INTRODUCTIONiv
Introduction
Work on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom program began toward the end of
2003 when a small group of Adobe people, headed by Mark Hamburg, met up
at photographer Jeff Schewe’s studio in Chicago to discuss a new approach to
raw image editing and image management. What would it take to meet the
specific needs of those photographers who were now starting to shoot digitally?
More specifically, what would be the best way to help photographers manage
their ever-growing libraries of images? It was shortly after this that I was invited
to join an early group of alpha testers and help work out what sort of program
Lightroom (or Shadowland, as it was known then) should become. As we began
to discuss our different digital photography workflows, it became increasingly
obvious why we all needed a better way to manage and process our digital
photos. Lightroom underwent some pretty major changes in those early stages
as the team tried out different workflow ideas, until eventually we ended up with
the Lightroom program you see now.
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book represents the culmination of over nine
years’ work in which I have been involved with Lightroom. Basically, this book is
intended to be the ultimate reference guide to Lightroom and designed to help
you get the maximum benefit out of the program. In writing this book, I have had
in mind both amateur and professional photographers and have aimed to provide
what I believe is the most detailed book ever on this subject. At the same time, I
have wanted to make sure that equal space was given to explaining some of the
fundamental aspects of digital imaging, such as white balance and exposure. The
feedback I have had for previous editions of this book has been encouraging.
Newbies to Lightroom have found it easy to access and understand all the basics,
while advanced professional users appreciate the background detail that’s pro-
vided. I have to confess when I first started work on this project, I never imagined
the book would end up being 736 pages in length. Mark Hamburg recently joked
that he must have failed in his mission to make Lightroom “unreasonably simple”
if you needed a book as thick as mine in order to understand it!
So many changes have taken place since version 1.0 was released. As a result,
not only has the book ended up being a lot bigger, but I have also had to
rewrite almost everything that was in the original edition. As always, I suggest
you approach the book by reading it in chapter order, starting with Chapter 1:
Introducing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which shows how you might typically
bring photos into Lightroom and process them from start to finish. This should
provide you with a good overview of what Lightroom can do.
The Lightroom catalog is a major feature of the program, which is why I have
devoted over 200 pages of the book to providing in-depth advice on how to
work with the Library module, including how to import photos and manage your
photos through the use of keywords and metadata. Even more space is devoted
to image processing and how to make use of all the Develop module controls.
