I'm finding lightroom a very powerful tool for my uses. At the moment, the only thing I find myself wishing it had was better healing/cloning tool.

At this stage I'm sifting through various free video tutorials. Some bits start getting a bit repetitive, but I'm find I often pick up a new point here and there.
Here are some channels that I've found useful:

Lightroom - YouTube

serge remelli:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2A7F058E0B6C95F4

Julieanne Kost:
Julieanne Kost. Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Adobe Lightroom tutorials.

Lightroom Killer Tips - Get your weekly dose of the coolest Adobe® Lightroom tutorials, tips, time-saving shortcuts, photographic inspiration, and undocumented tricks. New videos posted each Monday and other news over the week.

I never found a really great video tutorial on sharpening, but came across this article on lightroom 3 (which can be extrapolated to LR4):
Understanding Sharping in Adobe Lightroom 3

Hope you find these useful!

If you're running a Mac, Aperture works as well as LR for RAW. You can download both Lightroom and Aperture and see which program suits you best under their free 30 day trial incentive program.

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Critiquing my images are welcomed and appreciated.

For the last couple of RC's, LR has had almost continual coverage for the last 6-9 months. RC2 ended Oct. 31, RC3 comes out Nov. 5. Easy way to try it and keep it running past the 30 days if you still can't afford it right away.

Here's another interesting starting point for Lightroom. Phil Steele has a good easy start
progran that you can check out at His program is very afordable, easy to follow and will get you started. At least check out the youtube intro.

I don't do any real cloning or healing in LightRoom, other than occasional dust speck cloning in sky areas. Anything that's going to get printed gets run out to TIFF, opened in PhotoShop and I let content aware do its thing for more complicated areas. Works great.

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Most helpful to my getting started learning lightroom was:
Adobe TV's Juilanne Kost's Getting Started with Lightroom 4 vids.

For Books
Scott Kelby - The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book for Digital Photographers and to a lesser extent Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 - The Missing FAQ by Victoria Bampton. Martin Evenings Lightroom 4 book is supposed to be very good as well.

I've also downloaded a TON of assorted presets from around the web - if you get Scott Kelby's book he give's you a URL to download some. Just do a search for Lightroom 4 Presets. I've found these helpful for when your trying to dial in a certain look or feel for a shot, and can often take an otherwise blah photo up a notch.

Agree with the above poster-one of the few things that bugs me in Lightroom is I wish there was a more robust retouching set of tools. Hopefully in future releases they will build on this tool. What they do have is great for random dust particles and such, though.

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Thanks very much for all the suggestions! I have not yet installed Lightroom - I'll do that this weekend. I bought from BH and just noticed that they included a video tutorial for lightroom on DVD - so that will be a good place to start.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I also bought Aftershot Pro (they were clearing out the old version so it was cheap). But sounds look Lightroom is the way to go. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks again.

Oh and another thing I've found useful that helps to demonstrate the power of raw;

Show Us Your RAW Conversions, BEFORE And AFTER - Page 351 - Canon Digital Photography Forums

wow, after going through parts of that thread I'm going to have to take more raw pictures and play with LR!

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