Orange County Photographer, Jeff Sipper

Once again, the minds behind X-equals have knocked it out of the park with their new Lightroom Mini-guide!

I’ve been using Lightroom since it was released a few years ago, and it has revolutionized my entire workflow.  For those of you new to Lightroom, or just now getting into Lightroom 3, the guys over at X-equals have put together a great little mini-guide that gives some step by step instructions on how to get started.

The guide comes in at 52 pages, and does a great job at explaining all the new stuff that Adobe has jammed into Lightroom, including the new Import Module, the new “Process” engine that makes a marked difference in how your images will look, especially in the noise and sharpening categories, and the vastly improved Watermarking system. Plus a bunch of info about the Adjustment brushes, and the new Lens Corrections tool.

The thing I love about all the X-equals products is how easy they are to use. Whether it’s their Lightroom Presets, or their e-books which, while jammed full of info, don’t read like a boring manual.

You can get the Lightroom 3 Mini-guide for only $6.99 over at their site now!

About a month ago, I got an email from Brandon over at X-Equals.com asking if I’d take a look at an E-book that he had been working on.  I said sure.  If you haven’t been to X-Equals.com, you need to go check it out.  Not only is his blog one of my go-to’s for Lightroom tips and tricks, his interviews with other photographers are great, and his LR presets he sells (and gives away) are some of my favorites.

The E-book he sent me, “Living in the Cloud, Offsite Storage for Photographers” is chock full of useful information for any photographer that is looking for offsite storage backup.  Now, like most photographers who made the switch to digital a few years ago, I struggled with trying to find a good backup system.  Mostly, at first, it dealt with having a catalog of DVD’s taking up space in a bin in the closet.  Next, it was multiple Hard Drives categorized by year, with one copy staying at our place, and another over at my parents’ house, just in case something happened.  I think we are to the stage where offsite storage isn’t just a necessity, but it would be a lot less hassle.  And this is where the “Living in the Cloud” comes in.

“Living in the Cloud” starts off discussing why offsite storage is a great way to go, how trusting people with your precious files is really ok, and starts going into the Amazon’s Simple Storage system, or S3, for short.  I had heard of S3 before, but didn’t really take the time to fully understand what it was all about, and how I could benefit from it.  “Living int he Cloud” does just this.  Makes it easy to understand, and walks you thru the process of getting started, getting your files to Amazon, and the various ways you can do this.  He discussuses using “Jungle Disk” as a client to get the files to Amazon, and also their new AWS service (Amazon Web Service) in which you can mail hard drives back and forth with Amazon if you have a ton of stuff to backup.  And really, these days, who doesn’t have a ton of stuff, between HD Video, thousands of larger megapixel camera files, etc.?

Needless to say, “Living in the Cloud” really helped explain to me all that is involved in offsite storage.  I would highly recommend it for any photographer that, like me, was totally clueless about how and why I should do it! It’s only $19.99

To buy the book, and see a few pages from it, check out http://x-equals.com/blog/?p=6491

You can check out X-equals at http://x-equals.com/blog/