Written by T. Michael Testi

Last August, Adobe released the second incarnation of their photography workflow product Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 to rave reviews. As is to be expected, Martin Evening has updated his bestselling book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book to enhance his existing material as well as to reflect all of the changes to Lightroom 2.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers has been significantly updated and, as with the prior version, it was written with photographers in mind, addressing Lightroom's features from a professional photographer's perspective. This version is 624 pages in length (a whopping 272 additional pages of material) and contains 11 chapters (encompassed in 5 additional chapters).

Chapter 1, "Introducing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom," begins by describing exactly what Lightroom is, and where it fits in within your image processing workflow. Lightroom is a high quality image processer and photographic image database management system rolled into one. In this chapter you will learn about installing Lightroom as well as all about working with the Lightroom interface. Chapter 2, "Importing Photos," explains that because Lightroom is a catalog management system for your images, the first step is that you need to import images. Next you will learn about all of the options that are available to you such as converting images to Digital Negatives (DNG), using Adobe Bridge as a front end, and how imported images are organized.

Chapter 3, "Navigating the Library Module,"

Written by T. Michael Testi

It seems to me that whenever dealing with technical devices, everyone has to create a manual that is dry and to the point. I would also think that that over the course of time these things would change and we could have a manual that would inspire us to pick it up and learn more. Perhaps, you would think, we could get an interesting manual that actually teaches us how to use a product rather than just describe it.

Take, for example, a Canon EOS 40D, when they spend the first weekend experimenting and looking in the manual until they learn enough to get by - and then they use those same old options over and over. It's not because people are dumb, rather it is because the manuals are not put together to inspire you to explore your new device in depth. That is where Canon EOS 40D: The Rocky Nook Manual comes in. Its goal is to inspire you to take a deeper look at your 40D and really learn how to use it. Canon EOS 40D is 200 pages in length and covers seven chapters.

Chapter 1, "Camera Technology," shows you how the Canon EOS 40D is a high performance camera that leaves very little to be desired in the way of options. It contains all of the professional features that a consumer would want in a camera and a lot more. This chapter explains what setting you

Written by T. Michael Testi

While taking pictures is easy, especially in this digital world, mastering the art of photography is not always clear and straightforward. There are a lot of variables to factor in and one of them is Depth of Field (DOF). The first barrier that usually makes people's eyes glaze over is that it is a mathematical calculation. It combines a number of different factors including the distance of the camera to the object being photographed, the focal length of the lens, as well as the aperture that is being used.

The ExpoAperture2: Depth Of Field Guide was developed to make this process much easier and much more accessible to the average user. While there are several versions, the one that I am reviewing is the combo pack which contains two ExpoAperture disks. The first covers standard focal lengths (15-135mm), and the second is for telephoto lens lengths (70-600mm).

ExpoAperture is a tool that will allow you to take control over depth of field and let you apply selective focus within your images. This guide will show you the relationship between focal length, focal distance, aperture, and the resulting depth of field and let you make the calculations you need quickly and easily.

Just what is an ExpoAperture disk? It was invented by George A. Wallace as a companion product to the ExpoDisk. Essentially,

Written by T. Michael Testi

Doing photographic portraits, while rewarding, can also be a challenging skill to master. To do it professionally can take years to perfect and having the right post-processing skills and enhancement techniques are a must. In Beyond Skin: Going Deeper With Photoshop CS3, Lee Varis uses Photoshop CS3 to bring out the best in photos of people, faces, and bodies. He examines tone and contrast, color correction, retouching, and much, much more.

Your trainer for this library is Lee Varis. Lee Varis is the owner of Varis PhotoMedia, and has worked with photography and computer imaging for the last few decades. He combines digital and conventional photography with computer graphics to create images for use in advertising, commercial graphics, and multimedia. Lee's work has been featured in movie posters, on video box covers, CD covers, and in numerous brochures and catalogs.

Lee has developed a unique approach to photography that takes advantage of certain idiosyncrasies of digital capture technology to create impossible lighting effects. Lee has written several books, including Skin: The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies (Sybex) This library is divided into 29 lessons in two volumes and runs four and a half hours. I will break this review down by functional areas. You can see the full lesson listing at the bottom of this review.

