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Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure is a concept book. The point is to go out on location for two weeks and work with the latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software. The last adventure was to Iceland, this time it takes us to Tasmania. Keep in mind that this is not just the author on the adventure, but rather the author along with more than 20 of his friends and colleagues.
The point is though, to show you how to work with Lightroom 2, and perhaps more importantly, how others work with Lightroom. While most are professional photographers, there are also media personalities, and people tied in with Adobe Lightroom in one way or another. Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure is divided into 12 chapters and 384 pages.
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. When they are Lightroom creates a preview and a link to the full image. When you change something in the image, it does not change the image, but rather records the changes in a database.
Chapter 3, "Using the Library Module," is the next stop in using Lightroom. The Library module is used to edit descriptions, rate and sort your photos, and perform some basic file organization. Chapter 4, "The Develop Module," gets you into the heavy lifting of image processing in Lightroom. Here you will find not only the tried and true functionality of Lightroom, but the new features as well.
Chapter 5, "Develop Great-Looking Photos," continues in the Develop module to show you how to bring out the best in tonal qualities, white balance, and other aspects of your image. Chapter 6, "Color-Tuned Photos," shows how, in the Develop Module, you can adjust colors using Lightroom's color controls, as well as how to do a custom camera profile.
Chapter 7, "Black and White and Special Effects," shows how to create great Black and
White photographs from within Lightroom that will help you produce dramatic skies or brilliant foliage. Chapter 8, "Develop Recipes from Tasmania and 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 Tasmanian, as well as the Icelandic team members did it.
Chapter 9, "Exporting Files," explains how you don't actually save files in the Lightroom environment; rather it saves instructions on the processing for your images. So, if you want to process outside the Lightroom environment, you will need to export the file which applies the changes to the exported file. Chapter 10, "Lightroom Slideshows," will take you through the steps in creating a slide show to present your images. Also addressed are the new features to the Slideshow Module.
Chapter 11, "Power Printing," takes you to the next level of printing images. Many said that the Print module was one of the most powerful features of the first version of Lightroom; well it is even more powerful now. Chapter 12, "Creating a Web Gallery," shows how Lightroom can create all of the components to generate a full-fledged web gallery in either HTML or Flash. You can even upload your ready-to-go gallery directly.
Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure is a concept book, and because of that, it may not be for everyone. If you are a total beginner to photography and to the software needed to process images, this book may not go into enough detail and may not explain enough about the controls that are used within Lightroom. The same may be the case if you need step-by-step hand holding to learn a new piece of software.
Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure is on the other hand a great concept for a book. It allows me as the reader, an entertaining way to learn of new photographers, see how they compare to others who basically are shooting the same sites, all while learning the new features of Lightroom 2. If you own the first edition, should you get this one? If you like great photography you should, even if you do not learn anything more about Lightroom 2, the images themselves are worth it. I highly recommend this book.
