Memos From The Digital Darkroom

(This is a article I wrote for the Portland Metro Photographic News website. )
The first time I saw Adobe’s Lightroom, while it was in its earliest beta version, I wondered what the point of it was. I could already do everything it did in Photoshop. Why did I need to learn a new way of [...]

A change to the preferences in Bridge CS4 affects the way labels added in Lightroom are shown.

You can quickly navigate through files in Lightroom or folders in Bridge using the back and forward buttons on your mouse.

When I sit down with a new client, I ask them a series of questions that are designed to help me understand their level of workflow skills and knowledge. I’m often amazed at how often people who seem to be Photoshop savvy seem to get sharpening wrong. I ran into this twice last week so [...]

This article is related the the Customizing Cursors in Photoshop article. I thought of mentioning it in that article, but I get so many calls about this problem that I felt it was best to discuss the issue on its own.
Has this ever happened to you: You’re merrily working away in Photoshop when your normal [...]

Last week a student in one of my workshops asked me how she could determine exactly which part of the image her Photoshop tool would affect when she clicked. The reason she was uncertain was because she was using Photoshop’s Standard cursor display.
The figure to the left shows the Brush tool with the Standard cursor [...]

Creating an Action to Add a Copyright Symbol
This exercise details how to create an action that can be turned into a droplet for use in the “Using Photoshop Actions with Lightroom” article in the June 2009 issue of After Capture magazine. Be sure to see that article to learn how to use this action in [...]

Introduced with Photoshop CS3 is a nifty feature called the Clone Source panel that provides lots of control over the Clone Stamp and Healing Brush tools. This panel has many interesting features, but the one that’s been getting the most attention lately (at least from my clients) is the Clone Source Preview. That’s because of [...]

If you’ve been using earlier versions of Photoshop, you may have noticed that Photoshop CS4 is missing a few things that have been around for quite a while. I ran into this a couple of days ago when I tried to use my Epson scanner with Photoshop. I went to the usual place, File > [...]