AAUG Reviews

by Chuck Maas, AAUG Member

Technology books are tools for learning, and the good ones provide timely, accurate information in a manner that’s easy to assimilate. When they’re written by giants in the business whose views and opinions have been tested over time they are even more valuable. This is one of those books.

Digital photography has been like a tsunami that started relatively small and just kept on growing. As hardware and software tools have grown inexorably in number and complexity, there’s been a crying need for a polished, proven, up-to-the-minute set of methodologies to deal with growing collections of image files, especially for professional photographers for whom time is money and whose reputations depend on quality and consistency. Many have tried to provide this framework as consultants and trainers, but only a few have risen to the top, including the company D-65, founded by Seth Resnick and Jamie Spritzer, co-authors of this book.

Let’s be clear; there are many ways to capture, edit, publish, and store digital images, but only a few end-to-end workflows make the highest and best use of all the tools available to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness. And of course with never-ending technology improvements and software upgrades it’s a continually moving target, but in my view, this book — which is essentially the D-65 workshop in handbook form — is one of the best compilations yet.

In this discussion of workflow, the authors present Lightroom as the core component to move digital captures into the desktop darkroom and manage them from development through delivery and archiving. However, they stress that Lightroom is still best augmented with Adobe Photoshop and Bridge for a small number of specialized operations, and that integration between all these programs is now relatively seamless. As the core tool, Lightroom has significantly matured; its innovative non-destructive processing now includes considerable selective adjustment capability, and the digital asset management part of the program (metadata, cataloging, and search functions) is much more capable. On a special technical note, sharpening in the current version of Lightroom 2 — at both the capture and output stages — has been significantly upgraded using algorithms developed by the world-renowned PixelGenius team, of which Seth Resnick is an original partner.

Software books often concentrate on describing what program features do without showing how those features integrate and interact across the entire system. Here the authors go to great lengths to put features in context and offer best-practice suggestions that cover the full hardware/software workflow gamut. This is exactly the kind of information that is of greatest value to photographers at all levels.

While no one is going to become a Lightroom expert overnight, this book does a highly credible job of illuminating this very popular and rapidly maturing program and demonstrating how it can be used as the main engine of an effective and efficient digital imaging workflow. It belongs on every serious Lightroom user’s shelf as both a trusted learning tool and ready reference.