Chapter 4. Customizing

how to set things up your way

Photo by Scott Kelby | Exposure: 0.8 sec | Focal Length: 200mm | Aperture Value: f/22

A great name for this chapter would have been “Pimp My Ride” (after the popular MTV show of the same name), seeing as this chapter is all about customizing Lightroom 4 to your own personal tastes. Kids these days call this “pimping” (by the way, I just checked with a nearby kid to confirm this and apparently that is correct. I said, “Hey, what does it mean if something is pimped?” and he said, “It means it’s been customized.” But then I called my older brother Jeff, who had spent a number of years in the U.S. Navy, and asked him what it means if something is pimped and, surprisingly enough, he had an entirely different answer, but I’m not so sure our mom would be pleased with him for telling this to his impressionable younger brother). So, at this point, I wasn’t sure if using the word “pimped” would be really appropriate, so I did a Google search for the word “pimped” and it returned (I’m not making this up) more than 2,500,000 pages that reference the word “pimped.” I thought I would go ahead and randomly click on one of those search result links, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it took me to a page of totally customized cars. So, at that point, I felt pretty safe, but I realized that using the term “pimped” was kind of “past tense,” so I removed the “ed” and got a totally different result, which led me to a webpage with a “Pimp Name Generator” and, of course, I couldn’t leave without finding out what my pimp name would be (just in case I ever wrote a book about customizing cars or my brother’s life), and it turned out to be “Silver Tongue Scott Slither” (though personally I was hoping for something more like “Snoop Scotty Scott”).