photoshop

Anyone who's investigated the theory of photographic composition will be aware of principles such as the Rule of Thirds, The Golden Ratio and The Golden Spiral and other guidelines designed to help create pleasing compositions and direct the viewer's eyes to the main subjects thereby giving your images more impact.  Whilst no one would advocate adhereing strictly to these methods they can certainly be useful aids, unfortunately visualising them isn't always easy and that's where some new features in Lightroom 1.1 can help.

I often find myself returning home from a weekend away with several hundred shots, some are good (although not as many as I'd like), some are OK and some are rubbish.

Before I spend any time cataloging and properly "developing" the images I want to sort out the good, the bad and the downright ugly.  There are a number of ways that this can be achieved in Lightroom which include using ratings or simply deleting each bad one as you get to it.  I use the method outlined below because I find it quick, it gives me a chance to review my decision before I delete anything and lets me keep track of where I am so that if I get interrupted half way through I can come straight back to it another day.

Bruce Fraser and David Blatner are acknowledged experts on Photoshop, between them they have authored or co-authored a number of books on the subject and they clearly have a wealth of practical, hands on experience which really shows here.  This book is aimed at photographers, concentrating on subjects such as tone and colour correction, raw conversion, noise reduction, sharpening and basic image tweaking with the cloning and healing tools.  Areas such as special effects and creating images from scratch are not included here.