There are a couple voices I listen to when it comes to tweaking my own skills with Lightroom – Piet van Den Eynde and Sean McCormack. Lightroom keeps changing, and most of us don’t have time to dig around under the hood to learn it all. Fortunately these two gentlemen know Lightroom extremely well, and have the ability to teach it clearly. Sean McCormack is a new author to Craft & Vision, but he’s been writing the Lightroom Blog for ages and his stuff is always really helpful. So when Sean and I started talking about how he could become part of the C&V family, I asked him to distill everything he knows into one short eBook. He humoured me and pretended to do exactly that, when what he did, is in fact, way better. He wrote a really big book called Essential Development, 20 Great Techniques for Lightroom 4, and focused on the Develop module, because that’s where we spend most of our time.

Essential Development is a killer value. Sean’s divided it into 20 chapters, among them: Understanding The Histogram, Making White White, Beauty Retouching, Dodge & Burn for Beauty, Cross Processing, Achieving a Filmic Look, Image Toning, Tilt Shift, Effective Sharpening, and Correcting Lens Issues. That’s half of them. Then he said, Hey, what if I make a set of Lightroom Presets available as well? So we did that too.

I wrote a book about Lightroom, albeit Lightroom 3, but I still learned some really great stuff in Sean’s book. Whether you’re just looking to tweak your knowledge of Lightroom since the jump from LR3 to LR4, or you’ve been waiting for a great resource that doesn’t bog you down in Library modules and Print templates, you’ll get way more than $5 worth of value out of this. The screenshots are clear and large, and the writing is concise. It’s over 120 spreads long, and fluff-free.

We’re offering Essential Development a little differently than we usually do, with two options. The first is the PDF eBook for $5, the second is the PDF of Essential Development, Essential Development Toolbox (a folder of 85 Lightroom presets), and a short PDF instruction manual to help with the installation and catalog some of the presets, all for $6 instead of the eventual $7 (see codes below). Presets are a great way to cut down your editing time, and while I use them only as a starting point, they sure can be helpful. With 85 of them, there are presets here for a range of styles and tastes. Like I said with the last eBook, if you can’t get something solid out of this eBook, you should be teaching this stuff.

The Add to Cart button above is for the full package (incl. presets) – to receive $1 off enter the discount code DEVELOP6 and to get 20% off 5+ eBooks enter the discount code DEVELOP20 (these codes expire Tuesday, October 23 at 11:59 PM PST).

To download the basic $5 PDF of Essential Development please visit Craft&Vision.