Canon 50D From Snapshots to Great Shots – Book Review


Photographer and author Jeff Revell takes a slightly different approach in his book, Canon 50D: From Snapshots to Great Shots. Instead of simply rewriting and expanding on what the camera’s manual says, Revell’s book focuses on how to take great photos by using selected camera features and functions of the Canon 50D.

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Four Photoshop CS4 Books Reviewed


I’ve read and used at least a dozen or so Photoshop books in the last four years. With each new Photoshop of CS update, the manual styled books for the application grow larger and better. Figuring out which books will be mot useful for you largely depends on your experience and skills with the application, your learning style, and what you want to learn. Check out this review of four different Adobe Photoshop CS4 books.

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From Canon XSi to Photoshop CS3 Accelerated – Three Book Reviews


It’s difficult for a mere book reviewer like myself to understand how publishers and book writers can keep up with the frequent updates in digital software and hardware. Just when you purchase a Canon camera or the latest update of Photoshop, new versions of these products come out in less than a year’s time. It seems like writers and publishers have to scramble to keep up with the ever expanding technology. But somehow they get the job done, and in most cases very well.

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Layers: the Complete Guide to Photoshop’s Most Powerful Feature
Review


Well, Photoshop guru Matt Kloskowski has written a concise introductory guide about using layers, the heart of Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS series. His book is appropriately titled, Layers: the Complete Guide to Photoshop’s Most Powerful Feature. For this book, Matt incorporates Scott Kelby’s trade mark style of explaining Photoshop layer features and techniques in a well illustrated, step by step process. Each lesson is explained in less than five pages with no more than two paragraphs per page.

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Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers
Review


What is traditionally called point-and-shoot cameras are extremely popular, and affordable and for the most part they produce really good photos. But if you’re serious about photography, at some point you’ll have to get beyond the automatic exposure settings of your camera and learn about the marriage between light and exposure and how to use the features of your camera to make that marriage work.

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Epson RX680 Photo All-in-One Printer – Review


Because the RX680 is an all-in-one printer, it comes, of course, with probably more features than most people might use. In addition to the double-sided printing, other features include… read review here.

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Two Digital Photography Books Reviewed


With so many people shooting with digital cameras these days, and discovering and renewing their interest in photography, it’s great to see publishers like Rocynook producing a such a fine line of books on the subject.

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Automator For Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Book Review


Automator For Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard covers all the basics plus a little more. If you have never cracked open Automator, it would probably be a good idea to simply follow one of my tutorials. Have no fear, testing out and playing around with the program will not break or crash your computer. You might discover just how useful Automator and other similar programs can be in saving your time and stress.

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Live Capture in iMovie ’08


The new iMovie 08 allows Live Capture, meaning you can record video directly to the program rather than using a video camera and tape. Bakari shows us how to do it.

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Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3
Review



The objective of the book is to address how most people learn any skill: through constant practice and repetition. Good teachers know that if they want their students to learn and take ownership of certain skills, they (teachers) must identify those skills and then scaffold lessons and activities in a way that makes the tools and process of using those skills understandable. Read the full review here.

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Create a Media Browser Using Automator


If you haven’t noticed yet, each of Apple’s main creative suite applications including iMovie, iDVD, Address Book, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and now, Mail’s Stationery feature, includes a photo browser whereby you can access photos stored and managed in your iPhoto and Aperture libraries.

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Initial Reactions to Mail and Stationary


One of the upgrades that I looked most forward to for my business was Apple’s new Mail Stationery feature. I’ve always wanted a way to send graphic emails as opposed to simple text-based letters. I’ve tried using various programs – both web-based and 3rd party applications, but all of them were too time consuming for simply creating a few graphic personal or business letters that I wanted to do right within my Mail application.

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40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques
Book Review


While image retouching might seem like a daunting task, it can be learned and applied with practice. The third edition of Zack Lee’s 40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques does just that. It demonstrates in easy to follow steps how to use any version of Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS to retouch or fix good or not so good images. All the techniques are for both beginning and intermediate Photoshop users.

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Photoshop Lightroom Adventure
Book Review


All the current spade of books about Lightroom explain the use of the software in similar ways. There’s not very many unique ways explain how to use the features of a software application. But what makes Mikkel’s book stand out is that it comes out of a project in which he and 11 of his photography colleagues, plus five Adobe Lightroom team members, traveled for a photography expedition in Iceland and used the early beta versions of Lightroom to post-process their work.

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The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book
Book Review


Like so many other photographers and Photoshop users, I always look forward with delight when Scott Kelby publishes a new book or updates a previous edition of one of his works. If you have the previous edition of this book, you’ll certainly want this newest one if you’re now working in CS3. It’s completely updated with new photos, mostly new techniques, and with Kelby’s signature style and humor.

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Numbers 08
Spreadsheets for the Rest of Us


Leave it to Apple, however, to create yet another useful production program for the rest of us. That is, a program which is intuitive, practical, and stylish. Numbers ’08 is another fine program that can help you transform the analog fashion of pen and paper calculations and create functions that can help you become more efficient with various projects involving money, data gathering and calculations.

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Backup Automator Action


Say you’re working on a long-term project in which you’re creating and saving a number of different files over time, and you want to make sure you have those files copied to a back up source after you’ve saved them to a specified folder. Well, if you don’t already have a backup system in place to do this, you can create backup folder in less than ten minutes by following the steps below.

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