A big stumbling block for many new camera users is how to figure out how much depth of field a particular image will have it in given the focal length of the lens, the aperture used and the distance to the subject. Trust me on this, trying to do the algebra to figure it out is not something most people want to try to do in their heads. In this article we will cover all of the math involved and then make it real easy with an Excel spreadsheet and some links to some free applications to help you out.

Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 have graduated from Adobe Labs and are now available as final releases on Adobe.com. These updates include camera support for the following models:(Previously provided in the release candidates of these updates)

If you have ever re-sized an image you know that you always lose a lot of image quality whenever you do that, especially when having to blow things up really large. The solution may just be with OnOne Software’s Genuine Fractals 6. This tool is designed purely to handle your image resizing needs. For myself, I often have to scale things like screenshots for use in the books that I have been writing so that the images look good in the books.

Camera Raw 5.3 and Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidates are now available on Adobe Labs.(Camera Raw 5.3, Lightroom 2.3) The release includes new camera support for the following models:

* Nikon D3X
* Olympus E-30

There are several bug fixes in this update

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.

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.

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.

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.

Canon has posted updates to Digital Photo Professional, EOS Utility, WFT Utility and Picture Style Editor for Mac and Windows, bringing new features as well as support for digital SLRs up to and including the EOS 5D Mark II. They’ve also released a new version of Canon RAW Codec for Windows, which also adds support for the EOS 5D Mark II.

It seems like we just got into our groove with Photoshop CS3 and now CS4 is out and everyone is wondering if its really a signifigant upgrade or not. I just spent the day with the folks from Adobe to get a deep dive into the entire CS4 family and let me just say, one day was not nearly enough time to learn about everything. There are very cool changes in virtually every product in the entire suite. Today we are going to go deep into Photoshop CS4 and find out what some of the new features are and try to explain in layman’s terms what each of the new features can do for you.

Las Vegas, NV — September 4, 2008 (Photoshop World, Booth #321) — Nik Software today announced the latest version of its popular Sharpener Pro photographic plug-in for use with Adobe® Photoshop® and Apple® Aperture™. Designed for professionals and photo enthusiasts, Sharpener Pro 3.0 is the most advanced and powerful sharpening solution for photographers, eliminating the guesswork typically required for achieving superior and consistent results.

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.