ADOBE LIGHTROOM: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features

Rocky Nook has published a new book on Adobe Lightroom (mostly Classic) titled ADOBE LIGHTROOM: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features by Seattle photographer Jeff Carlson. As I write this, the book is out in eBook form, with a printed version due in September. As soon as I heard from Jeff that the book was published, I went off and bought myself a copy of both and spent a few evenings going through the material.

Full Disclosure - I’ve known Jeff casually for a long time and he’s a photographer I respect, and the workshops he does with Mason Marsh are on my short list to do one of these days. He’s also co-host of both the PhotoActive podcast with Kirk McElhearn and the Photocombobulate podcast with Mason Marsh, and both are recommended.

This is a large, comprehensive book with over 300 pages of material. It’s broken into two sections: roughly the first half of the book walks you through setting up Lightroom and using the core features, and then goes through processing images to show you how to use the tool’s core features. The second half is more of an encyclopedia of Lightroom functionality, giving you an easy way to find and read up a specific tool or concept.

The book is quite comprehensive. One thing I really like about it (and in fact bought it for) is that it covers in depth a number of the newer tools like Color Grading and goes into nice detail on how to leverage some the new masking capabilities and how they can be combined.

If you’re a Lightroom Classic user, this is a really well done, detailed reference to help you find aspects of the tool you can integrate into your processing workflow and improve (and probably speed up) how you work on images. If you’re new to Lightroom, this will be a useful way to improve your skills on the way from beginner to intermediate user of Lightroom.

Good book, definitely recommended.