Regardless of the steps you take to correct color cast or white balance, or to set white and black points the principles remain the same. Lee shows you how to handle both routine image correction and touch up as well as dealing with difficult image problems.

This book is not a basics of Digital Photography or Photoshop book. It assumes you have a modest level of understanding of both. Lee starts out with a basic chapter describing the tools and technology but quickly moves into setting up Photoshop and creating a custom camera calibration. (Side note: You can download the beta camera profiles and editor from Adobe).

The book then covers some basic lighting and lighting equipment for portraits with example lighting setups.

The real meat of the book and what Lee explains so well begins with the chapter “The Color of Skin”. I have yet to see an image that can’t benefit from some attention being paid to color correction. The chapters on tone and contrast and image retouching pull the entire workflow together.

The remainder of the book then goes into altering focus, special effects, and color manipulation to really make your images special. Finally one of the most useful sections of all, “Preparing for Print” getting that image off the screen and onto paper. I’m always looking for ways to streamline the output side of the workflow and getting my prints to look as good as what I see onscreen.

The companion CD has the files that Lee works on so that you can follow along if you want.

Great book, I should have bought it earlier. You can buy it right here.

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Vincent Laforet shot a short film with a prototype 5D. The movie was hosted on Canons site but it… had 1.5 million views in 10 days and I guess Canon took it down for now because of the bandwidth demand. Vincent reports that it will be available again soon. Check out Vincent’s website here for more information.

The 5D Mk II shoots 16:9 Full HD movie capture at 1920 x 1080 pixels at 30 fps or you can shoot 4:3 standard TV quality 640 x 480 pixels at 30 fps. Oh yeah and still images too! As I mentioned in my post about the 50D the 5D is the next throw down in the hyper-rapid Digital SLR product cycle. Photojournalists and wedding photographers alike have been challenged with increasing demands to provide their clients with video and still imagery of their events. Shooting both up until now has been a compromise or requires both a videographer and photographer. The 5D looks to begin to change all that. Still images are able to be taken simultaneously with motion capture without losing video frames. Does the 5D replace the video camera? Not yet as HD capture is limited to 4 gig clips, 12 minutes of HD video, 24 minutes of standard and once you start taking still images it’ll fill up faster, but it’s certainly more than sufficient to capture “moments”. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Canon 50D

The 40D is a great camera and it looks like the 50D only adds to the lineage. We are now in the age of imaging. In the ’80s and ’90s computers were obsolete by the time you bought them. Computing power grew so fast that IT departments had to ask manufactures to slow down their release cycles because it cost too much to keep testing and deploying at such a rapid pace. I see camera technology currently hitting that type of rapid advance and release cycle and will continue for the next several years. The best today will be surpassed literally tomorrow.