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Adobe Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC for Photographers by Lisa Snider

Obregon Obregon

Is from: Southold, US
3070 posts

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Obregon Moderator Donor Ribbon awarded for his generous support to the Fundraising Campaign 2014 Donor Ribbon awarded for his generous support to the Fundraising Campaign 2015 Awarded for his in-depth knowledge and high level of skill in several areas.  Donor Ribbon awarded for the contribution to the 2016 campaign Charter Member
Thu 29-Sep-16 04:52 PM
Now that Adobe offers the Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which includes a monthly subscription to both Photoshop and Lightroom, for under $10 a month, many photographers are wondering how to fit these two programs together for the best possible images. The two can be integrated so that each does what it can do best. Lightroom is great for global adjustments (as well as other functions like cataloging and slide shows) while Photoshop allows combining images, local adjustments and retouching.

After discussing the benefits of using both Lightroom and Photoshop, the author considers some of the basic functions of the Library and Develop modules of Lightroom. She then discusses the roundtrip workflow from Lightroom to Photoshop and back again. Snider then provides deeper instruction on moving Lightroom processed images to Photoshop for combining, selecting and masking, retouching and special effects. She finishes by indicating how to export images and very briefly touches on the other Lightroom modules.

The book uses tutorials that involve the downloading of images from a website and then detailed instructions for processing the images, first in Lightroom and then in Photoshop. This is one of the most practical ways to learn the functioning of the software and the author makes it better by explaining the why of the various steps, as well as the pitfalls along the way.

At first I was skeptical about the instruction level. For Lightroom, only the most rudimentary of instructions are given about the Development module, and indeed, if one wants to learn to learn to adjust tonality and color well in Lightroom, one ought to read books like Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC Book for Digital Photographers and Jeff Schewe's The Digital Negative. I was surprised by how cautious the author was about directly downloading photos from the camera card into Lightroom, preferring separate download and import processes.

The instructions for Photoshop did not mention some basic steps like establishing Photoshop preferences. However, as her tutorials moved the images into Photoshop, her instructions were detailed enough so that one could make use of the important features of Photoshop to do what Photoshop does best, and be comfortable in that software. (I would still recommend that one also read a book aimed only at Photoshop to make the best use of the software.)

Over the years I've developed my own regular uses of Photoshop for roundtrips, but I was astonished to find out that functions that I had not looked at in years, like the Liquefy function, had become so easy to use, and ought to be included in my regular arsenal. On the other hand, I was surprised to see strong advocacy for the Pen tool and no mention of the Lasso tool. Once one gets into using Photoshop, it pays to learn all of the selection tools.

In any event, this book pleasantly surprised me. It told enough about the two programs to show the benefits of integrating them, and the tutorials were highly successful in instructing, particularly about the functions of Photoshop that benefit the integration.

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