Seven Things You’ve Got to Know Right Now!
(1) The reason you have to know these right now is...if you turn the page without reading this, you will not only be totally and hopelessly lost, you actually may damage your hard drive. Okay, none of that is true, but there are tricks we authors have to employ to get our readers (faithful folks like you, who have either invested in this book, or at the very least shoplifted it, and there’s certainly some risk in that) to read this stuff you want to just skip over, but we write these intros for a reason: we’re paid by the page. No! That’s not it at all (though, I wish it was). We’re paid to make books that work for the reader, and if you read this stuff, it will help you get more out of the book, and that’s important to all of us. Well, some of us, but really, who’s counting?
(2) Read this book in order if you’re new to Lightroom Mobile. I know this is different than some of my other books, but for this particular one, it helps if you read it in the order it’s presented here. I promise it will help, and you’ll be able to follow right along with everything.
(3) If you’re a “grumpy-pants old guy,” skip the chapter intros entirely. Writing these quirky chapter intro pages, which have little or nothing to do with what’s actually in the book, is a long-standing tradition of mine, and somehow lots of folks absolutely love them (I even published an entire book of nothing but chapter intros—I am not making this up), but some serious-type folks hate them with a passion of a thousand burning suns. So, if you’re one of “those” folks, do yourself a favor and just skip them. And, if you’re even the least bit agitated by reading this intro here, absolutely, positively skip them. This is tame. The rest of the book, however, is just straightforward techniques.
The Rest Are over Here, so Don’t Skip This.
(4) I have good news: If you’ve used Lightroom on your desktop, and you’re even relatively familiar with how it works, learning Lightroom Mobile is going to be easy for you. It has many of the same features already in Lightroom on your desktop—it’s just that Lightroom Mobile has an entirely different interface (I’ve joked with Adobe that they just built a mobile-editing application, and then, at the last minute, decided to call it Lightroom Mobile. They did not find that funny). This whole book is about teaching you the workflow, so this will be pretty easy for you.
(5) I created a special video just for you! As a special learning bonus, I created a video just for readers of this book, where I take you through my own Lightroom Mobile workflow, from start to finish. You’ll see exactly how I use it in my own work to help you learn how to make it work for you. You can find it here: http://kelbyone.com/books/lrmobile.
(6) Lightroom Mobile is a little different, depending on where you use it. The size of the screen on a phone, versus a tablet, is much different, which is why sometimes the experience changes between devices. For example, on a tablet, you’ll see five icons across the bottom when you tap on a photo. The first one, Filmstrip, lets you display your thumbnails across the bottom of the screen to make navigating to images easier. On a phone, there’s not room for the Filmstrip, so there are only four icons. It’s stuff like that. It doesn’t happen a whole bunch, but it happens.
(7) Lightroom Mobile is a little different on Apple’s iOS than it is on Android devices. For example, although the features are now finally (finally!) pretty much identical, some of the names are different. For example, on an iPhone, images are imported from your Camera Roll; on an Android device, they come in from your Gallery. If I write that out each time, it gets really tedious for you, so I just use “Camera Roll,” but now you know what I mean. Luckily, the differences like this are very few, but I did mention when something is not available for a particular OS.