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Managing Your Photographic Workflow with Photoshop Lightroom | 
 enlarge | Authors: Uwe Steinmueller, Juergen Gulbins
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $15.60
You Save: $14.35 (48%)
New (39) Used (10) from $14.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 217287
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: Ill
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 220
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.9 x 7.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 1933952202
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.696
EAN: 9781933952208
ASIN: 1933952202
Publication Date: October 15, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new book. Shipped from our NYC store. Slight Shelf wear to cover. Pages are clean and unmarked.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Since the early days of digital photography, the photographic "workflow" has been anything but a flow. A diverse set of tools for managing, developing, editing, tweaking, and printing images was available to digital photographers, but some of them were never designed to be used for photographic imaging. With Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (and Apple's new competitive program, Aperture), a new generation of software tools has arrived that have been designed from the ground up specifically for digital photographic post-processing. This book guides the new user through Photoshop Lightroom 1.2, which has more power under the hood, and a little more complexity than one would expect from its fairly straightforward user interface. This powerful new program offers photographers the vast majority of the tools they need all in one place, providing new and easier to use tools for managing and processing their images. With easy to follow, step-by-step instructions and full-color illustrations, the authors demonstrate how to use Photoshop Lightroom to build an efficient photographic workflow; from importing and organizing images; through the development and editing phases; all the way to building presentations for the web and in slideshows; and finally, to the ultimate product--the fine art print on paper.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Too brief to be of use, to many diversions into unrelated issues April 11, 2008
I completely disagree with the positive feedbacks regarding this book for a variety of reasons. I took it fascinated by the "covers Version 1.2" note, thus suggesting a specialized "version 1.2" text, a most current book of them all, an advanced insider instruction to Lightroom. The dilemma about Lightroom is that it keeps changing from version to version. Users of this program know about its immaturity and stability issues. "Version 1.2" really sells in such conditions.
Another reason to pick this book was that I like to read the essays from Outback Photo and the FotoEspresso Online Magazine by the same author. But the reality with this particular book is different:
1) Too short to really provide any add-on value to the standard Adobe's manual, and to the many web-zines. 200 pages, minus approx 50 *not* about Lightroom at all, make this book too short to cover any advanced issues in the 5 main modules of Lightroom. This book is virtually just as brief and insufficient, as is the PDF file provided with the Lightroom by Adobe.
2) Tries to please everybody at the risk of not satisfying anybody, to quote the great Donald Knuth from one of his forewords. For example, do you really need to buy a specialized "version 1.2" Lightroom book to learn about what is a Jpeg and what is a RAW file? Yes, its true! This thin booklet spends a few pages to tell you revelations that Jpeg has different levels of compressions, and, yes, you guess it: You should use the lowest compression for highest quality.
3) Digresses into usage of other software and/or hardware. Do you really need whopping 3 full pages with screen shots from a Huey screen calibration software? No, you surely do not need that, a product flyer and a self guiding menu will do it! Besides, Huey is only one possibility. We have also all the "Spiders" and several more. In any case, I would rather be using the manual provided with the device instead of buying an extra book about something else, to look into it for another copy of a hardware gadget manual. I use Huey, its fantastic. And trust me, the menu is self guiding. You ought to press the Next button and proceed with the instructions. These 3 pages 191-193 in this book should be better devoted to Lightroom.
4) Poor print quality. It is really kind of difficult to talk about color, and look at the pale faded looking print by rokynook press. These images look like projected through a light gray filter.
5) Instructions seem to be very MacIntosh oriented, thus not attracting the vast majority of users, who are rather likely to use Windows and see completely different Lightroom menus. Its basic statistics...
I am at peace with author attempt to describe the workflow between Lightroom and Lightzone (8 pages), but this shows even more how few information is about Lightroom 1.2 per se. Do you need more examples of "not to the topic"? Have you seen compact flash cards in a box? Jeez, now you can! Have you seen a card reader? Now you can too.
One puzzling thing about Lightoom are its color curves. I am a seasoned computer scientist with a PhD, I do photograph for 30 years, and yet I fail to make any use of them based on information and instructions provided so far. I would rather be still using RawShooter, but Adobe bought and shut it down to "assimilate" its user base for Lightroom. A look into Adobe's forums shows just how many people are confused, if not lost in Lightroom's baroque interface, shuttered by bugs, malfunctions and poor performance. Such program needs instructions of more experienced photographers, who maybe stand in direct contact with Adobe development team and can explain what the manual and own experiments fail to provide.
