With the release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.2, camera profiles are now built in by default. What are camera profiles? Well, let’s look start at the beginning and explain what happens to your images within Lightroom so we have a basis of reference when we get back to figuring out how to use these profiles.

2008 was certainly a banner year for photography enthusiasts when it comes to the number and quality of websites that you have to choose from. We certainly appreciate all the visitors here at cameradojo.com and hope we are doing a good job at bringing you good information and we are always thrilled to see our name on lists like this. Now it’s our turn to pay tribute to some of the best sites out there that we read on a regular basis.

Focal Point is OneOne Software’s newest Photoshop plug-in that allows you to create images with selective focus and edge vignette effects. Using these techniques you can guide the viewer’s eye to the spot in the image that you want them to look at. Using an easy to use “focus bug” you can control the sweet spot, the amount and kind of blur. These types of effects have only been possible with expensive specialty lenses before. Does Focal Point deliver on the goods? We decided to try it out for ourselves and see what we thought about it.

Lightroom 2.2 is now available on Adobe.com. (Mac, Win) The release includes new camera support for the following models:

* Canon EOS 5D Mark II
* Canon PowerShot G10
* Panasonic DMC-G1**
* Panasonic DMC-FX150**
* Panasonic DMC-FZ28**
* Panasonic DMC-LX3**
* Leica D-LUX 4**

HDR Photography is a method of combining multiple exposures into a single image in order to achieve a greater dynamic range in an image. If that sounded a bit complex, let’s break that down a bit more. If I take a photo, the sensor only can capture a given range from light to dark, in a normally exposed image, you may lose some detail in the darkest areas and you may lose some detail in the brightest areas. But if we can take an normal exposure, an underexposed image (to get the detail in the highlights) and an overexposed image (to get the details in the shadows) and combine them into a single image, then we can get a new image that can be the best of all three.

This new version of the Camera Raw plug-in replaces the original Camera Raw plug-in that was installed with Adobe® Creative Suite® 4, Photoshop® CS4, Photoshop Elements 6 or 7, and Adobe Premiere® Elements 4.0 or 7 software.

Let’s face it, Adobe seriously dropped the ball on watermarking within Lightroom. Many of us got hints about potential new watermarking features for Lightroom 2.0 but were disappointed when there was nothing added. For many of us, Lightroom is the tool that we use for 90%+ of our workflow including prepping images for use on the web so the last thing we want to do is run some action in Photoshop or have to run an additional application to apply watermarks which reduces the image quality because the jpeg image has to be saved a second time.

In this video Kerry shows you a demo of the new Pixel Bender Gallery plugin. This is used to add special Pixel Bender effects to your images from Adobe Photoshop CS4. You will need to download the Pixel Bender plugin and any filters you want to add.

Pixel Bender Gallery Plugin is now available for Adobe Photoshop CS4. This plugin is actually more of a framework to allow Pixel Blender plugins to be used, these can be all kinds of different effects from sharpening, to blurring, to warping, and much more.

Another new feature in Photoshop CS4 is the Live Preview when using the Cloning and Stamping tool. What this does for you is show you exactly what the effect of the tool is going to be while you are using it. Where you will probably find this to be the most useful is lining things up with the clone tool or making sure color tones and brightness levels match well.