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Krogh Publishes 'Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom 5' Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

6 February 2014

Peter Krogh, who published The DAM Book in 2005, explaining how to manage your digital assets and archive your images, has published Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom 5. The 3.3-GB PDF ebook is available is available as a download, DVD or printed book with DVD from The DAM Bookshop.

The new title "breaks the process of organization down into to three simple parts: Storing the Photos, Tagging the Photos and Creating Projects. Using this simple structure, you can understand how to use Lightroom's tools in ways that are both simple and powerful," Krogh said.

With 208 pages and seven hours of video, the ebook is a multimedia experience. "The video makes it easy to understand how a process works." Krogh explained. "And the text allows you to quickly reference the steps as you put them into practice yourself."

In a blog post, John Nack notes:

This eBook is written for Adobe Lightroom 5 users, but the approach can apply to earlier versions. Whether you are a beginning user or a veteran user, all will gain insight, tips, and most important, assurance that your own photo library is well-organized for the future.

We're downloading a review copy now and will report shortly on how well Krogh cures our aversion to tagging (which has been biting us in the cushion recently).

We're happy to provide our readers with a 10 percent discount on the title through our affiliate arrangement. Just enter aff-mp-10-nx at checkout from the Bookshop. The code can be used on other items in the Bookshop, with the exception of the Victoria Bampton title and The DAM Book, second edition.

We've reprised our December 2005 review of The DAM Book below.

The DAM Book

A few sentences into this 280-page, full-color book, we knew we'd found another classic for our digital photography bookshelf. Previous classics covered dense subjects like digital printing and color management and Peter Krogh's title takes on just as tough a topic: digital asset management. "How do you manage all these photographs? How do you put stuff away so that you can find it when you want it? How do you organize it? How do you protect it against loss?" he frames the DAM question in the Introduction. And the rest of the book answers it in clearly written, easy-to-follow prose.

"What Is All This DAM Stuff?" introduces the concept of digital asset management for photographers, discussing the kinds of software required and the role DNG plays. Interestingly, he considers DNG "a digital job jacket," bundling the Raw file negative, as much metadata "paperwork" as you want to stuff into it and "a pretty good print" with the embedded preview supporting tonal and color correction as well as crops.

"Metadata" unknots the many kinds of information concerning an image before presenting some unusual and useful ways to think about ratings, keywords and groups.

"Creating the Digital Archive" takes two chapters. One on the structure of the information for a digital archive rather than a film archive. The other on the hardware required to build a scalable and safe archive. The discussion really goes beyond what you typically see, covering the particular needs of photographers dealing with thousands of images.

"Setting Up Bridge" puts Adobe's Bridge in context, showing what it can and can't do and how to enhance its operations with scripts. The workflow Krogh proposes strikes us as both efficient and productive. The scripting isn't flashy, but functional. You'll want to try this stuff out.

"The Editing Workflow" steps through the editing process from acquiring images to preparing them in Bridge and archiving them as DNGs.

"Using Cataloging Software" takes you beyond the Adobe Suite to real database territory. Krogh uses iView MediaPro to illustrate what a photo database can do for you that a browser like Bridge can't.

"Derivative Files" is a candid evaluation of every file format your image will take as it moves from the camera to a publisher.

"Strategies for Successful File Migration" doesn't blink in the face of this often ignored topic. How do you move your film image to digital, your Raw images to DNG, your images stored on one medium to a fresher one.

Thinking about digital asset management can bring on severe depression. But Krogh makes it pleasurable. Captions for the numerous images have a "Keyword:" tag with suggested keywords to help you think about cataloging. Once you get into the spirit of it, things start to fall into place and magically appear just when you need them. Which is the whole DAM point.

His focus on Bridge and the DNG format is unusually informed (not the usual tutorial stuff or argumentative rant but an evaluation of what each brings to the table), an approach that also brings MediaPro to the table. You may be put off by these choices, but the discussion at this level is worth having.

In fact, he says early on that a lot of the stuff to follow may be hard to swallow. Just "keep on reading," he suggests. It's a daunting subject. But Krogh tames the DAM monster.


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