Sean McCormack’s Essential Development: 20 Great Techniques for Lightroom 5 is out! An update to Sean’s Lightroom 4 e-book, it focuses exclusively on developing photos, and is full of great techniques and tips. For only $7, you receive not only a very generous 130+ page e-book, but also 100 of Sean’s develop presets.  Sean is an Adobe Community Professional and a professional photographer, specializing in headshot, fashion, music and editorial photography. He also does beautiful landscape photography.

 I have picked up some great tips and techniques from both the Lightroom 4 and Lightroom 5 versions of Sean’s e-book, and I believe most of you will too, regardless of your experience level. It is quite a challenge for an author to take such a huge topic as Lightroom development, and boil it down to something of reasonable length and yet useful and impactful, and Sean has done a great job at this. You will not have to wade through extra fluff or “chatting” to get to the core content.

I don’t consider Essential Development  to be a substitute for the core training you’ll find in my Lightroom 5: The Fundamentals & Beyond course, but  I’m a great advocate of learning from different instructors — we all have different perspectives and experiences, and  emphasize different things.  I found Sean’s portrait retouching techniques particularly valuable, since I don’t have a lot of experience in this area.

Bottom line: While Sean graciously provided me with a review copy of his book, I wouldn’t have hesitated otherwise to purchase this. Just a single one of Sean’s tips is worth more than $7 to me!

 Click here to go to Craft and Vision.