Yesterday I’ve mentioned the “Advanced Guide + New User’s Introduction to Lightroom 4” by Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. I’ve seen the whole introduction and a little more than half of the advanced guide during the past hours. It’s good, actually very good, and I can strongly recommend it to everyone who wants to learn how to effectively use Lightroom.
Well, maybe it’s just I, but I really love learning how to use programs from training videos. It’s just so much more effective.
One good thing is, that they have broken up the whole video thematically in parts of about 15 minutes. It makes sense to see the whole thing in sequence, but when you’re later interested in one single aspect, say split-toning, then there is a single short video for that. Very handy.
One part that I’ve found exceptionally worthy was that about noise reduction. I’ve always shied away from using Camera RAW’s noise reduction and have instead used first Noise Ninja and later Topaz Denoise. With what I’ve seen (and already practiced) today, I think this is a thing of the past.
I’ve played with an image taken at ISO 12800 (not shown here), and the result was extremely good: low noise, much detail, punchy colors. The point is, that although the controls are easy to use once you know what they do, the interplay of the controls is not obvious. This is something that someone has to explain, and thankfully Jeff and Michael do a very thorough job.
The Song of the Day is “Cloudspotting” from the 2010 De Phazz album “Lala 2.0”. Hear it on YouTube.