Tuesday , March 19 2024
Do you want to Learn Lightroom 3?

Video Training Review: Learn By Video – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 With Tim Grey and Mikkel Aaland

Learn By Video – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is a complete training program that contains over 10 hours of 1280×720 HD instruction. It is Adobe approved and is designed to teach you the fundamentals of Lightroom 3, as well as the principles of digital image processing.

The trainers are Tim Grey – author of over a dozen books including Take Your Best Shot, publisher of Digital Darkroom Quarterly, and a member of the Photoshop World dream team of instructors, and Mikkel Aaland – digital photographic pioneer, author of ten books including Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure and the highly influential The Sword of Heaven: A Five Contient Odyssey To Save The World.

Along with the video there is a 99 page booklet that contains additional information, including an extensive piece called the “Photographers Eye” by Michael Jordan that looks different types of photography, a section on what is new with Lightroom 3, a breakdown of Lightroom preferences, and a list of shortcuts for working with Lightroom.

Chapter 1, “Introduction,” begins by showing you what Lightroom is, how it works, and why it is different than Adobe Photoshop. You will take a tour through the workspace as well as seeing what is new to this version of Lightroom. You will also see how to set up preferences and how to setup an identity plate.

Chapter 2, “Importing Your Photos,” takes you through all the different abilities of getting your images from your camera and into Lightroom. This includes getting them from a CF card, importing from a hard drive, and shooting tethered. You will also see where to store your photos, various file handling options, as well as learning about the Adobe DNG file format.

Chapter 3, “Working with the Library Module,” examines the Library module in general including the various views that are available like the Grid View, Loupe View, Compare View, and Survey View. You will also learn about the use of multiple monitors as well as some basic video support.

Chapter 4, “Organizing the Library Module,” now gets into more detail about this module by covering specific topics like working with collections, rating, tagging, the use of keywords, and working with Metadata. You will see how to work with catalogs as well as how to synchronize them and back them up.

Chapter 5, “Editing Essentials,” takes you into the develop module where you will learn about working with white balance, the basic exposure controls, how to create virtual copies, and applying changes to other photos. You will also see how to save your favorite settings, work with the quick develop panel, and see how to use the Camera Calibration Pane.

Chapter 6, “Retouching and Correction: Local Adjustments,” next gets into more specific corrections such as dodge and burn, working with the adjustment brush, noise reduction, and sharpening. You will also see how to crop and straighten photos, remove red-eye, remove dust, and techniques to touch up portraits and fine tune landscapes.

Chapter 7, “From Color to Black & White,” examines what it takes to convert a color image into a black & white one. You will see how to add a color tint, add infrared effects to a black & white image, as well as how to work with split toning effects.

Chapter 8, “Lightroom and Photoshop,” takes you through a round trip workflow for working with Photoshop. You will also see how to take a series of photos and stitch them into one complete panorama, as well as how to take a series of shots and merge them into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image that captures a wider range of light values

Chapter 9, “Sharing,” walks you through the Slideshow, Print, and Web modules. Here you will see how to create a slideshow along with the presentation options. You will see how to print your images including creating a standard picture package as well as how to create custom ones. Finally, you will see how to create Web photo galleries including creating watermarks and identity plates.

As I said before, in the booklet there is an extensive piece by Michael Jordan called “The Photographers Eye.” Covering over 45 pages, this section takes a look at the quality of an image and how its success is governed by the intent of the image. In this section he goes over many different types of photography including landscape, nature, travel, architecture, portraits, and sports photography and describes what constitutes a good photo in each of the different disciplines.

The training itself is very in depth and covers a lot of ground in the 10 hours of running time. The two authors work well in tandem covering their topics in an easy to follow, easy to understand way. The video is crisp and clear as is the audio output making everything very easy to comprehend.

If you find that you are on the go, you can you have the ability to transfer your selected videos to your iPhone, iPad, iPod, or other mobile device so you always have it with you. The lesson files are included on the disk as well. If you want to get up to speed with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and want to learn it well, then I can highly recommend Learn By Video – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.

 

About T. Michael Testi

Photographer, writer, software engineer, educator, and maker of fine images.

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