Photoshop Lightroom Adventure began as an idea by award-winning photographer and the author of nine books, Mikkel Aaland. Aaland, a pioneer in digital photography since 1980, asked Ansel Adams in an interview what he would pursue if Adams was just starting out. Adams began discussing the ideas of digital photographs. Aaland has pursued this topic ever since.

As a beta tester for Lightroom in 2006 and knowing that he was going to write a book on the subject, Aaland also knew that there would be seven or eight other books to compete against. Instead of just writing a standard how-to book, he talked to the people at O'Reilly about putting together an excursion to a far-off land and inviting professional photographers to go along and see how they all used Lightroom (still in beta) in a real live environment. Soon Adobe became involved and the project became the O'Reilly Photoshop Lightroom Iceland Adventure and the book became Photoshop Lightroom Adventure

Photoshop Lightroom Adventure is divided into 12 chapters and 332 pages along with an introduction and a forward by George Jardine; Pro Photo evangelist for Adobe Systems. Why do I include the forward in a review? Not so much for its interesting viewpoint on the creation of the book, but rather because the author of the forward has put together a series of podcasts featuring the major players in this adventure that can be found on his Blog as well as on the O'Reilly page. The podcasts, tied with the book, really makes the adventure come alive in multi-media format.

Chapter 1, "The Lightroom Workspace Revealed," takes you on a tour around the Lightroom interface and explores all of the features that are Lightroom. Chapter 2, "Importing Images into Lightroom," explores the fact that images are not opened in Lightroom, as in other application, rather they are imported. You will learn why this is so and why it makes Lightroom so effective at what it does.

Chapter 3, "Using the Library Module," will show you the how and why of using the Library module to edit, rate, sort and perform some basic image processing. Chapter 4, "The Develop Module," gets you into the meat and potatoes of image processing in Lightroom. Here you will find the sophisticated and easy to use tone, color, cropping, and other basic retouching tools.

Chapter 5, "Develop Great-Looking Photos," continues in the Develop module to introduce you to the more advanced tool that will have you evaluating your images to make sure that they are coming out their best. Chapter 6, "Color-Tuned Photos," shows how, in the Develop Module, you can adjust colors with ease using the sliders to help make global corrections.

Chapter 7, "Black and White and Special Effects," shows how to create great Black and White photographs from within Lightroom as well as how to simulate the rough equivalent of colored filters for additional effects. Chapter 8, "Develop Recipes from Iceland," finishes up the Develop module by showing how to apply custom look and feel techniques to your images and showing how several of the Iceland team members did it.