Photoshop Insider

Ya know, it seems like only yesterday I was in this airport (actually, it was, as I returned from San Jose on a red-eye), but now I’m on my way to Atlanta for my Lightroom Live! tour tomorrow (Friday).

There is some big news today: Adobe released a pretty significant upgrade to Camera Raw today (taking it to version 4.1). Adobe had announced it earlier in the week, but now it’s actually available for download, and besides adding support for some of the newest cameras, it adds new sharpening controls, better noise reduction, and really slick new features that make it a must-download upgrade (especially since its free!). You can download Camera Raw 4.1 (for Mac and Widows) by clicking here.

Well, it’s time to board, so we’ll catch you tomorrow with my Friday News Update. Have a great day everybody, and to everybody who’s coming to my Lightroom seminar in Atlanta—we’ll see you there!!

I’m proud to announce that Nikon, Inc. has just come on as a co-sponsor of my new Lightroom Live U.S. seminar tour (joining Epson, Westcott, Peachpit Press, and Dell). During the day, we have three live shoots (A bridal shoot, we shoot live Calla Lillies, and we have a live portrait shoot), and I shoot with both a Nikon D2Xs and a Nikon D200 during these shoots.

The next stop for the tour is Friday in Atlanta, and then I’m up in New York City on Thursday, June 7th at the Jacob Javits Center. For more info, or to sign up, visit PhotoshopSeminars.com

If you’re at one of these next two events, please join me in welcoming Nikon (and don’t forget to come up and say “hi” if you read this blog).

Replacing what would normally be the Monday News Update, but it was a holiday and blah, blah, blah. Right now I’m out in San Jose, California at Adobe’s HQ for some meetings today, and it’s 3:32 am EST, but I can’t sleep. You know why? Because I haven’t posted my Tuesday news. Here goes:

• You know I’m a sucker for those before/after retouching sites, and add a celebrity retouch or two, write a few words in Russian, and I just can’t say no. Check it out right here.
• Moose Peterson (master of wildlife photography and Photoshop World instructor) has been digging deeper into finding “The Perfect PC Laptop.” He ran a very informative piece last week on his Dell Precision M65 laptop (which he calls his “Road Warrior”), and he included some info on his desktop machine as well. If you’re hard on your computers, this is definitely worth checking out (click here).
• You’ve heard me talk about famed Wedding photographer David Ziser here in blog, and now you can get his free email newsletter (which kicks butt by the way), by going to his site and signing up for free.
• Registration for Photoshop World Las Vegas (coming to the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, Sept. 4-6, 2007) is now open. If you’re coming to Vegas, get on board, baby!! (click here for details).
• If you’re into Lightroom (and I know you are), check out an article I did with 10 cool tips for Lightroom users, over at Layers Magazine (The How-to Magazine for Everything Adobe; on newsstands nationwide).
• Pro photographer Alan Hess did a mini-review of my Lightroom For Digital Photographers book over at Lexar’s pro digital site. Check it out right here.
• Mark Flemming over at LensEnvy.com posted a photo he took during my Lightroom Tour Stop in Boston (and if you look closely, you can see NAPP’s Executive Director Larry Becker looking all “out of focus” in the background).

All right, it’s pretty late and I’m going to bed. Everybody, have a great Tuesday—do great things–take great shots that don’t need fixing in Photoshop. Wait, who said that? It must be really late.

P.S. Hey, there’s another post today—keep scrolling down a bit.

OK, it’s not a beautiful view of the kit (it’s from B&H’s site), but it’s the same Lighting kit (using Westcott’s TD-5 SpiderLites) I’ve been using on my Lightroom Live! Tour (not to be confused with B&H’s Scott Kelby Location Kit, which isn’t lighting at all—it’s diffusers, stands, Justin clamps, and reflectors for shooting with multiple wireless dedicated flashes, like Nikon SB-800s or Canon Speedlights).

Once you see these these SpiderLites in person, you have to have one (OK, two). Having continuous, cool, daylight fluorescent studio lighting that’s always on, and they’re so easy to work with it’s like cheating, is just incredibly compelling once you see it live. (I did a studio shoot using SpiderLites and my buddy Terry White came along, and he was so impressed with them, that he got online and ordered his right in the lobby of his hotel when I dropped him off that night).

Anyway, the good news is that B&H Photo has put together this kit, using the same lights, and backdrop I use in the live shoot at my seminar. The bad news? Just like my location kit; it’s already sold out. However, you can visit the page on B&H’s site (click here) and get on their email notification list, so as soon as it’s back in stock, they’ll email you right away.

One last note: B&H photo put this kit together after receiving so many requests from students at my seminars. I don’t get a kick-back, or a cut, or…well…. anything from the sale of these kits—B&H put it together as a courtesy to make things easier for my students. So even if you buy 50 kits, it won’t help send my kids to college (although it will probably send somebody’s kid at B&H Photo’s to a really nice university. Probably Harvard).

On this Memorial Day, just a humble word of thanks to the dedicated men and women of our armed services and to all those who came before them who laid down their lives to protect the freedoms we enjoy each day.

All we have of freedom, all we use or know -
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
~Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899

Goods new: We had been sold out for the Atlanta stop of my Adobe Lightroom Tour Live! next Friday, but we were able to move into a larger hall, so if you were on a cancellation waiting list for a spot to open up; it’s opened up! If you weren’t on the list, you can grab a seat today at photoshopseminars.com

Registration for the full-day seminar is $99 (only $79 for NAPP members). Hope to see you in Atlanta on Friday, or up in New York City on June 7th (don’t forget, if you read my blog, come up and say hi during one of the breaks between sessions!)