Volume 1: The Basics

"The workspace" begins the lessons by showing you around the Photoshop CS3

Written by T. Michael Testi

Creating portraits is a combination of skill and technique. It is also about connecting with your subjects. By learning how to observe and understand those you are working with you will get a feel for who they are, and how best to present them in a personal light. Learning to find out what interests you about your subject will allow you to better capture their personality.

It also takes time to learn the creative techniques of composing your images by experimentation, and through the capturing a lot of images; by learning how to tell a story with your image. Portrait and Candid Photography is 272 pages divided into 10 chapters.

Chapter 1, "What You Must Know About Photographing People," begins by showing you how to observe and connect with people. Here you will learn how to compose your images, to see what your eyes see, and learn about working with light in general. Then you will explore the kinds of equipment cameras, lenses, and equipment you will need. Chapter 2, "Accessory Equipment," will now take you into more detail with equipment such as additional lenses, batteries, tripods, flashes, and other odds and ends.

Chapter 3, "Working with Light," will get into more detail about working with light by exploring the quality, direction, intensity, and color of light. Then you will see how to reflect light, defuse light, work with a flash, and work with a meter for exposure. Chapter 4,

Written by T. Michael Testi

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is the much anticipated second version of Adobe's highly praised photo management and editing system. Photoshop Lightroom 2 adds new editing tools as well as enhances the existing environment, while at the same time reduces the dependence on Adobe's Photoshop.

On the outside, Photoshop Lightroom 2 retains much of the look and feel of its predecessor, while providing many workflow improvements that will have current users singing its praises. As well as the expected improvements to existing functionality that one would anticipate in a version two product, there are also a lot more features to improve your importing, processing, managing, and the showcasing of your images.

Before we look at the improvements and enhancements, what do you need to run Lightroom 2? You will need Windows XP SP2 or Vista on an Intel Pentium 4 - 1.4 GHz or higher, or Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 on PowerPC G4 or G5, or Intel Based Processor, 1GB RAM 1 GB hard drive space, 1024x768 display, and CD-ROM Drive.

For those who are new to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I find that there is still some confusion between Lightroom and Photoshop. The basic difference it that Photoshop is an image editing program. It has the big guns to do just about anything you want to an image. What it doesn't have is true

Silver Efex Pro is the latest addition to Nik's collection of digital photographic filters and effects for Adobe Photoshop. This is a brand new product that is aimed at creating dynamic black and white images by offering the traditional tools of the darkroom while including the flexibility and precision of digital photography.

Not only is Silver Efex Pro a black and white converter, it contains Nik's premier U Point technology that gives you pinpoint control over what you want to do. No longer are you limited to working with global changes and masking to accomplish your goals. Rather, now you can precisely control specific areas of your image with a couple of clicks of your mouse.

What do you need to run Silver Efex Pro? System requirements are Windows 2000 Pro or better, Mac OS 10.4 or better, 512 MB, and Photoshop 7 through CS3 on Windows, CS2 and CS3 on Mac, Photoshop Elements 2.0 or better on Windows, 4.0 and 6.0 on Mac, or any image editing software program that accepts Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins.

Basically, the Silver Efex Pro workflow works like this. Launch Photoshop, open an image, and open Silver Efex Pro from the filter menu, which will open the Silver Efex interface. By default, the Style Browser with sample thumbnails of your image will appear on the left hand side of the interface. On the right side are the enhancement controls.

Once you select the style

Written by T. Michael Testi

Dfine 2.0 is the long awaited update to Dfine 1.0; the Noise Reduction product from Nik Software that is redefining noise reduction for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. That leads to the question "What is Noise?" Noise is the unwanted imperfections created by digital cameras as they try to capture the digital image. The amount of noise that is generated is determined by the quality and type of image sensor that created the image.

Dfine is a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop and other image editing applications; ones that support Photoshop Plug-ins, that can help you reduce noise in your images. Its goal is to reduce noise while still maintaining the detail and sharpness and therefore improving the quality of every image. Dfine will help fix problems due to fast or high ISO speeds as well as low light levels. It even works on JPEG artifacts.

So what is new with Dfine 2.0? Well first we have U Point® Technology; a dynamic and flexible technology that provides photographers a new way for editing digital images with out layers, masks or selections. It does this by using algorithms which consider relationships between color and light. It was first featured in Nikon's Capture NX Software. This allows you to reduce noise only where needed by using U Point Control Points
There is also Selective Functionality. This can be done three ways.