This brings us to the intended audience of the book. In his forward Aaland identifies his audience as "Anyone... be they an amateur photographer or a professional." And here lies one of the problems with the book. There is coverage of a lot of complex photography (and digital photography) concepts. But they are skimmed over, assuming the reader understands them.
In a section on digital sharpening, Aaland explains why the number 25 is the default for the sharpening amount. "Every RAW file is subject to a demosaicing algorithm that includes purposeful blurring. This blurring helps prevent color fringing by slightly blending adjacent pixels." Huh?
For the most part the sections are pretty crisp and engaging although there were times when a little more explanation would have clarified the picture, so to say. The section on sharpening, mentioned above, is outstanding in its balance of "how to" and "how does it work". But several other sections aren't as fortunate in their treatment.
The book also covers impressive ground in terms of exploring and explaining the features of a complex application. There is coverage of virtually everything you'd like to know about Lightroom - which pretty much encompasses all the recent advances in PC-based digital picture processing. Thus the book is also a really good tutorial of the subject as well.
The second half of the book contains a chapter called "Develop Recipes from Iceland" in which Aaland takes one cool treatment of a photograph and breaks it down step by step. This is the closest the book comes to in terms of helping you understand when to use the many slick features provided by Lightroom.
I closed the book having thoroughly enjoyed it, but also wishing the collective experience of the talented team had been harnessed to provide some invaluable tips on digital photography along with its processing in Lightroom.
You can try Adobe Lightroom for 30 days by downloading a copy from this location.
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