Lightroom & Photoshop: The Essentials
If you are serious about digital photography and you use or want to use Lightroom and/or Photoshop, these books are “The Essentials” when you are ready to move beyond the basics. If you are a beginner or need help with the basics, you should start with The Best Basic Introductions to Elements, Photoshop, and Lightroom.
RAW Files
For starters, you need an excellent introduction to dealing with your RAW files using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which comes with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Photoshop Elements. To get the maximum benefits from using RAW files, you need to know what you are doing with ACR. If you don’t, you will limit the potential of your processed files. So one of the keys to great images is to do the right thing by your RAW files with ACR.
Your best guides to ACR and RAW files is Jeff Schewe’s The Digital Negative: Raw Image Processing in Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Photoshop (2nd Edition) by Jeff Schewe.
Photoshop & Lightroom
While Tom Ang, Scott Kelby, and others have written excellent introductions to Photoshop and Lightroom (which you can find here), if you really want to dig into Lightroom and Photoshop you need to read Martin Evening. A member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, I know of no other author who has written such excellent and comprehensive single volume guides to Photoshop and Lightroom. Evening’s books are the best of the best and he comes at this software with a professional photographer’s perspective. Pick the book by Evening for the version of Photoshop and/or Lightroom that you are using.
If you want more information than Evening provides, you are going to have to get a set of books that specialize in different aspects of Photoshop. See the link below to The “Mastering Photoshop” Series.
Photoshop:
Adobe Photoshop CC for Photographers: 2020 by Martin Evening
Lightroom:
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC Book by Martin Evening
Image Sharpening
It is a shame so many great images are ruined by poor sharpening techniques, and there are so many things you can do in terms of sharpening if you know how. Your guide is Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop; CameraRaw, and Lightroom (2nd edition) by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe.
The Print
The final test of your image quality is in your prints. As much fun as online photos are too look at, nothing is quite like a big beautiful print hanging on a wall. After you’ve gone to all the work to create a beautiful image with Lightroom and/or Photoshop, how do you get the best possible print from your carefully crafted digital file? Read The Digital Print: Preparing Images in Lightroom and Photoshop for Printing by Jeff Schewe.
If it sounds like you have heard the same three names over and over again, you are right. But if you really want to learn, you might as well learn from the best.
Links
You can buy all of these books (and more) in the Digital Photography Books section at my photography store with direct links to Amazon.com. You will find some excellent books that deal with digital photography in terms of both shooting and image processing.
If you are a beginner or need help with the basics, start with The Best Basic Introductions to Elements, Photoshop, and Lightroom
If you want to follow up on Evening, Schewe, and Fraser with some specialized books on different areas of Photoshop, go to The “Mastering Photoshop” Series. The Schewe/Fraser books on RAW image processing are also part of that series.
This is one in a series of articles that will guide you to the best of all things photographic. The rest are here: Buyer’s Guide: Recommendations For The Best Photography Equipment, Software, Books, Magazines, DVDs, Online Photo Labs and More.