To be honest, I don’t download a lot of presets from the internet.   I personally have limited mental bandwidth for add-ons, and there are so many out there that they can be hard to sift through.  However, I agree that done right, they can add great value.  It can be very efficient to use a good creative preset or set of presets, since I can get 90% of the way towards making a photo look great with just one or a handful of clicks in one panel rather than having to sift through all of Lightroom’s Develop sliders, plus I can get cool looks that I never would have thought of creating myself. Occasionally I hear about some presets [...more]

I am a fan of Craft & Vision e-books — great information and inspiration for photographers, quality writing and book design, and incredibly low prices — $5 each!   But now Craft & Vision has gone and released an even cheaper e-book — in fact a FREE e-book.  And it isn’t just a fluff piece, it is quality content.  It is 11 Ways to Improve Your Photography, edited by David DuChemin.  There are chapters by 8 different  well known and excellent photographers, designed to give you ideas and insights into improving your photographic vision and skills. Click here to visit Craft And Vision.

Adobe recently announced the upcoming release of this new software to manage images across devices via the cloud. Their initial target audience is point-and-shoot jpeg shooters, but it will almost certainly grow to include raw support, Lightroom integration, etc… As the first version is only available for the Mac (Windows to follow in 2012), I can’t actually get my hands on it to review it, but Rob Sylvan over at Lightroomers has a nice article on Carousel with his impressions so far, and some good perspective for those of us wondering how it might fit into our photo lives today.

Victoria Bampton, a.k.a. The Lightroom Queen,  has just recently released her Missing FAQ book updated for Lightroom 3.    She is an administrator and Lightroom Guru on lightroomforums.net, and is one of the most knowledgeable Lightroom users and troubleshooters I know — if I don’t know the answer to a question myself, I often turn to Victoria or this forum. As a forum moderator, Victoria understands  the questions and issues users face.  

For 10 days starting today, talented Photoshop instructor Mark Johnson presents videos on new features in Photoshop CS5. See today’s excellent video on content aware fill and content aware spot healing. If you can’t tune in each day to watch the video for freee, you can buy the whole set of 10 videos for $9.95 — a great deal. Click HERE to watch.

As Mac users may know, Aperture 3 was released last week.  While I would love to be able to speak personally to how it compares to Lightroom (Lightroom 2 or the Lightroom 3 Beta), I don’t have a Mac and am not willing to fork out such a large chunk of cash to buy one just  to be able to run Aperture, so I can’t do so.  Fortunately my colleague Gene McCullagh has written a thoughtful blog post on his experiences and opinions thus far over at www.lightroomsecrets.com. Mac users, my advice to you is to think long term and to not  switch to/from either unless you are convinced one will significantly help you to improve the quality of your [...more]

Last week Lightroom guru  Sean McCormack released a new web engine plug-in, LRB Exhibition.  I have to say, I am impressed — in less than an hour I was able to use Lightroom to create a complete website that I would not hesitate to show someone who might  judge my work.  The plug-in accomodates a home page, about page, contact page, one additional page of your choice, up to two external link pages, and up to 6 gallery pages.   You can modify text placement, fonts, all colors, and much more.  And it costs just 15 Euros, or USD $21  at today’s exchange rate!    This includes up to 9 downloads, so as Sean continues to refine the product, you can [...more]

Most of us occasionally or often can use some advice about what we can do to make our images really pop.   More contrast? Less contrast? Brighten up that corner? Change the color cast of just the mountain?  It’s  about conveying a mood, and understanding how to lead the viewer’s eye where you want them to go.   If you have some favorite images and you want help from a master at this, consider doing what I just did — purchasing a Print Treatment critique from Tim Cooper.  Tim is a very talented fine art photographer and photography and Photoshop instructor.  For $25, you will receive a movie in which he works two of your images in Photoshop, talking about why he [...more]

A colleague of mine, Kathy Eyster, brought to my attention a great series of compact camera reviews that Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) published for the holidays: Enthusiast Digital Compacts Premium Digital Compacts Ultra Compacts Budget Compacts Digital Photography Review also has excellent  in-depth reviews of DSLR’s and lenses. Kathy is a an excellent photography  instructor, by the way.  Check out her blog at www.essentialdigitalcamera.com.

I have been thinking lately that it would be nice to have a point and shoot camera that I could always have in my pocket. Here’s an article from yesterday’s New York Times, with recommendations for point and shoots under $300. article I didn’t check them all, but I doubt they shoot in raw. I know the Canon G10 does, but it is closer to $500.