Concluding in April, Professional Photographer magazine ran Making Eyes, a three-part tutorial on eye enhancement in portraiture from Jane Conner-ziser. Click here to download the custom set of brushes Jane uses in Adobe Photoshop. To use the brushes, navigate to your Photoshop application folder > Presets folder > Brushes folder. Place the file JanesRetouchingBrushes.abr in the Brushes folder. From Photoshop, choose your Brush tool and click on the Brush Preset dropdown menu in the Options bar. Click on the reveal triangle to the right of the Master Diameter slider and choose Load Brushes.... In the Load window, navigate to the Brushes folder where you placed the file, choose janesretouchingbrushes.abr, and click Load. The brushes will appear at the bottom of your current brush preset selection.

Layer blending modes have been part of Photoshop for years, but because they're not easy to understand at first glance, this immensely useful feature tends to get overlooked. "Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers" is the only recipe-format book that covers blending modes specifically for digital photographers.

The book covers:
•    Changing hue, saturation, luminosity, and color
•    Correcting basic color shifts
•    Repairing highlights
•    Sharpening or softening focus
•    Adjusting lighting for subtle or dramatic effects
•    Controlling contrast
•    Creating surface effects and textures
•    Adding interest to landscapes and urban scenes
•    Enhancing portraits of children and adults
•    Simulating graphics arts techiques

and much more.

LightZone blazes new trails in RAW processing

By Andrew Rodney

Correction layers, selections and blending now a part of the RAW-to-rendered process

In the last 6 months, a slew of new software products designed for photographers who shoot primarily in RAW format have come onto the scene. Apple Aperture and Adobe LightRoom are just two examples. Light Crafts LightZone enters the fray as yet another new image processing product that provides some unique and interesting tools.

LightZone has two basic modes: a simple image browser for quickly finding files and an editing mode, which is the more advanced. While the browser can preview existing rendered images (TIFF, JPEG, PNG) as well as RAW data from a number of camera manufacturers, it's limited to viewing images and embedded metadata (Figure 1). In this first released version, LightZone is all about the editing mode and rendering images.

By Tom Peterson, Product Line Manager for Rimage Corporation

Professional photographers need clear answers to their questions about using CDs and DVDs as archival media.  What causes data loss in CDs and DVDs? How do you avoid that? What is an archival CD/DVD? How do I find archival quality CDs/DVDs? How long should my data last on archival quality CDs/DVDs? What is Blu-ray technology? Do I need it?

Tom Peterson is the Product Line Manager for Rimage Corporation, providers of CD-R and DVD-R publishing, duplication and printing solutions. He is responsible for the purchase of more than two million CD-Rs and DVD-Rs each month for the company and meets monthly with representatives of all major media manufacturers to keep abreast of changes in technology. Peterson led the initiative within Rimage of working with vendors to establish the Rimage 100-year media warranty.

We asked Peterson to provide the answers you wanted.

Charcoal shading

Shading is one of the nicest ways to add a painterly effect to photos and paintings in Corel Painter.
I like to use the Charcoal category's Charcoal Pencil 3 variant as my shading brush.  I have altered it slightly, lowering the Grain slider in the Property Bar to 12, which puts more texture into the stroke.

   
Click the painting for a larger view. Photo and painting of Laurence Gartel ©2006 Karen Sperling.

by Wendell Benedetti

The value of actions and plug-ins to professional photographers is indisputable, but finding the right ones can be daunting.

Plug-ins and actions dramatically expand the capabilities of Photoshop. Some provide new and time-saving ways to apply the application's tools, while others provide distinct capabilities. Both streamline the workflow from image capture to final output. No professional photographer should be without them.

But there are literally thousands of these tools available. Instead of Googling through pages of worthless links to find ones for your particular workflow, check out the examples from the Web sites below. All of them offer downloadable plug-ins and actions, and many include reviews, tutorials, instructional DVDs and lively forums.

By Mark Garber,  PEC Chair

Beginning at the International Print judging in July 2006, album competition entrants may submit their Album entries on CD. This exciting change in the International Print Competition will simplify the submission process and greatly reduce the cost of producing and shipping physical albums.