Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic Classroom in a Book (2023 release)

Concepcion knows his stuff, that's for sure, but I'm often left in mid-air as to exactly where he is. I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but it just seems sometimes he starts a section and it's like, You're supposed to be here, and some things you have to figure out yourself to get back on track. For a book that costs this much and an author elected by the developer of this highly rated photo editing software to teach how to effectively use this software, I am at times upset.

Book was shipped in a timely manner and the box was perfectly intact. The book, on the other hand, had a creased cover, rippled pages and dirt on it. The book is still readable but definitely not new.

I’m getting tired of saying this. The “Lightroom Classic Classroom in a Book” is still in the top category of books for learning to use Adobe’s Lightroom Classic software for image processing.Maybe Adobe developed Lightroom Classic because people started using “Photoshopped” as a way of stating that an image didn’t represent something real. (Or maybe that’s gone out the window with AI, even though Lightroom and other Adobe products do use AI). In any case Lightroom Classic was developed to allow photographers to make adjustments like cropping and tonality to their images without battling the intricacies of Photoshop, which seems to have been created for graphic designers. Applying the tools to make your photograph look more like you imagined it at the time you took it is a lot easier with Lightroom’s tools. However, because it can do so much, there still a lot to learn about Lightroom.Concepcion takes a tried and true method for teaching. The publisher provides images which you can download to your computer and then follow along with the author as he makes appropriate adjustments. The steps are taken one at a time, so that unlike some other books, if you make a mistake on one image, it won’t come back to haunt you further down the road.For me what’s even better is that you can also use the book on-line. That means that you don’t have to keep the book on your desk or lap while you work. You can switch back and forth with a keystroke or two between on-line version and software. But wait! There’s more. The on-line book has tips that don’t appear in the print copy. Even better, there are videos that cover what’s in the book so that if you have difficulty finding a menu item, you can see where it is in the video. You can see an effect being applied in real time.I particularly like this on-line Classroom in a Book because it seems to be narrated by Concepcion himself rather than some AI voice. (On the other hand, you can also here him burp loudly in one of the videos—it makes me wonder about what kind of editing is going on.)A problem about publishing a book like this is that Adobe keeps coming out with updates year around, and by the time this book got to press, several spectacular updates had come out. The book covers the great new selection updates (although it has signs of having been rushed to press; not bad information but not the careful organization of some other sections). On the other hand we may have to wait for the 2024 version to learn how to use the brand-new denoise tool in Lightroom Classic. Even so, this is still a good introduction for someone looking to first learn about using Lightroom. Experienced users will have to learn about updates that occur after the book is put to bed in some other way.Despite the problems of keeping up to date on rapidly changing technology, this is still my choice for learning to use Lightroom.

When it’s important to actually see pictures to know exactly what your are instructed to do and to see the result of the process, this book does not do well. It’s a horrible printing job in every respect. The pictures are like they added a filter green to them. In fact, every aspect of each page is grainy.