Using the Internet to Learn

There is a vast amount of information and help about photography on the internet. The purpose of this page is to help you make the best use of this resource. Information is typically presented as written material or videos.

Youtube

Youtube is by far the greatest source of videos on photography, indeed many web pages that include videos actually just include a link to a video in Youtube.The url for youtube is listed in the resources table lower down. On launching Youtune you will see a search box at the tope of the screen. Simply enter something like "Guide to using Lightroom Classic". You will then be presented with several videos to choose from. If, as in this case, you want assistance on using some software, its important to find a recently posted article - because software keeps changing! Click on "Filters" near the top right of the screen and then choose "Sort By Upload Date".

The Youtube search facility is fairly simple, so in the example above, it may well return unrelated results such as "Using Lightroom Mobile". You may therefore want to try wording a search in different forms to see what is returned. For example, "Beginners Guide to Adobe Lightroom". Do bare in mind that when doing a new search such as this, you'll need to set the filter again.

Google

Google is a very powerful resource for finding information (url shown later). It returns results in two forms (1) References to articles that you can click on and (2) An AI overview. Using the example above, enter "Guide to using Lightroom Classic" in to google and it will return a link to the user guide information on the Adobe website, and Google AI's guidance for how you should go about learning the software. However, always take AI guidance with a small pinch of salt. The AI will also show some links to useful Youtube videos on the topic you searched for.

As with the Youtube search, rewording your search criteria can result in different results from Google. For example, "Beginners Guide to Adobe Lightroom" will return a selection of Youtube videos but no AI summary.

Using an AI to research

There are many AI systems now available online and each has their pros and cons. For example, ChatGPT is an AI that is useful for "Chatting" but not as good for research. Alvin recommends Perplexity (url later) because it shows where it is taking its information from, gives you links to useful information and provides easy to understand summaries.

Enter "Guide to using Lightroom Classic" in to Perplexity and it will list the articles its scanned, then give you an answer with links to useful web pages and videos. (Each bullet point in the answer will include a link to the source article that the AI has summarized). Above the overall answer are some links such as "Videos" and "Sources" which give you more videos and links to web pages.

Resources

Example searches in Perplexity