Photoshop CS6 started shipping yesterday, so I anticipate that a lot of photographers not currently using Photoshop are wondering if they should consider it.  I am assuming for the sake of this article that you are already using Lightroom.  (If not, you may want to read this post, which talks about why I think pro’s as well as amateurs who really care about their photography should.) The question here is, do you need Photoshop too? There is certainly much that you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Lightroom.  The key questions are, do you need or want to do enough of those things to justify the $699 price tag, and are you willing and able to invest [...more]

In this video, I show you the features that have most caught my attention so far in the Photoshop CS6 Beta: The content-aware patch tool feature Content-aware move and extend Easy skin tone selection within Select>Color Range New blur filters with on-screen controls and live preview Incredible performance boost in the Liquify filter preview Layer-based video editing — I didn’t expect this to be in my favorites list because I don’t shoot video, but it has made me want to start!  Download the Photoshop CS6 Beta here. (After you click on the play button, click on the wheel/sprocket in the bottom right of the video to increase the quality setting.)   Though I didn’t cover it, the Adaptive Wide Angle [...more]

Ever loved a photo you took, but threw it away because it was blurry due to camera shake?  Well, stop doing that!! Adobe demonstrated its new Photoshop technology for removing camera-shake blur from photos at Adobe Max 2011.  Will this make it into Photoshop CS6?  I have absolutely no idea.  They even qualify this by saying that it may or may not make it into a future version.   All I know that when they started demonstrating Content Aware Fill, it made it into the next Photoshop version. Every time I start to think that it may be time to stop upgrading Photoshop, something mind-blowing comes along. Here’s the Adobe video of this exciting image deblurring technology. Here’s another cool [...more]

In this Lightroom and Photoshop video tutorial, I demonstrate how to copy eyes, faces or heads (or anything) from one photo into another and transform them to fit.   This sweet cat of mine died a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to make a print of this image.  However, the eyes were out of focus — but fortunately I had another version that had in-focus eyes that I could borrow from. I don’t post much on Photoshop, because these days I don’t use it nearly as much as I do Lightroom. However, compositing is one example of where I still rely on it.  Compositing in Photoshop can be a complicated process.  This is a relatively easy example.  For those [...more]

As hard as Adobe works to keep up, when you buy a newly released camera, it may be quite a while before there is a new Lightroom release to support it.  In the meantime, Lightroom will not recognize your camera raw files.   And if you haven’t upgraded from Lightroom 1 or 2, you will never get direct support for newer cameras.  The same issues occur with Camera Raw and Photoshop. So what do you do if you have a new camera, or an older version of Lightroom or Photoshop?  Fortunately there is a free solution — it involves converting your raw files to Adobe’s DNG format first. Jeff Tranberry from Adobe has written a post on converting to DNG [...more]

I like a lot of the new features for photographers in Photoshop CS5, but now that I have been using it for a while, I notice there are two that just continue to warm my heart. The first one may seem minor, but if you have used old versions where this feature wasn’t present, then you are probably really appreciating it as well.  It used to be that if you had a 16 bit file, and went to save a jpeg, the jpeg file option was not available.  You would have to cancel the save dialog, convert the file to 8 bit, and then go back into the save dialog.  Now, if the file is 16 bit, the jpeg save [...more]

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.

Curves is certainly not one of those intuitive features of Photoshop (or Lightroom), or at least that was my perspective when I tried to figure it out on my own before I got formal training. Curves is used to brighten or darken tones in your image, and at a more advanced level, to do color correction work. The best way to use it in PS is with an adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Curves.) In Lightroom simply go to the Tone Curve panel in the Develop module. The curve will look like this (with different buttons and features around it depending on your software and version).  Photoshop gives you more point-by-point control, so I will begin there. The Curve Dialog Box [...more]

For me there were not alot of exciting additions to Photoshop CS4,  but I have to say that the new Content Aware Scaling is quite impressive. Here’s an image that I like, but I feel that there is too much empty space between the photographer and the subjects: Here’s how to easily eliminate some of this empty space: In the layers palette,  double click on the background layer and hit OK to convert it to a regular layer that can be transformed. Go to Edit>Content Aware Scaling.  Drag in on the right hand center square of the transform bounding box, to shrink the empty space. Hit enter to commit the change, and then crop the image with the crop tool [...more]

In addition to writing this blog, I will be contributing occasionally to O’Reilly Media’s Inside Lightroom blog. Visit the blog today to read my first post, on maximizing compatibility of Photoshop files so that you can import them into Lightroom. Go to O’Reilly There are twelve writers and alot of great information, so visit often (and come back here too!).