OnOne Software is releasing a Standard Edition and a Lightroom & Aperture Edition of Perfect Photo Suite 7 to go along with the Premium Edition (currently shipping) of the photography software suite.  
Learn more here: Perfect Photo Suite 7

The Standard Edition allows usage of the entire Perfect Photo Suite 7 as a standalone application. This edition is ideal for those who don't shoot RAW or use Adobe Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, or Apple Aperture but want to enhance, stylize, correct their JPG images with a professional touch, and create and edit multi-layered files without Photoshop.

The Lightroom & Aperture Edition of Perfect Photo Suite 7 is designed for the photographer who does not use Photoshop but uses Lightroom or Aperture as the hub of their editing and photo management workflow. It provides powerful image editing tools that do not exist in those products and gives them the ability to extend their image editing power, maximize their creativity, and solve the most common problems in photo editing. With the Perfect Photo Suite 7, users can work with a variety of image format including RAW, JPG, PNG, and TIFF, create and edit multi-layered files, and access any of the Perfect Photo Suite 7 modules directly from Lightroom or Aperture. After adjustments are made, edited images may be saved as a .PSD, .TIF, .PNG, or .JPG right next to the original image in their Lightroom or Aperture library. This edition of the Suite also works as a standalone application for quick touch ups and edits.

The Premium Edition is the version of Perfect Photo Suite 7 that has been available since October 31, 2012.

Perfect Photo Suite 7 Premium Edition
Full Version – $299.95
Upgrade Version – $149.95

Perfect Photo Suite 7 Lightroom & Aperture Edition
Full Version – $149.95
Upgrade Version – $79.95

Perfect Photo Suite 7 Standard Edition
Full Version – $79.95
No upgrade available

Learn more here: Perfect Photo Suite 7

Coming soon! "Virtual Instruction".

I'm hard at work getting the new software ready and preparing materials to use for future online lessons. With the use of new Webinar services I will soon be providing tutoring in Photoshop, Lightroom and some Photography topics right over the web. 

This will be an amazing way for me to provide a much wider variety of lesson topics, to a wider number of people (and thus at a reduced costs to you).  No need for you to travel, no need to make "time in the day".  All you need is your computer, headphones and your web-cam (and you don't really need your web-cam unless you need me to look at your camera or something).  This is NOT just watching some training video.  This is live training with me in real time (but also with all my course materials available too).

Webinars: will consist of Full presentations, interactive lessons, real time screen sharing and shared applications.  In addition you'll be able to return to and review the webinar as much as you like because all webinars will be recorded for students to access as needed for review of materials.   Sounds good huh?  

As demand for my tutoring in Adobe has risen, I've decided that everyone, including myself would benefit if I were to start doing small group workshops.  The new workshops (approx six per month) will rotate monthly, so if you can't make class for the topic you wanted, you can make the next one a month later.

The new workshops will cover topics like:

• beginning Photoshop and Lightroom
• portrait retouching
• HDR photography
• textured photography
• and more to come as I work out what subjects are popular enough to fill a small class

Photoshop of course is an amazing way to do touch up work on portrait photography.  However, all too often the touch up artist takes things too far, either by choice or more often becuase they simply don't know the techniques for doing natural touch up work in Photoshop.  The following article gives you some great touchup techniques for skin, eyes, lips and teeth that result in very realistic natural looking images.  As with anything in Photoshop, there are a hundred variations on these techniques, but to get the basic concept down, just grab a portrait of yourself and follow along with the tutorial steps.

Did you know that you can actually “paint” smoke into your photos and graphic designs with special “smoke” brushes in Photoshop?  Well you can.  So think of all the cool images you have that would look even cooler if there had been smoke pouring out of the house, the car, the building, or your brother’s ears.    Ok, so maybe you don’t want to make fake fires in your photographs, but smoke has other uses as well.  Just because it is called smoke doesn’t mean it cannot be used for any number of other cool effects.  Fog, stylized texture, insanely cool masking options, and more.  Just get creative.

Here is a long list of websites which give away various brush sets based on the “smoke” theme.

Looking to create some “cool” grunge type graphics from your photography?  Well, there’s a lot of ways to do it and a lot of styles to choose from.  So to get your started, here’s a long list of tutorials from various websites which you can use to jump start yourself.  These tutorials all work with Photoshop to give your artwork some textured, aged and uneven look with rusting metal signs, dirty spots, scorched borders, or overall distressed accents.  Have fun.

HDR Hotography is a relatively new way of taking photographs which allows for new frontiers in artistic expression by the photographer and new advances in image capture by your camera.  The basic concept of HDR is the blending of multiple exposures to produce a wider range of visible details in a photograph.  That's the short description.  If your ready to dig into the detailed step by step instructions on creating HDR photos both in your camera and on the computer, then please read on.

There’s a new extension available on Adobe exchange and it’s free!  Everybody likes free right?  The new PIXEL BENDER plugin comes with a full set of pixel bending tools which you can apply to your images.  They range from Twirl to Oil Paint to Fisheye to Hole.    Yes, it makes holes in things.  Basically it’s like getting thirteen new filters for Photoshop. 

Send in your Photoshop and Lightroom questions. I’ll post you an answer.

When I’m not shooting photographs or tutoring I still must keep my Photoshop and Lightroom skills sharp.  One of the best ways to do that is to teach others how to make the most of their photos and artwork.  So send in your questions with as much detail as you can muster. I will respond to your question on my blog with full step by step detailed instructions on how to create the effect, look, restoration, etc that you are trying to achieve with your images.