Thread: Learning Photoshop and Lightroom for correcting digital images

Dear all,
I would like to ask your opinion on which book I should try for learning adobe photoshop cs 6 and lightroom as well.

Have you tried one in the past. What is your experience?

Regards
A

Hi again,

I appreciate how you would like to read photography related books. But really, it's not necessary. Lightroom is not that complicated, you can learn it by simply try it out (if you want to flatten the learning curve, look at YouTube tutorials first - they also only cover the basics most of the time, but they are fast to watch and easy to understand). As for Photoshop CS6 - it's a little bit more complicated here. Do you have any knowledge from other photo manipulating software? If not, simply look for tutorials for the one specific thing you want to do to an image at a time. Do this over and over again, and you'll not only save time and effort of reading a thick book at the beginning and forget half of it until you need it (which takes much fun out of learning these things), and in some months, you'll be able to do most of the things somebody would need in PS.

I disagree. LR may not be complicated at one level, but it hides some very powerful capabilities and it is good to know what those capabilities are, how they work and how they interact. So in addition to the video tutorials on Adobe's website the two books I recommend are The Digital Negative by Jeff Schewe and Vision and Voice by David Duchemin. The former is more 'instructional' and technical and provides the best explanations of how LR actually works and you can download DNGs of the images used in the book from the website and work on them yourself; the latter is more descriptive and includes twenty of the authors images with explanations of how he used LR to enhance them.

Schewe's book also has a little about PS but since I never use it I can't offer any other suggestions.

As Poki said, there are plenty of great tutorials on youtube for Lightroom, but I'd also like to add that Adobe has some very good learning content right on their website. Also, the website 'lightroomkillertips.com' is worth bookmarking, he has some interesting tutorials from time to time. An hour at those sites should give you the base of knowledge you need to get going.

Originally Posted by olli

LR may not be complicated at one level, but it hides some very powerful capabilities and it is good to know what those capabilities are, how they work and how they interact.

You can certainly pick up some useful skills by just playing around with it, and I did that at first. But my Lightroom chops improved by a factor of ten once I bought Martin Evening's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book. As olli said, there's a ton of fairly well hidden capability in that program. If you're going to use it, it's well worth your time to learn it.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions, actually I am reader and I like learning with books.
I am thinking for a book that covers both: Lightroom and when needed switching to photoshop

I found this one pretty good with simple to follow interface.
Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4: A Photographer's Handbook: Stephen Laskevitch: 9781937538033: Amazon.com: Books