In my opinion, there should be two additional chapters in books written for expectant mothers: photography and hair cutting. Even if you’ve never held a camera or a pair of hair scissors, you will once your baby arrives.

If you can’t cut hair, you can pay a stylist; if you aren’t a good photographer, you can hire one to make your baby’s portraits. Ultimately, however, you will want to document your family’s day-to-day life, which means learning how to use a camera.

Since we have just determined that you hold a very important job — Family Photo Historian — the goal of this column is to put some tips and tricks in your camera bag.

Although there are many photo editing programs on the market, the one that I will feature in this column is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. Wait–don’t leave! Unless you are a current Photoshop and/or Lightroom user, you probably saw those words “Adobe” and “Photoshop” and heard “cha-ching” just as your eyes glazed over from fear that I was about to go all technical on you.

Don’t worry: You qualify for a substantial discount as a homeschooling family (and I’ll tell you how to get it) and Lightroom is a user-friendly program, less complicated than Photoshop.

Why should I use Lightroom 2?
Lightroom enables you to organize, edit, and backup your photos within a slick interface that is both user-friendly enough for the amateur photographer and powerful enough for the professional. Let’s briefly explore these capabilities.

Organize:
Doesn’t it make you nuts when you need a photo and can’t find it? Lightroom allows you to organize your photos by keywords, ratings, even colors. When I import groups of photos from my memory card, I assign them broad keywords such as “cross country,” “fair,” or “vacation” that will work for the whole batch. After import, I add additional, more specific keywords such as the names of people in the picture, or details like “sand,” “hands,” “floral,” “feet,” or where the photos were taken.

By taking a few moments to keyword my photos at import, I can easily locate them later based on the keywords that I’ve assigned them.

Edit: Lightroom has not only the basic features you would expect in most photo editing programs – red eye reduction, cropping, spot removal – but also the same powerful features available in Adobe Camera Raw. One of the neatest features is something called the Adjustment Brush, which enables you to “paint” on effects such as skin softening, brightness, contrast, and sharpness.

In my opinion, one of the most wonderful things about Lightroom is that it has a non-destructive workflow, which is a fancy way of saying Lightroom doesn’t alter your original image. You can crop and edit to your heart’s content without worrying about overwriting your original.

Backup:
Backing up your photos isn’t going to really work unless they’re being saved to a different location, like an external hard drive, instead of just another folder on your computer. If your computer crashes, it crashes, right? If you have an external hard drive attached, Lightroom can be set to automatically duplicate your photos to another location upon import.

What do I do now?

Remember when I told you that homeschoolers qualify for serious software discounts? The retail of Lightroom 2 is $299, but as a homeschooler you can purchase it for $99 or less!

First you need to email Adobe to get pre-qualified. [A word of advice: do this right the first time. I emailed Adobe without documenting that we homeschool, and I’m still waiting for their response. Three weeks later I sent another request, which included a scanned copy of my HSLDA membership card, and I received my approval one minute and twenty-seven seconds later.]

Send an email to adobeauthorizations@adobe.com and include the following:

• Name of Teacher & Student(s)

• Grade level(s) and expected graduation date(s)

• Address, phone & email

• Any other relevant information that documents home school status (Letter of intent to home school addressed to local school district for current school year; Home School Legal Defense Association membership card; Home School Charter School membership card; or book/curriculum receipt for the current year)

Don’t lose that authorization email, because you’re going to need to forward it to verify your eligibility after you place your order. I purchased my copy of Lightroom from Academic Superstore (www.academicsuperstore.com) for $98.95 plus $1.99 shipping.

Enjoy Lightroom 2 today!

The good news is that you don’t have to wait for your software to arrive in the mail. Once you’ve purchased the software, go to Adobe’s website and download a fully functional 30-day trial version. When your purchased software arrives in the mail, enter the serial number when you open Lightroom on your computer (whenever you open the trial version, you will be asked if you want to continue using the trial or enter a serial number to activate it) and you won’t even have to install from the disk; Lightroom 2 will already be installed from the online download.

Questions? Comments? Feedback? Suggestions for future columns?
Email me at dawn@heartofthemattermagazine.com.

Recommended Resources:

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/lightroom/articles/lir2am_videotutorials.html (getting started with Lightroom 2.0 video tutorials)

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/ (Matt Kloskowski’s Lightroom Killer Tips blog)

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby

Check out my article on page 44 of the new flipbook edition of Heart of the Matter Magazine.

Dawn has been homeschooling her eight children–ages pre-K to college–since 1993. Her interests include photography, and both graphic and web design. She is the owner of Barefoot Blog Designs, and also blogs at My Home Sweet Home, her photoblog and The Homeschool Post.