- Serious digital photographers, amateur or pro, who seek the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 choose Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team at Adobe Press. The 10 project-based lessons in this book show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working in Photoshop Lightroom 3.
Photoshop Lightroom 3 delivers a complete workflow solution for the digital photographer. Readers learn how to manage large volumes of digital photographs, work in a non-destructive environment to allow for fearless experimentation, and perform sophisticated image processing tasks to easily produce good-looking pictures and polished presentations for both web and print. The newly expanded version of this software offers accelerated speed with refined, powerful performance. This completely revised Photoshop Lightroom 3 cross-platform edition covers how to work in the new import interface, add audio to your slideshows, shoot tethered, use the new crop overlay tool, customize a watermark, simulate film grain in your images, utilize more options for publishing your work online, and further customize your print packages.
- As for self paced, self educate books, in my opinion this is an A+. The 2 biggest things that set it apart: the publication is written by the Adobe team who wrote the software, they have kept the photographer/artist and their workflow or artistry in mind throughout the book, additionally, and really foremost, the CD-ROM included is essential. It gives you real and great, but not overwhelming photos to work with in every lesson that let you experiment and play. My point is that it is not a rigid lesson plan, it is quite flexible and really nudges you into learning the finer points of the software with real situations. Photography in its very core is creative and the Adobe products have become an industry standard in unleashing one's creativity and this "Classroom in a Book" is a fine example of their commitment to that. I highly recommend it to anyone new to the Lightroom product.
- I've used two tutorial books for Lightroom 3 - this one and the one by Scott Kelby. I find the classroom in a book much easier to use in that it's clearer and far more concise in content and presentation. Kelby's book is full of bad humor that I find rather charming but he bounces all over the place with alternative ways of doing things. He'll explain a process then then jump into several other ways of doing it that I find very confusing. Classroom in a book sticks to the fundamentals and doesn't go into 'oh by the way, here are four other ways of doing this'. My goal is to work on my pictures not become a geek of all things Lightroom. That said there are times when I've referred to Kelby's book when Classroom presents a process that appears cumbersome (rarely happens) to find a different avenue