Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Product Description
“I’ve worked my entire adult life in digital imaging, from managing high-volume production departments to running my own photography and printing businesses. And for many years, I’ve been teaching photographers how to be self-sufficient when it comes to working with their digital images.

Having used all major image editing software released over the past twenty years, I now choose to use Lightroom because it allows me to work quickly, helps me deal with large numbers of images and lets me get back to enjoying the creative aspects of photography.

From my experience, I know how hard it can be to learn new ways of doing things–especially computer stuff. Unfortunately for a lot of photographers, struggling with digital processing can take the fun out of photography. Trying to figure out the intricacies of file formats, resolution, color management, etc., and even simply where to put all the files can be daunting tasks. Worse yet, sometimes it’s hard just to know the right steps to get the best quality from a single photo!

It’s my mission to ease your pain; to show you that you really can be in control of your entire imaging process, and help you develop a personalized workflow that fits your style and needs. My students frequently tell me how liberating this is: to comfortably handle all the files coming off the camera and residing on hard disks, to work methodically through a known sequence of steps and to produce finished pictures that you’re proud to show other people. This is at the heart of the photographer’s experience, and I want you to know this sense of confidence and capability.

I’ve taught large groups and individual photographers alike. Over the years I’ve learned where people get stuck. I understand the pitfalls new users face when first starting to use Lightroom as well as the concerns of more experienced users looking for ways to tweak their workflow for better performance. I want to help you overcome these challenges.

My goal for this book is to teach you to effectively use Lightroom 3 as quickly and easily as possible. My writing has been heavily influenced by my experiences working with clients and students, and I’ve approached the content of this book as I would tutor someone in a one-on-one training session. The order in which concepts are presented and the emphasis I give to certain aspects of the workflow are unique among books of its kind.

We’ll start by reviewing some important, basic principles, such as working with Lightroom catalogs, the Lightroom workflow, color management, and an introduction to Lightroom 3’s updated tools and screen interface. From there, we jump right in to importing images into Lightroom. This is followed by a step-by-step editing tutorial that will make your work much easier. Then we move on to in-depth explanations of how to perfect each photo for tone, color, contrast, sharpness and much more. After a detailed look at exporting images out of Lightroom, the next three chapters deal with presenting your work to others with prints, Web sites and slideshows. Finally, we’ll wrap up with an in-depth look at advanced techniques for integrating Lightroom with other software.

The material presented in this book is appropriate for digital photographers working in all disciplines, at all skill levels. The information and tutorials are applicable to every kind of photography: from weddings and portraits to fine art landscape work, everyone can learn to streamline their digital photography process using Lightroom 3.”

Nat Coalson
Conifer, CO
2010

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Tags: production departments, creative aspects, Digital, Process, Photography, Lightroom, Streamlining, printing businesses, image editing software

2 Comments

July 15th, 2010 - by D. McCranie

I met Nat Coalson at the Moab Photo symposium where he gave a very impressive talk about Lightroom. I also attended his Lightroom workshop both of which, of course covered lightroom 2. After hearing his talks I really looked forward to his Lightroom 3 book. I have gotten through the first half of the book and as a lightroom user from the get go I have been amazed at what I didn’t know! Nat has many specific recommendations for making your workflow more efficient that have been very helpful to me.

Nat presents things in a logical and easy to follow manner and suggests that the book be read and or referenced while you are at the computer working with Ligtroom 3. You can either read it from front to back or use the extensive index to look up specific problem areas. I am doing both.

My only complaint is that some of the screen shots seem small.

For me the book is a very valuable tool and I recommend it highly.
Rating: 4 / 5
Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

July 15th, 2010 - by Rick Grant

I have been using Adobe Lightroom for a little over a year and while I am deeply impressed with it (I recommend it highly) I always felt that I simply didn’t have a clue about how to use it properly.

Adobe has tonnes of excellent on-line help material for Lightroom including hours of video tutorials. The company runs a helpful forum for users and those users themselves have set up a vast array of websites and blogs dealing with the program. Full marks to all of them and thumbs up to Adobe for creating the best imaging program I have ever used.

But I could never get a handle on how I should be approaching the “workflow” or method of working with my photos in Lightroom.

For me Lightroom is not just some place to play around with pictures; it’s more like a giant mansion filled with rooms crammed with mysterious machines, secret passages, and stuff that looks a bit like magic. I was always more than half lost in the Lightroom mansion whenever I processed photographs.

Until Nat Coalson’s book that is.

I am about a third of the way through it and if I stopped reading it now I would still consider what I have learned as worth the price of the book. Indeed, as the headline to this review says, I would have been happy to have paid twice as much for just the little I’ve got out of it already.

Mr Coalson writes the way I think he must deliver his training programs. There is a strong sense of one-on-one teaching in his writing and it pays off in ways that everything else I’ve read concerning Lightroom failed at.

One of the problems with Lightroom, for me, has always been the bewildering series of options, features and menu selections. I never really knew what half of them did and of the other half I hadn’t a clue about which choices to make. Those choices are all explained nicely in the book, not in the sense of what they do, but what they can mean for your work, for your images. And if you still aren’t clear on what option to choose he usually finishes off the section by telling you what his personal choice is which at least gives you a very well informed place to start.

The section of the book I have completed deals essentially with how to get your images into Lightroom in an organized way, how to sort them, judge them, and get everything lined up before diving into the actual processing. This is a critical phase of what Adobe calls the “workflow”. While there is no one way to go about the workflow the ways I was using were wasteful and utterly draining of my time and energy.

Reading about workflow in Lightroom always used to make me feel like someone was painting varnish over the surface of my brain. I just couldn’t get the concepts, the details were byzantine, and it just all seemed way too bureaucratic and anal.

Now I don’t even think about the process. It is all transparent and effortless.

I set up the program and my picture files the way he recommended. I found the options and features I liked. And I started to get-stuff-done — quickly.

It used to take me an hour or more just to get a hundred or so shots sorted and evaluated, ready for full scale image processing. But now I can zap through a hundred shots in a handful of minutes.

I am really looking forward to the next two thirds of this book.

Rick Grant

Calgary

Rating: 5 / 5
Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

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