Monday , March 18 2024
A manual for Lightroom users shows how to also get the most out of Photoshop.

Book Review: ‘Photoshop For Lightroom Users’ by Scott Kelby

While Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a great product for photographers, especially for cataloging and editing your photos, there are still a lot of things that it cannot accomplish. This is especially true for high end retouching and compositing. For these situations you need to bring out the big guns in Adobe Photoshop.

In Photoshop for Lightroom Users , author Scott Kelby walks you through everything that you need to know to make that next step in editing in Photoshop. You will learn those fundamental techniques that you need to get you going without overwhelming you. Photoshop For Lightroom Users is 169 pages in length and is contained in eight chapters.

Phoshop for Lightroom UsersChapter One, “Essential Techniques,” begins by going over the basics. You will start off with the Photoshop Toolbox. Some of these will be familiar since they also exist in Lightroom as well. Next you will learn how to navigate the panel system. From there you will learn how you can modify areas in your image using the selection tools, how to work with the Clone and Patch tools, how to work with layers, how to resize, rotate, and transform you image and how to use Camera Raw as a filter.

Chapter Two, “Jump,” is all about getting your images into and out of Photoshop. You will first look at how to set everything up to go into Photoshop where you will work on them. Here every step is detailed. Next you will see how send them into Photoshop and then return them back into Lightroom when you are finished with them.

Chapter Three, “Get Smart,” takes a look at Panoramas, HDR, and Smart Objects. This chapter begins with keeping your raw image fully editable by using Smart Objects; this is the same for the Develop Module in Lightroom or if using Adobe Camera Raw. Then you examine stitching panoramas in Photoshop. Finally you will see how you can use Photoshop to create High Dynamic Range (HDR) images.

Chapter Four, “Re-Touch,” starts off with looking at some of the same retouching that you can accomplish in Lightroom such as working with eyes, and skin, but then moves on to more complex tasks such as realigning eyes, trimming eyebrows, removing veins from the eyes, and softening skin while retaining texture. Finally you will use Liquify filter to work with teeth, fix folds in clothes, reduce nose size, smooth body parts, and make eyes larger.

Chapter Five, “Composite,” describes how composite work has become more popular over the last few years because of  the new tools that come with Photoshop. Here you will see how to use the Quick Selection tool to cut out a person from their background and put them on to another. You will also see how to blend two or more images, put an image inside another image, remove large distracting objects, and adding a logo or illustration to a photo.

Chapter Six, “Side Effects,” describes how side effects can be used to create more dramatic looks to your photos. You start off here by creating a high contrast portrait look.  You will see how to make your image look like an oil painting, get a tilt-shift look to your photo, create a mirror look, swap out a sky, and create a wedding book effect.

Chapter Seven, “Sharpen,” is another feature available in Lightroom, but you can see the sharpening in Photoshop so much bette,r and there are many more options for sharpening. The chapter looks at the sharpening filters, how to fix wide angle distortion, fixing group shots, fixing reflections in eyeglasses, as well as removing stuff using content-aware fill.

Chapter Eight, “Don’t Move,” finishes off with 12 things that you would think you need Photoshop for, but you don’t. These include adding selective color effects, creating an iris blur effect, running Photoshop plug-ins, reducing noise, adding a photo filter adjustment layer, and more.

Photoshop For Lightroom Users is — as are all of Scott Kelby’s books — very well written and easy to understand. It provides step-by-step instructions to help you along the way. Many of the key images are available for download so that you can work along. You will want to read the introduction as well since there is a lot of information that you may miss out on if you don’t.

To me, Photoshop For Lightroom Users really works because it is targeted and it hones in on its objective to give Lightroom users the ability to move to using Photoshop without stressing them out over all of the other things that Photoshop brings to the table. If you are a Lightroom user and want to take advantage of the power of Photoshop, if you already use Photoshop but want to get a better grasp on the fundamental tools for editing photos, then I very highly recommend Photoshop for Lightroom Users

About T. Michael Testi

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

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