Managing Your Photographic Workflow with Photoshop Lightroom by Juergen Gulbins and Uwe Steinmueller: Review

There are dozens of Lightroom books on the market. Over time, this website will offer reviews of many of these books. This Gulbins/Steinmueller book is published by one of the higher end photographic book publishers.

The Bottom Line

Lightroom is a complex program with many uses and many tools. There can be no one book that describes everything in this program completely. Gulbins and Steinmueller, however, attempt to do so in this very detailed, well written book.

The rating: 3 Stars.

Summary: This book is a good reference and careful reading will teach even the most experienced Lightroom user a thing or two. However, it is quite heavy weight for an average, new Lightroom user.

Detailed Review

In the days before tools like Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Aperture, the editing of digital photographic images, let alone large groups or collections of digital images, was an arduous and time-consuming undertaking. Adobe Lightroom and similar applications were designed specifically for processing digital photographic images efficiently. Gulbins and Steinmueller offer a detailed publication on how to utilize Adobe Lightroom to construct a highly effective digital photographic workflow. The instructions guide the reader through importing, image organization, editing, creating slideshows, and printing.

This book is published by Rocky Nook; it is well printed with a nice binding system that allows the book to lay flat. Every book from this publisher is a treat compared to some of the lower cost printing and bindings that we have seen. The current version of the book covers the Lightroom 1.x family; it does not cover new features added with Lightroom 2.0.

This book follows a similar organization to Kelby's book. This is no surprise: the design of Lightroom and the way that most photographers work leads you to a workflow of a particular form that corresponds to the modules of the program; organizing a book around this workflow structure makes sense. This book, in contrast to Kelby's, spends time in the first chapters on the overall "workflow problem" and a Lightroom overview and how it fits into the workflow. This is material that is missing from the Kelby book and would be a good addition there - written in simple and brief language.

Overall, the book is very complete. It has hundreds of screen shots to illustrate the use of the program, along with a description of virtually every control, dialog box, slider and button the program has to offer. This level of coverage is nice to see, but can be a bit overwhelming. Compared to a book like Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers, this book is a bit too much for a new user of the Lightroom software. A more experienced Lightroom user, however, can learn a lot of material from Gulbins and Steinmueller. There is some "step-by-step" instruction present in this book, but it tends to get buried with the voluminous information presented. The Kelby book is much better at a step-by-step approach that we find very amenable to learning a complicated software package like Lightroom.

Though they may be important topics to consider in the development of a full photographic workflow, we believe that the inclusion of some other material should have been left out of this book. This includes the detailed descriptions of how cameras capture images, color management, backup, and geotagging. These are important topics, but require more extensive treatment for many people. It is unclear if this is a Lightroom book (as indicated by the title and typesetting on the cover, which makes "Photoshop Lightroom" the dominant element) or a description of the authors' workflow ideas with a focus on Lightroom as a tool. The material in the book is dominated by Lightroom specifics, which begs the question if the other materials should be included at all.

Overall, this is a good book, but probably isn't the best starting point for someone new to Lightroom - or digital imaging. This is a good second (or third) book on Lightroom for a more experienced user, however. Gulbins and Steinmueller should be commended for writing such a complete and useful book.

Book Organization

The nine chapters and two appendices are organized in the following manner:

• Chapter 1: "The Photographic Workflow" describes in camera image making techniques, file formats, and image exposure. The authors begin by identifying tasks and steps that users will perform as part of engaging in a digital workflow including downloading images, image inspection, and meta data. They offer glimpses of there own personal workflows and share their own practical experiences and solutions.
• Chapter 2: "Understanding Lightroom" introduces readers to nondestructive editing and how this concept is integrated into Adobe Lightroom. The second chapter also outlines the five modules in the application and how they are integrated to make up a functional digital workflow; other topics covered include, supported formats, digital asset management, system requirements, user interface, lightroom basics, catalogs and libraries, templates and presets, views, modules and modes, and preferences.
• Chapter 3: "Image Management in the Library Mode" focuses on the Library Module and it functionality explaining how images are organized, collected, and viewed. Additional topics include organizing and retrieval of past work and the hierarchal method of rating and marking (flagging) images. Furthermore, this chapter discusses downloading and importing, collections, stacks, virtual copies, viewing and editing metadata, keywording, and auto importing (watched folder).
• Chapter 4: "Editing Images in the Develop Module". The authors unveil the true power of Lightroom in this chapter by suggesting how to use its tools to optimize its efficiency in correcting images; they suggest that there is an order to the corrections and adjustments. Other topics include histograms, basic corrections, target adjustment tool, “hsl” for color correction, gray scale, camera calibration panel, toolbar, history and snapshots, before and after view, presets (creating and browsing) copying and applying corrections.
• Chapter 5: "The Slideshow Module" describes the steps of creating slideshows. The authors describe the options available as well as the functionality of the Slideshow module. They discuss layout, overlays, and adding text to the slides. Backdrop options, the playback controls and adding a soundtrack are also discussed. Then how to export the slideshow as a PDF file. Other topics include backdrops, and playback controls.
• Chapter 6: "Print". Making slides shows is nice, and they can be compact as well as portable. However, the primary goal for serious photographers and artists is to produce beautifully printed representations of their images. Making prints from digital images is a large and complex topic in and of itself; Gulbins and Steinmueller's book for example “Fine Art Printing for Photographers” goes a long way in describing this process. This chapter focuses on how to set up the Lightroom print settings, including page layout, image layout, overlays, and print settings. The color management portion of this chapter includes settings for both color and black and white prints. This chapter also includes how to print to a file (PDF and TIFF), as well as printing on silver halide paper.
• Chapter 7: "Web Galleries". Often photographic image makers will present their works online as an inexpensive way of sharing their work or interacting with clients after the images have been edited and sorted by the photographer. The Web Galleries chapter walks the reader through the process of collecting and sorting images for the gallery, creating the web gallery, including site info, working with the color palette, adjusting the appearance of the gallery, including image info, and output and upload settings.
• Chapter 8: "External Editors and Exporting Images". Lightroom has its limitations, seldom can one application satisfy all users needs. At times users will have to use another application or editor to make the corrections or modifications required. In this chapter the authors describe the methods of using external editors as well as exporting images with proper color attributes and post processing modifications. There are some specific examples using Lightzone, which is a package that won't be familiar to most readers of the book. A better choice would have been a lower-end editing program like Photoshop Elements to compliment the professions use of the full version of Photoshop. The complex example shown to motivate the use of Lightzone is not a great learning tool for most readers.
• Chapter 9: "More Useful Lightroom Features" looks at some of Lightroom's features and functionality that did not fit into any of the previous chapters. These topics include views, searching, catalogs, backing up data, performance issues, templates and presets, color calibration, and geotagging. Some of the material here is not Lightroom specific and we question its inclusion in this book.
• Appendix A: "Keyboard Shortcuts" includes both Mac and Windows shortcuts. Sadly the current versions of Lightroom does not have the ability to edit these shortcuts.
• Appendix B: "Resources" includes many pointers to resources on the web or in other books. Many of these are related to other efforts of the authors, but the list is fairly complete and useful.