With the release of Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom in the spring of 2007, there are a lot of people who are trying to get a handle on learning Lightroom. Lightroom acts as a library and workbench to store, catalog, modify, and present your photographs. It is a wonderful product and one that, to me at least, is a must have for photographic work. Not just for professionals, but for anyone who shoots a lot of pictures, and is in need of managing them.

Your instructor for Photoshop Lightroom Essential Training is Chris Orwig, a faculty member of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara. He has an infectious teaching method that works well to get the point across. The training is divided into 18 lessons and runs five and a half hours.

Lesson 1, "Getting Started" starts off by explaining what Lightroom is, and how it fits in to your world. It also explains the Photographic workflow puzzle. Lesson 2, "Setting the Stage" gets you into Lightroom by touring you around the interface, explaining hardware options, showing you what the essential preferences are, and ways to customize the interface.

Lesson 3, "Importing Images" helps you get your images into Lightroom in a number of ways; using drag and drop, importing from a folder, and getting them from a memory card. Lesson 4, "Library Module Overview" gives you an overview of the Library module by showing you the navigator, grid view options, loupe view options, as well as how to work with zoom, and other tools.

Lesson 5, "Library Module Keywords" will show you everything you wanted to know about using Keywords in Lightroom. Lesson 6, "Library Module Organization" does the same thing with rating, and building collections within the library. Lesson 7, "Library Module Metadata" again does the same thing, this time with the metadata that you can embed with your image in the database.

Lesson 8, "Library Module Processing" examines how to do some quick developing from within the Library module. This is real handy if you need to get some quick proofs out without a lot of processing time. Lesson 9, "Library Module Exporting and Editing" finishes up the Library Module by showing you how to export images, or editing them in Photoshop.

Lesson 10, "Develop Module Overview" begins work in the Develop Module by showing you around what this module has to offer. You will see features like shortcuts, preset, rating, comparing, and the histogram. Lesson 11, "Develop Module – Color and Tone" gets you started with the basic adjustments. Things like white balance, exposure, color, tone, HSL, split toning, and Black-and-White conversion.

Lesson 12, "Develop Module Details" continues with the Develop Module by showing you how to work with camera calibration, lens correction, cropping, Spot Healing, Red-eye removal, and how to undo your work. Lesson 13, "Develop Module Creativity" finishes up the Develop Module by showing you how to use some additional techniques to your Lightroom toolbox with fill light, color and tone, graphic black-and-white, and presets.