An excerpt from Kevin Ames' "Photoshop CS2: The Art of Photographing Women" (Wiley Publishing, Inc., avail. Sept. 2006)
All photos ©Kevin Ames

In our August issue of Professional Photographer, we printed an abridged chapter excerpt from Kevin Ames' informative and instructional "Photoshop CS2: The Art of Photographing Women." The following is a collection of sidebars, tips and notes that we couldn't include due to space limitations.

Ever want to know what it was like to go on a photo adventure tour? One participant in The Moab Experience, Thomas H. Nevin, shares his journey down the Green River to Arches National Park.

©All photos ©Thomas H. Nevin

Personal journal of Thomas H. Nevin

Host: The Moab Paper Company; Greg Schern, President
Date: June 3-8, 2006
Schedule: One day photography workshop; four days on river; one day photo op at Arches National Park
Accommodations: Red Cliffs Lodge, Moab, Utah

Photo: View behind Red Cliffs Lodge

By Ronnie Norton, ABI, Qualified European Photographer, Associate of the Irish PPA

The best way to introduce Sketch Master is to quote the Redfield Plugins opener which explains it far better than I could. "This is a manipulation tool for the creation of realistic looking hand-drawings derived from photos. You can simulate various tools such as lead pencil, ink-pencil, crayon, charcoal, airbrush, etc. Three layers with separate settings allow one to produce some effects of stylized fine-arts on all sorts of surfaces (water paper, squared paper, laid paper, canvas, leather, crepe, rag paper or any other kind of surface you wish)."

Image: Patricia Vonne, singer songwriter and actress ("Sin City"), from her Irish concert shots. ©Ronnie Norton

System protection for the professional photographer

By Wendell Benedetti

System crashes can be a major headache for photographers. Obviously, for protection, valuable digital images must be stored outside the system. But storing images offline doesn't protect the system itself. The operating system with its numerous components, all the software applications, and countless personal files, are stored on the hard drive. Complete protection can only be guaranteed by backing up the entire system to removable media. That's done with an application such as Norton Save & Restore.

Norton Save & Restore is a more user-friendly version of the well-known Norton Ghost backup and recovery utility. It has all the power of Norton Ghost, but with its wizard interface it's easier to use. It provides a straightforward approach to its primary task of backing up and restoring the entire system, as well as copying the contents of one hard drive to another.

By Andrew Rodney

Most photographers don’t like noise, and I don't blame them. This non-image forming muck can be added if the effect is desired, but what do you do if you shoot high-ISO digital capture and want to remove the noise? I hadn’t played with any standalone noise reduction software until my friend Greg Gorman raved about a product he was using called Noiseware from Imagenomic. Since I often shoot under available light at the highest ISO my Canon Rebel supports (ISO1600), I can use some assistance in noise removal. For some subjects, I far prefer shooting under natural light and usually will accept whatever grain I get due to higher ISO settings as a minor penalty. With Noiseware handling the process of noise and grain removal, the penalty is almost non-existent.

In this and future months, Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.

In this lesson we show how you can rig your portrait gear to save time and make lighting those school portrait jobs (or any set of similarly posed individual shots) a snap. All the preparation you need to make this lesson work for you is a quick and cheap trip to a hardware store.

The "String" method refers to simply attaching a length of string to each piece of gear you use to shoot your portraits.

Go to the String Method lesson at Web Photo School.

Press Release—GTI (Graphic Technology, Inc.) has introduced a new PDV “e” series of Professional Desktop Viewers with a sleek new look. All models come pre-assembled with a unique hinged design that allows quick and easy set-up for viewing, and equally fast fold-up for storage and/or transport. 

Automatic image enhancement software introduces advanced color features, new optical corrections, improved workflow and speed as well as plug-in compatibility y with Adobe Photoshop

Press Release—DxO Labs has announced availability of a free, Windows PC public beta release of DxO Optics Pro v4 for all digital photographers to download from the DxO Labs Web site.  DxO Optics Pro software improves the image quality of Digital Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras and advanced digicams. DxO Optics Pro is the award-winning digital image enhancement tool incorporating revolutionary optics, noise and exposure corrections in an easy-to-use, feature rich application for Mac and PC users.

By Ellis Vener

"Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking," by Julieanne Kost, is one of the more profound Photoshop and photography related books I've seen in many years, yet has the least amount of technical content. The photographs are from Kost's collection of photographs made while on business trips over a five year period. As a mainstay in Adobe's Photoshop education program, Adobe Evangelist Kost is on the road "about 200 days" a year. While she has educated many thousands of photographers on Adobe's flagship software through  various Photoshop conferences, workshops, and a DVD series from Software Cinema), the real meat of her book is a plainspoken treatise on how to stay fresh and creative, even in the face of your fears or while mired in the prosaic grind of the workaday world.

Press Release—Phase One and SanDisk Corporation have announced that all SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards now include a full and free edition of Phase One’s Capture One LE RAW Workflow software. Capture One LE normally retails at $99.

The bundle of the two products will enable photographers who shoot in JPEG to easily join their professional peers in working in RAW. Extreme III users who already shoot RAW images can now process their images in Capture One at no additional charge.

Purchase of Extreme III CompactFlash cards also offers upgrades from Capture One LE to Capture One PRO at a 15-percent discount. Upgrades can be purchased through Phase One’s on-line store at www.phaseone.com.

Press Release—The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), founders of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, is proud to announce that Eddie Tapp, Jeff Schewe and John Paul Caponigro—three prominent leaders in Photoshop and digital photography—will be inducted into the 2006 Photoshop Hall of Fame. Their official induction takes place during a special ceremony at the upcoming Photoshop World Conference & Expo at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on Sept. 7th.