A while back I thought this might be the year I finally jump into the Micro 4/3 camera pool, and a $290 black friday deal on a Panasonic DMC-GF2 pretty much forced my hand. This will be the first detachable lens camera I've owned since my old Canon AE-1 35mm SLR, so I'm pretty excited to start taking photography seriously again.

This also means I'm going to want to move up the ladder from Picasa for my photo management/processing needs. In looking at some Aperture/Lightroom comparisons online and briefly trying each out with my existing photo library, I think Lightroom fits my needs better, and since I can get Lightroom for only $20 more than Aperture on my educational discount, I decided to give it a go. (My decision was also biased by an Aperture thread here a while back where most folks seemed to come down on the Lightroom side.)

Since there are a lot of photo geeks here, I was wondering if anyone knew of any good online Lightroom tutorials I could use to get up to speed quickly. So far I think I have most of the basic concepts down, and I've found a few plugins for doing things like Picasa Web export and importing facial recognition tags from Picasa, but I'd like something that'll teach me some of the more advanced photo editing and workflow techniques. Any suggestions?

When I was first learning Lightroom, there were a few Youtube videos done by Adobe people, where they walked you through all the different sliders and how to best use them. That was years ago. I assume there's a lot more of that sort of thing now.

Didn't really see anything worthwhile on the first few pages of Youtube results. There's a bunch of useful Adobe-produced stuff at:

http://tv.adobe.com/product/lightroom/

but it's not laid out very well in terms of knowing where to start, or which lessons build on each other, etc. I was hoping for something more comprehensive that started at a high level overview and drilled down. For now, I'll just work through those AdobeTV episodes and hope I can eventually put it all together.

See if you think something like http://kelbytraining.com/ is worth it for you. Their training has always been spot on in my experience.

Cheers

Cris