You are a Small Business Owner (or thinking about becoming one). You have a ton of questions. Some of them are about how to promote your business, what the best way to market your company on the Internet or what marketing materials you need. You dig through a lot of books and websites. But you may have missed this one - Duct Tape Marketing. This website has a blog or better say a series of blogs that cover several directions, such as Ideas Deparment, Customers Count, Design Matters, Buzzworthy Branding, Internet Marketing Unleashed and others. I recommend that you visit this blog and subscribe to its feeds.

Have you seen "The Russell Brown Show"? No, it's not on TV. It's on the Internet. Russel performs various tricks with Photoshop, but he doesn't hold any secrets from you. He gives them away in Tips & Techniques section of his website. And it's an instant bookmark in my browser, which is Firefox by the way .

Who knows how to frame an image rise a hand! Not many as I see. Don't worry it seems that I don't know either.
Why would you want to learn about framing? Several reasons. For instance, you may need to frame a photograph, which you bought at a flea market and want to get a best frame and a best deal. You may want to speak with the guy who does the framing and do it on a professional level. Or may be you are selling your own photographs and need to frame quite a bunch, that's why you are thinking about doing it in-house.
So if you are interested, then let's learn about it at StartFraming.com. There are many good educational articles on this topic.

This article is a new and better version of an existing one (called "Complex Black and White Conversion) that was revamped specially for you. It explains how to select and manipulate tone and contrast compostions in conversion of a color image into a black and white image, and how to add some effects and finally present it. The process may appear to be complex and cumbersome, but it provides a lot of possibilities to control the contrast and tones using a mix of channels and variations of blending modes.
I would realy apreciate your feedback on this article, because I am going to redo the other 50+ articles. That's why every critique counts.

If you are a serious photographer and manage a lot of photographs, you may want to consider an investment into a tool that would cover most (if not all) of your day to day activities. ExpressDigital offers a matured version of such a tool - Darkroom v8.7.

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A bi-monthly online magazine published by CPQ Professional Imaging. You can see prior issues in the archive.

Marathon Press is a set of tools that could help you drive the business to your goals. It provides several lines of services:

• Promotional Printing - Custom designed cards, brochures, flyers, presentation folders, multi-page publications, preproduced portrait promotions and more.
• Internet Services - Website creation and hosting for professional photographers. Services include session proofing, shopping cart capabilities and marketing and sales support content.
• Marketing Programs - Cost-effective and efficient photography marketing programs that create a consistent and custom-designed marketing message.
• Publications - An ever-increasing list of photography publications by some of the most successful authorities in the professional imaging industry.
• Schools and Events - Marathon Press is the school and event photographer's one source for today's cutting-edge products and services. This complete product line features the industry's highest quality printing and creative designs teamed with superior customer service.

The galleries of beautiful pictures created by Charles Miller.

Sometimes we encounter situations when simple masking/selection doesn't work or is too time consuming to do it right. That's why professionals like to have a whole arsenal of tools to make that perfect selection. Here is another trick to tuck under the belt - Masking with Calculations (PDF).

This article reveals technology that could prove that an image was taken by a cerain camera based on the "fingerprint" of the camera:

In technical terms, Fridrich and her co-inventors Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan found that every digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity. As with fingerprints, that digital noise pattern will be consistent among all images taken from the same camera.

Though this technology is intended to be used against child pornography (as it exaplained in the article), I think that the same technology could be used to prove the copyrights of photographers on their photographs. The only thing is that the cameras should be legaly registered (the fingerprints scanned). So later on when the camera changed the owner, you still can prove that an image was taken by your camera. Well, you got the idea.

There are different papers, printers and inks. And, of course, there are different conditions where the prints are stored or diplayed. All of it affect the longetivity of the print. You probably heard or read about different lifespans of a digital print, but were those statements as true as it realy is? The following article (in PDF file) casts some light on when you can expect the skin tones on your photo turn green (or yellow?).
Want to learn more? Here is the list of articles for you.

Photo by Tom Dahlin
Illuminated by two sources: Dahlin's ceiling mounted Dynalights and the floor level IR flash. Here the ceiling strobes were used to add a little fill light to the background, and were dialed down to be about 1 stop below the floor strobe.
What an interesting approach to sport photography. Read the article on SportsShooter.com about an assignment where the client was "... looking for unique images beyond the standard through the glass, overhead, and post remotes stuff we all shoot so much of ...".

One of my tasks is to write and maintain the articles on this website. That's why I am always looking for an interesting read about usability and overall design. Recently I posted about "Writing For Web" and here I continue this interesting topic. Today I came across an article about "Article-Level Page Design". It tells us what things can help to keep the reader interested in the content we present. Don't forget to browse that website for other articles, such as Using Headline & Blurbs on News Homepages, Headline Size on News Homepages and Online Images: Faces, Size Attract.