Would you believe that the ENTIRE set of development operations, what includes these dreaded tone curves, is covered on mere 32 pages (pages 78 to 111, chapter 4.) Can we really learn anything new but to see another enumeration of menus and sliders in such a brief description?
Example: Split toning, half page 98. ..."split toning can also be (mis)used to reduce the blue cast of your shadows." Excellent, I am excited! Lets see it, lets learn!! Oops, there are no instructions, no lesson of just how to (mis)use the split toning to work on the blue shadows... This was it! Authors said "it can be used" and that was it. This is the KIND OF VALUE PROVIDED BY THIS BOOK. I am sorry, this does not do it.
My recommendation is to take rather Mikkel Aaland's book, what is clearly my favorite among the otherwise hastily thrown books about Lightroom.
 reads like a college text book March 14, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I get tired of Scott Kelby's humor but at least his books are readable, and useful. This book, well, I suppose all the information is there but I kept drifting off from the dull text and even duller PC-inspired graphics (they could at least use Mac screen grabs). I think the front cove pretty much sums up the book.
It looks and reads like your basic college text book. It's going back
 Clarity, factual, informative March 10, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
An excellent book if you want to learn how to work with Photoshop Lightroom.
No frills, no ego's from the writer interfering with the information. Just plain information how the programm works. Clear explanations, following the workflow.
Just what I needed.
Four stars due to the principle that things are not perfect, because it is made by humans.
 A very good reference book for Lightroom February 22, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have only Scott Kelby book to compare with Juergen Gulbins and Uwe Steinmuller book. Both have their advantages. Managing Your Workflow with Photoshop Lightroom is a simple with book with straight forward easy to follow examples. Kelby book has mare examples for advance uses of Lightroom. Workflow makes a good reference book to use for every day use. Kelby book gives good advance step by step procedures for different images.
I will continue to use both. Like most of Kelby books his humor detracts from the information. Maybe he should write a joke book.
No Kidding December 6, 2007
57 out of 58 found this review helpful
"Managing Your Photographic Workflow with Photoshop Lightroom" ought to be on most photographers' short list of books to read about Adobe's newest image processing software.
The book resembles many of the other books on Lightroom in that it leads you through the five parts of Lightroom, including cataloging, adjusting the image, creating a slide show, printing and creating a web site. It shows you what the sliders do and how to manipulate an image to improve it and send it to a useful output. What makes this different is the audience at which it aims.
The book is not aimed at the novice who has to be taken through the process step by step, like Scott Kelby's "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers, (Voices That Matter)" (and for those who might have been put off by Kelby's sophomoric sense of humor, it's deadly serious, without a single joke.) Instead it's aimed at people who have some experience with image processing programs, like Photoshop. When the authors discuss curves they don't tell you the benefits of tonal adjustment or what a curve is. Instead they tell you how Lightroom's targeted adjustment tool, which is something other software doesn't offer, can ease the job of adjusting curves. On the other hand, sometimes the authors are just a little too spare. They don't even mention the range sliders in tonal curves.
When Lightroom offers several different approaches to a task the authors tell you what their preference is, which can be quite useful. On the other hand I sometimes disagreed with them. For example, they advocate applying keywords to images on import. My own experience is that the list of keywords that pops up when you start to type on the import menu is much too sensitive so that it's easy to select a wrong keyword, which one then has to undo. I much prefer dragging my images to the keyword tags. Moreover, the authors didn't mention the importance of parent-child keywording or the ability of Lightroom to export and import keyword lists.
Where they really shine is in revealing a few of the hidden Lightroom capabilities. For example, there is a good discussion of editing Lightroom presets in a text editor. The authors also tell you how to set up presets so that they can be accessed by multiple catalogs.
The authors didn't spend a lot of time talking about the importance of a folder system because they recognize that Lightroom's method of recovering files by keywords, metadata and so forth reduces the importance of filing organization.
This book covers Lightroom versions to 1.2. With regard to the latest features, like the improved sharpening facility, they are discussed here. I just wish authors would devote a little more attention to the values of input sharpening, as advocated by the late Bruce Fraser. This is still uncharted Lightroom territory.
This is a book for the individual who already has some familiarity with Lightroom and is not looking to learn the fundamentals, but instead needs to look at the software's capability to take processing to a higher level. Inevitably that means reviewing some familiar material but it is worth it.
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