Book Review: Lessons in DSLR Workflow with Lightroom and Photoshop by Jerry Courvoisier

This book is a little different from other books about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom that I am currently reading (and soon be reviewing here).
First of all, it’s not only about Lightroom 2 but about the whole DSLR workflow from shooting to managing and developing the photos with Lightroom and then fine tuning them with Photoshop.

Of course a single book can not cover everything in complete detail. As the author explains in the introduction, he does not cover the Lightroom moduls Slideshow, Printing and Web. He only covers the Library and Develop Modules.
And of course he doesn’t explain everything Photoshop is capable of. But this is probably impossible to do in a single book.

The book is divided into four parts:

1. Part one covers the digital SLR camera and choosing your computer hardware. The author explains the advantages of a DSLR, how to use memory cards, which image format (RAW or JPEG) and how to calibrate a monitor.

2. Part two covers the configuration of Lightroom 2 and how to import and organize your images.

3. Part three covers the Develop module of Lightroom 2. The Develop module is the most difficult for most newcomers to digital photography and Lightroom. I found the explanations in this book very easy to follow. Sometimes I wished they were more detailed.

4. The last part is all about Photoshop. It’s not a beginners introduction to Photoshop. The author explains some interesting techniques like creating Panoramas, how to make HDR images, using Adjustment Layers, and creating some interesting effects with Photoshop. Black and White images are also covered. As with the Lightroom part, I found the explanations easy to follow, but sometimes I wished they were more detailed.

Conclusion:
As I already said, this is not a complete introduction to Lightroom and Photoshop. This wasn’t the intention of the Author when he wrote the book.
If you really want to master Lightroom and Photoshop, you will need other books, too. For Lightroom 2 I highly recommed The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book by Martin Evening, which I reviewed here.

I like the workflow presented in the book and I think it’s a good basis to build your own workflow on if you haven’t already established one or are looking for new ideas how to do it.

I think the books succeeds in explaining how a digital workflow could look like. I recommend this book for beginning and intermediate photographers who wand to build a workflow around Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 and Adobe Photoshop. It’s also a good book for people coming from film to digital photography. If you are already an advanced digital photographer with an established workflow or if you want a complete book about Lightroom and Photoshop, this book is probably not for you.

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