How To Use Lightroom

[Doug West]

I just started to use Lightroom a little while ago (3.6).

Can anybody recommend any books or links that might help
me get more out of LR and everything it has to offer, especially
from a bird photographer's point of view?

Thanks
Doug

[Doug Schurman]

I thought the Scott Kelby book was helpful. Lots of good tips to put to immediate use.

[Gerald Kelberg]

If you are like me - too lazy to plough through a weighty manual - you might find it useful to subscribe to the Kelby Training videos (www.kelbytraining.com). There is a lot there on Lightroom - like 4 x 1.5 hour training sessions, plus a whole bunch of stuff on the new LR 4 and Photoshop and lots more. A year's subscription is under $200 and works out good value in my opinion.

Gerald

[Ian Cassell]

Another option, which I use for LR and CS5, is lynda.com . I think you can get an introductory trial (and you can use any of the videos during that time) for free to see if you like it.

[Doug West]

Thanks, I'll check everything out.

[Linwood Ferguson]

Lightroom forums is a great place to ask questions, and search for those already asked.

http://www.lightroomforums.net/

[Jay Gould]

Definitely upgrade to Version 4; it is a light year leap.

Kelby's LR4 available digitally is an excellent book to go through very slowly and do all of the exercises too.

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

I've been very disappointed in Lightroom 4. I definitely like some of the new features like local adjustments, but the I find the recalibrating of the exposure controls, doesn't suit me, and it is dog slow compared to version 3. Version 3 had the snappy: you pressed a key and whatever you asked for happened. On the same hardware, version 4 waits for a couple of second son almost every operation. E.g. I press R and 3 or 4 seconds later the crop tool shows up. I press the right arrow and the picture previews very slowly, and it still isn't done when the progress indicator finishes. It's several seconds more before I see the final sharp image. Very disappointing. :-(

[Jay Gould]

I've been very disappointed in Lightroom 4. I definitely like some of the new features like local adjustments, but the I find the recalibrating of the exposure controls, doesn't suit me, and it is dog slow compared to version 3. Version 3 had the snappy: you pressed a key and whatever you asked for happened. On the same hardware, version 4 waits for a couple of second son almost every operation. E.g. I press R and 3 or 4 seconds later the crop tool shows up. I press the right arrow and the picture previews very slowly, and it still isn't done when the progress indicator finishes. It's several seconds more before I see the final sharp image. Very disappointing. :-(

Mine is instantaneous! What are your computer specs?

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

I've got beefy enough hardware that it really shouldn't be struggling and as I said, Lightroom 3 performed just fine on these same systems. I notice the slowness on both my MacBook Pro 17" (SSD + 8GB RAM) and on my Mac Pro (3.33 GHz, 6-core, 12 GB RAM, SSD + RAID). Either should be well more than enough for Lightroom.