What You Actually Get When You Buy Into This
Scott Kelby The Digital Photography is a fairly comprehensive beginner to intermediate course covering RAW processing, lighting, composition, and post-processing in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I went through it a while back because I was stuck somewhere between "I know what aperture is" and "I can make photos look decent" without understanding why. The format is mostly video lessons with accompanying book chapters, and it's structured in a way that actually moves in a sensible order rather than jumping around randomly. Most online courses do that last one terribly.
How Scott Kelby The Digital Photography Works in Practice
The first section you encounter covers camera fundamentals. Not the superficial "what does ISO do" stuff that everyone else explains poorly, but the kind of thing where Kelby goes into why your images are consistently coming out a stop underexposed when shooting in Aperture Priority mode during overcast days. He has a habit of addressing the specific mistakes regular people make rather than listing features from a manual. That's where most of the value sits for me. The post-processing sections in Lightroom are where the course spends the most time and probably where it earns its weight. He walks through his actual workflow for color correction, exposure recovery, and local adjustments. I found the part about using gradient filters for sky replacement surprisingly useful because I had been trying to do it manually with the brush tool and wasting twenty minutes per image doing it wrong. The Photoshop portion covers layers, blending modes, and retouching. It is not an exhaustive Photoshop course by any means. You will finish it understanding what layers do but not having mastery over them. That is honest positioning on his part and I respect it.
One Specific Problem I Hit and How I Worked Around It
About halfway through the Lightroom editing module, I ran into a real issue. Kelby demonstrates his develop process on a set of portraits where the lighting was controlled and relatively even. My files came from a wedding with mixed ambient and flash, and his step-by-step approach just didn't translate cleanly. I kept ending up with skin tones that looked orange and shadows that were crushed to near-black no matter what I adjusted. The workaround was to stop following his steps linearly and instead use the Histogram panel in Lightroom as my primary reference point while temporarily disabling the Presence sliders. I would set my white balance first by using the eyedropper on a neutral gray area in the frame, then adjust exposure based on where the histogram hit the left wall, then bring back detail from the shadows using the Shadow slider rather than the Exposure slider. It took me about three sessions to internalize that pattern, but once I did, the rest of the course started making sense because I understood the underlying logic rather than just copying his settings.
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Common Pitfalls Beginners Miss Here
The biggest trap in this course is assuming that watching the videos is equivalent to learning the material. It is not. I learned that when I finished the entire basic section and then opened a raw file and had no idea where to start. The course teaches you to see the problems before you fix them, but you have to practice seeing them yourself. That means opening your own photographs and going through each adjustment stage deliberately rather than just hitting the Auto button and moving on. Another thing nobody warns you about: Kelby edits aggressively compared to what most working photographers actually do. His final images tend to have higher contrast and more saturated colors than what sells in commercial work. If you are studying this for a professional career, you will need to mentally dial his output down about fifteen percent when applying it to client work. I learned this the hard way after a client told me their food photography looked like it belonged in a magazine spread rather than on their menu.
What This Course Won't Do For You
It does not cover drone photography. It does not go deep into HDR merging workflows beyond the basics. It does not address tethered shooting for studio work or advanced compositing techniques. If any of those are your primary interest, you should look elsewhere or supplement this with targeted tutorials. The course also assumes you are working primarily in Lightroom with Photoshop as a secondary tool. If you shoot mostly in Capture One or prefer a purely Photoshop-based workflow, you will find yourself translating his instructions rather than following them directly. That is a minor friction but it adds up over time.
Where to Get It
Scott Kelby The Digital Photography is available through the Scott Kelby Publishing website and various photography education platforms. Pricing changes periodically but it typically runs in the one-time purchase range rather than a subscription model, which is relatively rare for this type of content. There are also occasional bundle deals that include his other specialized courses on topics like portrait lighting and landscape photography if you want to go deeper after finishing this one. I would recommend starting with the free preview content on his website before committing money. The preview lessons give you a clear sense of whether his teaching style clicks with you because it is very specific and somewhat dry. Some people find that approach excellent. Some people find it exhausting. There is no middle ground here.
Final Practical Notes
The course runs roughly forty to fifty hours of content depending on how thoroughly you pause and experiment. Budget at least three months to work through it at a comfortable pace. Rushing through it in a weekend defeats the purpose entirely because the material builds on itself sequentially and you will lose track of the reasoning behind each adjustment if you skip ahead. Keep a notebook or a text document open and write down the specific problem each lesson is solving. Kelby frames everything around solving visual problems rather than memorizing slider positions, and that distinction is what separates people who finish this course and actually improve from people who finish it and still produce the same mediocre images they had before. The course is not perfect. The video quality on some older lessons shows its age with 720p resolution and basic editing. Newer modules are noticeably better. But the instructional content itself holds up well enough that the production values rarely become a genuine obstacle. What matters more is that you actually open your own photos and apply what you watch rather than treating it like entertainment. That is where most people fail with any photography course, not just this one.
