It is true that a Lightroom user can learn great deal from this book. Thus I basically second the opinions of the many ah so positive voices about this book, why would I see a reason to put only three stars and to complain?

This book is written by an author being in close touch with Adobe design team. It is branded as Adobe Press and is thus literally the "missing manual," which should have been provided with every copy of Lightroom. Consequently it tends to be "Adobe centric": mentions only Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop. However, since these products have the lion share of the market, this automatically addresses the majority of readers. This is understandable. It is a common practice these days to diminish the competing products by ignoring them. Annoying are forms of "person cult," to which this writer tends. He imagines some members of Adobe stuff as godlike creatures, messiah visionaries, about whom he writes in first person "Thomas (Knoll) likes this, Mark (Hamburg) thinks that". Sit down now: On this team there is really someone with a function of an "evangelist." Oh dear... I hear violins playing. But, this self-admiration would be only a little annoyance.

My problem with this book lies mainly with the typography and the print. Every page uses approx. 4"/10cm for print and the remaining 2"/5cm are either blank, or contain "TIP" or "NOTES". It is whopping 33% of the surface provided on these pages. The book is littered by countless TIP's and NOTES. By their nature, they are breaking up the flow of the presentation into a kind of two prong reading. Furthermore, these notes are printed with a tiny font, to small to my eyes. I have genuine troubles reading them.

Equally troublesome to my eyes are numerous screen dumps, which are fuzzy, too small and have lots of compression artifacts. Probably author was using a lossy format, like JPEG and not a format like GIF or BMP for the screen dumps. Lets take a look at some examples: Can you read anything on page 123? Page 129 is my "top example" for a miserable, unreadable whole page screen dump. What about the figure 4.16 on page 129? Figure 1.13 on page 17 is a joke. It says: "Resource and Lightroom Community help pages," but can you decipher URL's of these pages? Figure A.17 on page 555 looks like 10 black rectangles. Sadly, this list could go on endlessly.

Generally, the entire color print/technology is of a rather moderate quality by present standards. All images look fade and grayish, many are tiny like a post stamp and are difficult to decipher. Do I have a bad print copy?

In some cases author seem to have made obvious mistakes, even such which were widely discussed and criticized in Adobe forums. An example is page 88, on which author claims that pressing "N" while in any module, brings Lightroom into a survey mode. Not true, when in Develop module, "N" enters rather the Heal/Clone tool, which I nickname "Noise Tool" for my own association with "N". Actually this "N" ordeal is one of many inconsistencies in Lightroom's interface, and I would hope for some insight or outright critique: Whereas "R" select the crop/rotate tool in both Library and Develop modules and transfers control into Develop module, "N" has a different function in these both modules. And why "N" for Pete's sake, how does this translate into "Survey"?? How to remember that? Lightroom is unfortunately rich in such issues.

Some passages in this book are mere repeats from the manual, and they do not bring any additional explanation about some features as to the very reason of their existence. Example: page 31, in Develop module use control-D to deselect an image. Why would a user do that, what is the purpose? To see empty screen? This seems to be the only function of this operation. And "control shift D" selects the most selected photo only. "Most selected"? I do not see this function do anything, not a thing. I tried it out in Library module with Grid and Lupe mode, and in Develop module.

I still have so many questions: Why is mouse wheel traversing from image to image in Library module, and yet it is dead in Develop module? Why do I need to click on a slider in order to use mouse wheel to move it left and right? What is the meaning of 3 little white dots on thumbnails in grid mode? What is the meaning of a white thin frame around thumbnails, which vanishes as soon I move mouse pointer over the thumbnails? Default brightness is 50 out of 100. Ok, I can see that. But for raw files default contrast is 25, whereas for JPG files it is zero. Why? What is the rationale? I still do not know. Lightroom human interface is somewhat of a mystery to me.

Controversial as always is to quote on many pages someone elses instructions: Pages 230-233 show basically how to use X-Rite Eye-One screen calibrator, but it is a waste of space. Once one gets the device, its use is obvious and documented. In another book about Lightroom the other author did the same with Pantone's Huey: pages of screendumps. I wonder what is the rationale behind this "fashion" to inject irrelevant data like that?

Looking beyond these issues reader will get indeed a comprehensive "users manual" with insider information, which I would really call invaluable. In that sense getting is book is clearly a must to everybody who would like to get a maximum use out of Lightroom.

Previously I was using the French Eyrolles version of this book with a perfect translation from English to French language and culture. I was not so happy about the copy of the display. The menus in that images were not readable, the red circles around the buttons and options to be selected were missed.
In the Adobe press release, all is readable and the photographies are more visible, so modification made before and after with lightroom are more clear for the reader.
So the best will be Gilbert Volker/Eyrolles book for the sentences and Martin Evening/Adobe press for the images, photographies and copy of the the menus, buttons ..;
May be an idea for a new book.

I bought both this book and Kelby's book, and I look forward to reading both, cover to cover. Yes, this will take time, but I want to really understand Lightroom 2, inside and out.

I first started reading Kelby's book. But he is colloquial and less verbose _at the expense of clarity_. Martin Evening's book is long, and incredibly detailed. But written _very_ clearly.

Long story short, read Martin Evening's book first. Nowhere is this point made more clearly than the two author's treatments of the "xmp"/sidecar issue. Martin Evening devotes 4 full pages to discussing this very confusing topic (pp. 179-182), whereas Kelby seems to cut corners and offer under-explained, possibly incorrect advice (see his three paragraph discussion on pp. 69-70).

Buy both books (Kelby's book seems to offer more tips and tricks related to the Development module, which I have yet to get to), but read Evening's book first. Kelby's book is too imprecise, cuts too many corners, to be your foundational course in Lightroom 2.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
This book is a master's course in Photoshop Lightroom 2. For those of you who have read Martin Evening's other books on Lightroom and Photoshop, you already know that he leaves no stone unturned in breaking down the components and capabilities of any software he writes about. The good news is that if you want to know what any Lightroom 2 button, menu item, preference, tool, or setting does (and how to use it to its maximum capability), this book will tell you within its 601 pages. On the other hand, if you're looking for a quick introduction to get you up and running in Lightroom 2, this isn't it (although chapter one is an overview based on a shoot Martin did just for this book).
Martin follows Lightroom 2's workflow approach, taking the reader through each of the program's five modules (including 170 pages on just the Library module) from raw image import and organization to finished photo output and display (as a print, Web image or slide show). Along the way, he illustrates--in words, diagrams, charts, tables and his own exceptional images--the inner workings of Adobe's powerful--yet flexible--program.

This is clearly written and very complete. Those looking for a "quick start" Manuel should look elsewhere. This goes into great detail. The writing is reasonably concise and very easy to follow and understand. The screen captures of Lightroom, help you to understand exactly what he is referring to. The one great shortcoming of this book is the screen captures have low contrast and are very hard to read. Given that this could have been easily corrected using Lightroom or any other photo editing program, it is an outrageous short coming. I do hope they will correct it in the next edition, or even release a new version of this edition to correct it. Despite this one short coming, I would still recommend this to anyone who likes to delve into programs in great detail.