative, and while I could have done without some of the weird humor, it was well worth the money and the time. Some things that Kelby presented in the book I knew, of course, but he offered a number of hints and tips that really were helpful and new to me. They will help me make better use of Lightroom.
The book is a bit like Lightroom itself--pretty good for version 1. I did find a few errors. (He boldly states that Lightroom's controls treat RAW and JPEGs exactly the same--that there are absolutely no differences in the tools. Wrong! You get more white balance settings with RAW photos in Lightroom than you do with JPEGs. Also he contradicts himself from chapter-to-chapter on one or two things.) But mostly the book appears to be relatively error free.
I especially enjoyed the sections on work flow for wedding and landscape photography. (These are located towards the end of the book.) I found his recommended work flow not all that different from what I already do. Still, he offered several suggestion that will make my work flow (and hopefully my photographs) even better. (Kelby pushed hard for integrating Photoshop CS3 with Lightroom, so, sigh, I guess I am going to have to order a copy as soon as it gets released.)
Now it's time for me to get some of my portrait shots and a number of recent Yosemite Park shots together and try some of the new things I learned from the book. I can hardly wait!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great guide
Comment: First, I am not a professional photographer, more of an avid fan of programs like Photoshop and Painter. I was hesitating about buying this book - after all, how hard can Lightroom be compared to Photoshop? But I am so glad I did - I have a much better feel for what the program can do and how it can help me improve my photos. Because of this book, I know that my investment in Lightroom will be maximized. Mr. Kelby is easy to understand and takes a step-by-step approach. His section on Lightroom's develop module is an invaluable aid. I visited one of the sites he mentions in the books for downloading presets and, boy, was that a neato site! The only reason I did not give the book 5 stars was, as another reviewer pointed out, Mr. Kelby's ego & flippant attitude is annoying at times. But the book is still a definate recommend.
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