1 – Introduction

Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic is a book written by Thommy Andersen. The goal of this book is to provide you with detailed information on all the commands available in Lightroom. Many of these commands are either ‘hidden’ or difficult to find, hence the title of the book.

I use Lightroom as my raw converter and many other people do. However, even though I have extensive knowledge of lightroom, and even though I published a comprehensive tutorial in the Mastery Workshop series titled Artistic Lightroom Mastery, I do not know each and every command available in Lightroom. In fact, except for Lightroom software engineers, I doubt anyone does. There are just too many commands, many of which I only use once in a while, not often enough to memorize where they are and what they do.

2 – About the book

One important aspect of this book is that it is not a workflow book, or guide, the way my Artistic Lightroom Mastery Workshop on USB tutorial is. In my Mastery Tutorial my goal is to describe my Lightroom workflow in detail, give examples, and make my presets available. In Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic Thommy’s goal is to provide information on every Lightroom command. The chapters are organized by the type of action you want to perform on your photographs: import, organize, view, edit, print, export, share and so on. This organization does not follow a specific workflow. Instead, this information can be used in any workflow.

I like to think of Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic as a ‘Lightroom Dictionary’ so to speak because, just like a word dictionary, it provides information about each function the way a word dictionary provides information about words. Just like a dictionary does not tell you how to use these words, Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic does not tell you how to process your photographs.

To me the value of Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic is to provide me with information about many things I would never find on my own. Either I would not know where to look, or I would not have time to find it in the maze of drop down menus, obscure keyboard commands, or hidden interface controls. In fact, I would not even know that these commands, or shortcuts, even existed.

Therefore this book enlarges both my knowledge of Lightroom and my awareness of what can be done with Lightroom. By doing so it increased the value of this software. I still pay the same amount of money to Adobe each month, but I can do more with what I pay for.

There is a lot of learning material in Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic. You can explore this knowledge in three ways. First, by reading the book cover to cover and discover new things you ignored in the process. Second, by jumping to any part of the book and see if you find things you did not know before. You most likely will. I know I did. Third, by looking for a specific command you cannot find on your own. The table of contents is helpful if you chose this third approach.

Conclusion

Get this book. It will help you use Lightroom more efficiently and more professionally. The cost of the book is easily offset by the amount of knowledge you will acquire. As I said previously, you will get more use out of lightroom for the money you pay monthly to Adobe. Where can you get it? Amazon has it at this link in the US, in both print or Kindle version, or you can do a web search for Hidden Secrets in Lightroom Classic by Thommy Andersen and you will find it no matter where you live.

Alain Briot

January 2025