I’ve had lots of emails and posts about when I’m going to release the CS3 version of my “Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers.” Well, I’m delighted to let you know that I’m just wrapping up the latest edition and the book should be available in late June. I made an awful lot of changes since the last edition (for CS2), with completely “rewritten from the ground up” chapters on The CS3 Bridge, Camera Raw 4.0, Color Correction, and printing & color management.

I guess what surprised me the most was how many new techniques I’ve learned since the CS2 version of the book came out over two years ago. So, I not only added in the new features of CS3, I also updated a lot of the existing techniques with new settings or faster, better, easier or more effective ways to pull them off. Plus, of course I couldn’t help but add all my latest stuff, and my favorite new techniques, photo effects, photo fixes, and repair techniques.

The big challenge is keeping the book from becoming 700 or 800 pages long (most readers don’t like those huge unwieldy-sized book). This is more challenging than you might think, because each time a new version of Photoshop comes out, I add in all the new techniques for photographers, and this book started back on version 7, so if you add only 100 pages for each version, it’s not long before you’ve got a “phone book-sized” tome. So I carefully went through this new version to “cherry pick” only the best, most useful, most relevant techniques for the book (the real meat and potatoes of what serious photographers will really use), and the more obvious, or esoteric techniques will be available online just to people who buy the book at a special Web site I’m creating just for them. Of course, even with all that, the book is pretty darn big, but know that I did my level best to keep the page count under control.

If you want to be among the first to get it as soon as it comes off press, you can pre-order it from Amazon.com.

I’m excited to introduce you to the “new kid in town,” and the latest addition to NAPP’s in-house team of Photoshop gurus, Rafael Concepcion (he prefers to go by just “RC”).

We first met RC a couple of years ago at Photoshop World Miami during a preconference workshop based on the TV Show “So you think you can dance?” called “So you think you can teach Photoshop?” This pre-con was designed for Photoshop instructors, and besides teaching NAPP criteria for becoming a Photoshop World instructor, each student would give a 10-minute presentation in front of the class and each session would be critiqued by the instructors (Matt, Dave, and myself). Then, at the end of the day the class would choose the best instructor, and that instructor would then get to teach a 30-minute session in the NAPP theater on the Expo floor.

Well, RC won the competition in a unanimous vote, but it was his live Expo floor session that caught our attention. He was doing such a great job, that the moderator for that class was grabbing staffers off the floor to come and see this guy in action—he was that good! Since then we’ve been talking on and off to RC and when it was time to add another Photoshop expert to our team, his abilities, and his personality, were a perfect fit for our team and we’re just tickled to have him on board.

He was based in Long Island, New York and he’s in process of relocating to our Tampa, Florida home base (apparently this is a natural move for New Yorkers and didn’t phase him in the least), and we hope you’ll help welcome RC into our NAPP family (feel free to leave him any comments here on the blog). Also, we introduce RC on this week’s show, and on next week’s episode he’s showing a cool trick using Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Before we get into the main news, at the absolute insistence of my wife I have to include this first:

>> Yesterday my publisher (Peachpit Press and Pearson Education), announced that for the third straight year I am #1 bestselling author of computer and technology books across all categories (according to Nielson Bookscan data for the calendar year 2006). You can read the full press release here (which will make my wife very happy).

Now, onto the news:

• Panos FX has released “Analysis” another way cool set of 10 Photoshop Special Effects Actions (my hats off to Greece-based Photoshop expert Panos Efstathiadis, who continues to amaze me with the incredible stuff he comes up with). Here’s how he describes his latest set: “They break down an image into a number of elements such as book pages, individual photos, filmstrips, stripes, and more. At the end the original image is presented as a combination of these elements.” You get all 10 effects for (plus variations of each) for only $9.99 (about a buck a piece, which is a bargain). Check them out at PanosFX.com
• Our man Matt Kloskowski is profiled this week over at Jason Moore’s excellent Photography and Photoshop blog. Click here to learn more about “the man behind the Houseski.”
•  Seth Resnick’s acclaimed (and consistently sold-out) D-65 workshop is coming to San Diego on 10-13, 2007, and if you move quick, you can snag one of the few remaing seats for “Digital Workflow, Not Workslow: Accelerate & Automate Your Workflow.” Seth is a brilliant teacher (I got to sit in on one of his sessions last year, and not only was I impressed with his skills as an instructor—I learn a ton!). Here’s a link to his workshop schedule for the rest of 2007.
• Fascinating article in the LA Times, from Lou Dolinar called “Turn Throwaways into Keepers with Lightroom.” If you’re curious about Lightroom, make sure you read this.
• It’s stuff like this that makes me want to write more books.

More news as it develops (please note the lame use of the word Develop. It wasn’t funny, but it’s all I’ve got). I’m going into my Wednesday meeting—have a great day everybody!

What an amazing time I had yesterday at my Boston Lightroom Seminar (photos by Terry White, the top one taken during the first live shoot that kicks off the day–scroll down ot the next post to see the shot I was taking).

The people of Boston were just absolutely great (what a fantastic crowd to present to), and I met so many wonderful photographers who are really excited about Lightroom. Even more so after Adobe Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty gave the sold-out crowd of nearly 500 the first public look at the cool new features included in the Lightroom version 1.1 upgrade (which is coming soon), which included improved sharpening and noise reduction as well as improved file mobility.

Also, Tom was gracious enough to field one-on-one questions all day long (as did Terry White from Adobe, who was there helping out as well), and it really made for just an amazing experience.

Thanks so much to Tom, Terry, and all the wonderful folks, and NAPP members, from the Boston area who came out to spend the day with me learning about the new digital photography workflow using Lightroom and Photoshop.

The next stop on the tour is Altanta on June 1st, and then New York City on June 7th. Click here for the class schedule or to reserve your seat. Hope to see you there!

P.S. Thanks to all my blog readers who came up to say “hi.” It was really a kick getting to meet you!