Currently #1 Ranked Arts & Photography book – Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book!
Creative professionals seeking the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Photoshop CS5 choose Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team at Adobe Press. The 14 project-based lessons in this book show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working in Photoshop CS5.
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Compositing is one of the hottest trends in Photoshop and photography today for portrait photographers, designers of all walks of life, and even retouchers. Everywhere you look, from group photos, to school graduation or sports portraits, to magazines, movie posters, and DVD covers, chances are, you’ve seen compositing. Continue reading
Looking for a easy way to create Hollywood style portraits? Like many of you, I, too have played 
around in Photoshop manipulating layers and channels, with limited success and no consistency. PhotographyBB has released an advanced Photoshop Action that produces professional level skin retouching in a single click. [You will need to be running Photoshop CS2 or higher to use this Action Pack.]
Included in this Action Pack:
PhotographyBB produces a number of Photoshop Action Packs, however, the Portrait Magic Pro provided the solution I was seeking. Considering the cost of Photoshop, the sale price of $28US for this collection of actions was quite reasonable.
Admittedly, spending a great deal of time online is a necessity in today’s world, whether you’re a blogger, photographer, web designer, journalistic, etc. One of my main goals is to learn to work more efficiently. Great resources is the key! While we are very familiar with desktop applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Office Suite and a host of others, many people overlook the thousands of web applications which are available for free. In addition, there are numerous websites which provide resources to make life easier.
Where do I find all these cool sites? Besides my general searching/surfing, StumbleUpon is a great resource to find information on just about any topic you can imagine, plus much more. The key to using StumbleUpon is to first register (of course), and then set up your topic preferences. Listed below are the topics I’m currently searching for…a nice geekie/artsy mix.
Here are just a few of my favorite posts listing a honeypot of cool sites and web applications you might be interested in!
The Radiant Vista photography site is a tremendous resource for photography tips and tutorials. This photography blog was actually referred to me for a possible web site review. Thank you for this wonderful recommendation! The Radiant Vista has a host of great sections, including the Photoshop Workbench, podcasts, and a nice community section. However, I was most impressed with "The Daily Critique".
The Daily Critique is a photo critique in video format. How this works…the publisher takes a selected photograph and initially gives a brief overview of the image qualities. Next, he makes use of a electronic pen (football fans will recognize this technique) to illustrate the points he is trying to make. After all the talking points have been addressed, it is time to get to work on the image.
The image is reprocessed in Adobe Photoshop based on his aforementioned recommendations and all the screens and layers are viewable during the segment. This is an invaluable 
for photographers to watch the work flow in progress.
Great attention is given to every detail. The video example I watched "Stephen from Ireland", was 15 minutes in length! Using some simple math, I figure each critique takes several hours to produce and it shows. I was thoroughly impressed with the originality of the content for this site and the level of expertise of the publisher. If you are looking for photography tips and tutorials to improve your photography, the site is a definite bookmark!
