Learn the ins and outs of landscape photography with this 6.75-hour course from Lynda.com. In it, I cover gear, shooting, aesthetics and lots and lots of post-production using Photoshop CS5. You’ll learn about landscape-specific exposure issues, tone and color correction, manipulating light and shadow, HDR, panoramic shooting, thinking like a painter, and much more. This is the full content of the online course, and you can learn all about it, and even order a copy (believe it or not) right here.

If you’re getting started with Capture NX2 and want to get up to speed quickly, then consider taking a class from the official Nikon school. I’ll be teaching a half-day workshop in six different cities around the country starting in November. For $99 it’s a great way to get quickly immersed in the application, and learn the ins and outs of editing with this exceptional tool. The workshops will be held in Santa Clara, Washington DC, Orlando, Chicago, New York City, and Dallas. Check out the official link for more info.

Photoshop’s a great image editor, and all, but you need a lot of money to get it. If you’re a Mac-based photographer who’s been looking for a more affordable alternative, and iPhoto is not for you, then you might want to consider Pixelmator, an incredibly speedy Photoshop alternative that offers a fair amount of power at a reasonable price. Read the full review here.

A photographer friend recently sent me this extraordinary collection of color images shot during the Depression. One of the things that’s fascinating about looking at them is that we simply are not accustomed to this subject matter being in color. It’s a fine example of McCluhan’s “medium is the message” idea. Your choices of black and white or color, grungy or sharp, saturated or muted – all of these have a huge impact on the reaction the viewer will have. For film photographers, many of these decisions are determined by film choice, and the ability to choose specific films to achieve a particular look or feel is one of the great advantages of film shooting. Alien Skin Exposure, a sophisticated film-simulating Photoshop plug-in, gives this same power to digital photographers.

Performing image resizing in a batch process can be tricky. How do you tell Photoshop to resize when you might have a batch of images of varying orientations and aspect ratios? Because batch resizing requires special consideration, version 5 of the Photoshop Automator Actions, contains four different resizing actions.

While the Photoshop Automator Actions ship with a lengthy, detailed, can’t-put-it-down user manual, there are times when an old-fashioned screencast is still an easier way to learn a new piece of software. Assuming that this is one of those times, I have put together the first in a series of movies that detail how to use Automator to drive Photoshop.

If you routinely find yourself slogging through tedious, repetitve chores in Photoshop, then you should try using Automator to streamline your batch processing chores. Built-in to Mac OS X 10.4 and later, Automator makes it simple to create sophisticated, complex automations. Out-of-the-box, Automator can’t control Adobe Photoshop, but with the addition of this Photoshop Automator Actions collection, you get everything necessary to drive Photoshop using Automator.

A lot of beginning shooters think that raw format photography is a high-end technology that only professionals need. They fear that it’s complicated, and a different way to shoot, and generally something that beginners should stay away from. But it’s not! In fact, the safety nets provided by raw format shooting are a boon to beginners! With raw format, you can correct overexposure and white balance problems that are impossible to tackle with non-raw formats. This article will walk you through a basic understanding of what raw is, and why you might want to consider giving it a try. (And if you want to know more, take a look at my Getting Started With Camera Raw- a complete discussion of all things raw.)

If you’re interested in landscape photography, then you might want to check out my new Photoshop CS5 for Landscape Photographers course at Lynda.com. This six-and-a-half hour video training course takes you from shooting through post-production, with thorough discussions of all of the landscape-related technical and aesthetic issues that you’ll face along the way. For more info, take a look at the preview, after the jump.

Only a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have spent any time talking about shooting with a cell phone camera. It’s not that I have anything against lo-fi imagery, it’s just that for years, cell phone cameras were more akin to no-fi photography. The iPhone offers a very good camera (for a cell phone) as well as the ability to edit images on the device, and print. (If you haven’t seen this, it’s worth a look to see an extremely serious application of the iPhone camera.) If you’ve been wondering about editing your iPhone images, this article will help you get started, while this will walk you through printing – both from the phone, and from your computer.

I just spent the last week motorcycling from San Francisco to Oklahoma, (to teach at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute) camping and motelling along the way. As is usual on a motorcycle, I tried to stay on the smallest roads possible, and so ended up in some fairly interesting locations. I was probably supposed to be blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking my exploits as I went, (Karaoke night in Roswell, NM will definitely make you believe in alien visitations) but to be honest, one of the nice things about such a trip is to be out of the media bubble, not engaging in it further. So rather than trying to provide heavy coverage of my trip, I decided to simply enjoy myself. But also, I have a penchant for mail – the physical kind made from crushed wood pulp. Sitting in a forest or remote desert at night, writing letters and postcards, is a pretty nice way to spend an evening, but just because I’m using analog communications doesn’t mean I have to scrimp on imagery. Thanks to the amazing Polaroid PoGo printer, I was able to print images in the middle of nowhere!

Photoshop CS5 has been shipping for a couple of weeks now, and if you follow such things, you’ve probably already heard about its new features. Photoshop serves many markets, from photography to graphic design to movie and web site production, so determining an overall assessment of the program can be tricky, as different markets have different needs. For photographers, though, Content-Aware Fill and the new Camera Raw are reason enough to upgrade. Many other features abound, and you can read about them in my comprehensive review.

As I’ve said before, anyone who performs a lot of image editing needs a pressure-sensitive tablet, and no one makes better tablets than Wacom. A lot of people, though, don’t like the coordination of drawing in one place while looking at another. For these people, Wacom has long sold the Cintiq line of screen/tablet combos. These are LCD screens that have a built in pressure sensitive tablet.

While Photoshop tends to get most of the press during major upgrades, Bridge users have a few things to be happy about with the CS5 release. The new Export tab, which bundles Photoshop Image Processor-like functionality right into Bridge; the Mini Bridge which bundles Bridge right into Photoshop; new Batch Rename functionality and new Output features, and other tweaks and modifications make Bridge CS5 a welcome upgrade. Unfortunately, as with Photoshop, Adobe has not seen fit to add any migration features for moving Bridge database information into CS5. However, with a few file copies, it appears that you can move the bulk of your important Bridge data to the new version

Five years ago, I wrote this piece on whether you should buy a full-frame or cropped sensor digital camera. At the time, cameras with a full-frame sensor were substantially more expensive than cropped-sensor cameras, and a lot of people believed that, eventually, cropped-sensor cameras would be phased out and replaced by more affordable full-frame cameras. Five years later, we’ve seen that that’s not going to happen, but the question remains: do you need full-frame or is a cropped sensor camera okay?

Topaz Labs has been producing Photoshop filters aimed at photographers (as opposed to design-oriented plug-ins) for a while now, and – for good reason – their collection has developed a good reputation. For adding "punch" to an image, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a simpler solution than Topaz Adjust. But one of the most impressive features of the Topaz Labs plug-ins are their very low price. For only $179 you can get a bundle of five plug-in packages that provide everything from color and tone manipulation to sharpening and stylizing. However, the trick to getting good results from these plug-ins is knowing their weaknesses, and learning when enough Topaz is enough. To learn more, and to see some examples, check out my detailed review.