It very well be that you already know about this website, but silly me, I just found it.
16106 tutorials (and counting) about topics such as: 3D Studio Max, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Adobe Photoshop, ASP Coding, AutoCAD, Blender 3D, BodyPaint 3D, Bryce, C++ General, CGI Coding, Cinema 4D, ColdFusion, Corel Painter, CorelDraw and Corel PhotoPaint, CSS Stylesheets, Delphi, DreamWeaver, Fireworks, FreeHand, FruityLoops, General Website Development, Gimp, GoLive, HTML Tips and Tricks, Illustrator, Image Ready, InDesign, Java Development, JavaScript, Lightwave 3D, Macromedia Director, Macromedia Flash, Maya 3D, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Word, PageMaker, Paint Shop Pro, Perl, PHP Coding, Poser, Premiere and Premiere Pro, Rhino 3D, Sound Forge, Swift 3D, SWiSH, Terragen, Visual Basic and Visual C++.

You probably noticed that images in the blog posts have rounded borders and shadows. I know that some people don't know how to do it, so here I am going to cast some light on this subject. To create such a crop of the image you can use any shape or just simply paint with brush. And the shadow here is just an optional effect, which you can replace with your own.

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This is a website with an extensive lists of Photoshop tutorials, actions, brushes, plug-ins, books and other stuff. It's just another link for your bookmarks.

Either a useful tool or a great gift, but here it is. A company called WorldTech Devices offers a keyboard for Photoshop users. This keyboard is sold in two versions: for Windows and Mac. The list of features and benefits includes:

• Includes more than 70 clearly laser-etched Pro Tools commands icons
• Color keycaps help the user locate important Pro Tools command categories, including MIDI Control, Zoom/View, Edit Tools/Modes, Record/Playback
• Quick reference card with descriptions of etched icons
• The keyboard functions as a standard keyboard for your other software applications
• Mac version only:
  • Two built-in USB ports for mouse or other USB devices
  • USB version includes 3-foot USB extension cable
  • For use with USB-equipped Apple computer with Mac OS X v10.2.5 or later
• Windows version only:
  • Palm/wrist rest included
  • Special Power, Sleep and Wake keys
  • Twelve pre-programmed multi-media keys
  • USB version includes keyboard with 6 ft. USB cable and palm rest

Note: The image represents the Mac version of the keyboard.

Constant changes of focus, distance, composition and position of the subject in dim light represent some of the obstacles that a photographer encounters in a "concert environment". You may try to use flash if allowed or rely on the vibrant and unpredictable stage lights, but you have to complete the assignment and produce great photographs. Such job is not for everyone, though for those brave ones there is a tutorial written by Steve Mirarchi.

Some of us (me for example) write articles and other text for web users. As it turned out, it's a completely different beast. At least I didn't know, may be just suspected.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In a recent study John Morkes and I found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. Jakob Nielsen

Therefore when you adapt your writing approach and already written texts you can improve usability by 159%. And there is a good set of articles to do so. Just read them and apply.
For example, there you will find out about F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content, which you could use to better organize your text.

One more thing. Have you noticed that some web designers use latin text to fill the areas in their layout mockups? Yes, me too. So here is a link to the website that can generate tons of such text just for you.

Sometimes being a beginner is a good thing (you will find out why a bit later). I am not a web designer even though I managed to create and maintain this website. And I don't know many things about web design and PHP programming. The one new thing I learned is "<!-- #include -->" directive. With such command you can include another HTML code into your web page. The only thing that you should know is that your web page (where you include the code) has to have ".shtml" extension. The file, which you include doesn't have to have any specific extension.
This directive is useful to include the same header and footer to your pages (that's what I use it mostly for). So you can modify the header and footer in one place.

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While playing with some new effects I discovered a way to resurect the background layer after you made all the changes without preserving the original image. This technique is somewhat obvious, but how many times we overlook the obvious. Before I tried something like copy the original state, but such action will be recorded in the history and after that I cannot return to my final changes.

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Zigview - the World's first digital angle view finder for digital SLR. Here is how it described by the manufacturer:

ZIGVIEW simply attaches to the eyepiece of your digital or film SLR cameras and displays the image in real time on a 2 inch/TFT color display for easy viewing at any angle.

The Zigview is particularly useful for low angle photography where you would struggle to see through the viewfinder especially with macro work, high angle situations such as press work where it is impossible to see the subject when taking pictures over crowds, and for copy work, etc. Zigview makes it easy to see the subject without difficulty in these, and many more situations.

Argraph offers two models of the viewfinder: SC-V100B - $249 and SC-V100R - $299. The more advanced one (SC-V100R) has additional capabilities, such as cable shutter release, interval shutter selease (intervalometer), and motion detection shutter release.

For some time now I was thinking about buying Canon Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3, which price is $133. But after learning about ZigView, I am strongly thinking about the ZigView-R (the advanced model). It combines the viewfinder with all those nice features. And it will be more compact - one piece instead of two.

For those of us who have a tight budget and some time to make things up there is Photocritic Blog. This blog is dedicated to Do-It-Yourself projects.

This lesson (written by Kevin Ferrara) any photographer should learn. There Kevin teaches us about meaningful composition:

By "meaningful composition" I mean a composition that is "abstractly informative in a psychological or symbolic way". So what elements of a composition can be "abstractly informative in a psychological or symbolic way"? In short, just about anything related to the craft of composing pictures: The Shapes, the Lines, the Colors, the justaposition of elements, the framing, and on and on. Everything except the subject matter, which is real or "concrete", not abstract. "

Well, it's more than just a Photoshop Blog, there are sections that are related to Graphic Design, Creative Culture, Web Design and others. But this section is dedicated specifically to Photoshop.