In this day and age we are used to software that is more-or-less self explanatory. Manufacturers are becoming more and more stingy with documentation. Paper manuals have all but disappeared, replaced by pdf files on a CD. I have no doubt that most of these will soon be “download only”.

Usually this is not a problem. Other than “quick set up”, I can think of few occasions when I have actually cracked open a manual anyway – I prefer to learn by doing. Even with something complex and deep like Photoshop, I was able to get started and figure out the basics without much trouble. Sure, understanding the myriad of features and techniques available takes time and experimentation (not to mention textbooks and the internet), but at least I could get started and look for answers when I got stuck.

The same rules don’t hold for Adobe Lightroom, however.

Lightroom is promoted as a tool designed specifically for photographers (unlike Photoshop, which is the Swiss Army knife of image processing). Many professional photographers and serious amateurs sing its praises and claim that they rarely touch Photoshop any more. So when, a year or so ago, the time came to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 I jumped at the offer of a package bundled with Lightroom version 1 for just a few dollars more.

Unfortunately Adobe failed to adequately explain what Lightroom actually WAS, and for people like me, who had established a way of working (or “workflow”) based around Photoshop, this new product made no sense. I couldn’t figure out how to duplicate what I had learned to do in Photoshop. I didn’t understand what the program was doing, or why it needed information I wasn’t used to worrying about. After a short period of experimentation, I decided that it was easier to just keep doing things the way I was, and I gave up.

The praise for Lightroom continued, however, and this year version 2.0 was announced with much fanfare. I decided to give it another shot.

I tried to “get it” – I really did – but when faced with a real life task, it was quicker and easier to fall back to the old tried and trusted Photoshop.

Then I learned that fellow photographer and Fotonova19 participant, Godfrey DiGiorgi, would be running a class at Mountain View’s Media Center entitled “Lightroom: Starting in the Middle“, expressly for folks like me who were entrenched in an existing way of working and who wanted to transition.

For me at least, the class did its job and finally helped me to understand what this darned thing is all about, and why its advocates are so excited about it. The key is that Lightroom represents a complete change of approach to managing and processing photographs – not just another tool. It is absolutely critical to understand this before you even start the program for the first time, and requires quite a bit of thought and preparation before you can start using it in earnest. It is not a program that you can learn by trial and error.

Once I understood what was going on “under the hood”, the pieces started to fall into place and the benefits became clear. The class did not have time to get into much functional detail, but it got me to the point where I can start experimenting and leveraging some of the abundant resources available online.

It’s going to take me a while to make the transition, but I can now understand not only how, but more importantly why, I will move my workflow to Lightroom.

Thanks Godfrey!