After trying out Lightroom 3, I found it having all the tools I used most often for editing photos in the develop module. Using LR3 can save me a lot more time than using GIMP. So when the Amazon advertisement about this book hit me and after reading the positive reviews I ordered this book. Now I've read a little more than half of the book. Yes, one can learn a good way of thinking and several useful techniques from this book. But the loose and inarticulate text is often annoying. The text in this book is often repetitive and winding on some simple and obvious concepts. I felt like being treated like a primary school pupil. This book will feel much more classy if all the talks like "so what?" "you bet" are cut off. In addition, the text feels quite opinionated. At the centre stage stands the author's own opinion but not the knowledge I expected. In comparison, Michael Freeman's writing style is much more articulate, concise, and modest.



On page 32, the author said "....There's some kind of funky math going on here that I don't understand, but the right side of the histogram is capable of storing exponentially more data than the left side. If your sensor can record around 4,000 levels of data, 3,500 of those are represented by the right half of the grid and the remaining 500 are on the left...." Holding a degree in computer science I have to point out that what the author said here is technically wrong. A tonal histogram of an image simply shows the distribution of tones in an image. It is a statistical graph. On page 33, the whole point of "....Working backward, quadrant D can hold about 80 percent of the total data in an image, quadrant C can hold about 10 percent, quadrant B can hold about 7 percent, and quadrant A can hold about 3 percent...." is wrong. And the point made on page 34 "expose to the right" does not make sense based on the wrong understanding of the histogram.



Because of the loose text and wrong information about histogram, I have to remove two stars for this book. Otherwise a fine book.