Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 for Dummies®

Introduction

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom — more commonly referred to simply as Lightroom — has made an incredible impact on the digital photography world in a very short time. The reason it has made such a splash is due in large part to the fact that the folks behind Lightroom started out by taking a step back and looking at all the tasks today's photographers are required to perform with their digital photos. The Lightroom team wanted to know how they could make the process of taking a photo from camera to finished output as efficient as possible while still holding to a level of quality that professionals demand. They also wanted a means to equally accommodate the surge in photographers turning to shooting in raw mode (where the camera saves the photo data to the memory card, but stops short of processing that data to make it look better), as well as all the photographers who still rely on working with photos in JPEG format (where the camera captures the data and processes it based on the in-camera settings).

What the Lightroom team found was that (unsurprisingly) photographers wanted to spend more time shooting and less time in front of their computers. Photographers wanted to have a great deal of control over how their photos were managed, edited, and prepared for output, but they wanted the process to be intuitive and visual. Photographers wanted tools that would help them make the most of the photo data that was captured by their cameras, and they wanted consistent output across ...