Product: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide by Tim Grey Publisher: Wiley Publishing, Inc ISBN: 978-0-470-11919-8 Pages: 198 Price: $39.99 US Level: All levels Rating: 4 out of 5 apples

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is Adobe's new kid on the block and we welcome any help to get us up and running with it. The fact that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide is only 198 pages, is a tribute to the application itself. Lightroom is very intuitive and for the folks who are acquainted with Adobe products it will be very familiar; therefore a large tome is not necessary. However, this book saved me a lot of time in finding not-so-obvious features in the application.

Because the author is a teacher this book has a unique quality. Teachers have the gift of being aware of the many learning styles and making sure to address each one. Therefore they can impart difficult concepts with ease so that everybody understands. The author uses elegant language to put across difficult concepts.

The book itself is well organized, modeling Lightroom's complete end-to-end workflow, useful to digital photographers. Chapter 1, which must be read, gives an overview of the book. Tim Grey walks you through what you can expect, such as the importance of a workflow tool, the Lightroom modules, workflow strategies, and a typical workflow in an outline format. From there each chapter describes each of the features of Lightroom in a clear and simple manner. Grey eliminates the fear of learning another application that will keep the photographer in front of a computer instead of behind the lens.

I always test a book's clarity by trying to see how easy or hard it is to follow an explanation. I noticed a new feature called the Identity Plate in Lightroom. I had no idea what this was all about. It is an option to allow the branding of your own copy of Lightroom. I will admit, although it's totally egocentric, it is a nice touch when using Lightroom to review images with clients. The book walked me through the steps and I was able to personalize it in no time. Now on the upper left corner of the window my full name is spelled out in green and with my favorite font.

The book has a good Table of Contents and an Index. At the end of the book there is a neat, concise one-page Workflow Overview. It is a perfect ending to a valuable reference book for the new user, and I can recommend it to every user of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.