A release candidate of Lightroom 2.1 is now available on Adobe Labs. The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this release is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing to validate the corrections and changes included in this update. The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of Lightroom 2.1 through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

This week I got together with my regular co-host David Esquire from Esquire Photography and recorded another podcast this week. We covered all the latest news about the new Canon and Nikon gear as well as some new software updates.

We knew when we sat down to write this review that many of your would be sitting there thinking that the guys at the Dojo had totally lost it if all they can come up with for a product review is a simple camera strap. In all seriousness, we have appealed to every company we know to come up with a better camera strap. The two main issues we have are comfort for shooting all day long and the security that your camera won’t fall off your shoulder.

I have been a fan of Wolverine products for almost four years now and my trusty Wolverine FlashPac was in need of an upgrade. Not that the FlashPac didn’t do it’s job, its just that it was pretty slow and didn’t have a display that could be used to view the images. Without hesitation I turned back to Wolverine to see what they had available and I found the new ESP Digital Photo Album and Multimedia Player.

We are happy to announce the release of our updated presets for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The Dojo Essentials package now contains a few more presets and the existing presets have been tweaked slightly and compatibility with Lightroom 2.0 has been added. As before, the Dojo Essentials is a free set of Lightroom presets.

Kerry shows off the new Vignette tool in Lightroom 2.0. With the new features you have far more creative control of vignetting on your images. In Lightroom 1.x, the Vignette tool was simple for lens corrections, with Lightroom 2.0 there is advanced creative control of your vignettes making it a much more powerful creative tool. In this video you will see the difference between the old post-crop vignette and the new creative vignetting in Lightroom 2.0.

There are plenty of changes even in the Library module in Lightroom 2.0, but thankfully us here at Camera Dojo have been frantically learning all we can and have been making these videos for you to learn how to really take advantage of all of the new features. In this video we look at how some of the features have been moved around, we look at the new smart collections, collection sets, better keyword tagging, and view filtering among some of the biggest changes.

A Photowalk is a group of people walking around a specific area for about two hours taking pictures of the area. Popular photowalks occur in Washington DC, New York, and even in small towns. On August 23rd, in over 100 cities around the world, people of all kinds will be participating in photowalks in their area.