| If you’ve been photographing digitally for any length of time, you have probably been seduced by the easy way you can continue pressing the shutter release and seeing your work pop up on your camera’s view screen. All goes well as you download memory card after memory card into your computer. After a number of months or even years go by, your hard drive fills up, and it becomes harder and harder to find a particular image that you are looking for. You spend more and more time in front of the computer monitor first looking for your images, then selecting them, and finally processing them. Your workflow gets more and more complex with additional pieces of software that you have to add in. First you have to use one piece of software to choose your favorites and mark them somehow. Then you have to open each one in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to make small adjustments before you can show them to your clients (if you are a professional photographer) or your family and friends (if your photography is done simply for pleasure). Each time you go through this process, you generate more copies of your images in various sizes and formats. These copies are floating around all over your hard drive. Now you have to do the final adjustments on the images and create still more copies, either to have prints made or to make the prints yourself. Every step seems to take longer each time you do it. It is turning into a real mess.
Don’t be discouraged! Adobe comes to your rescue with Photoshop Lightroom. It is one of the first of a new generation of workflow applications designed to help you find and process your images quickly and efficiently. With Lightroom and this book, you will be able to spend much less time in front of your computer, protect your images by storing them in an organized manner, and produce the images you need for showing, for slideshows, for Web sites, and for easy printing. |
