If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, you’ve noticed that most personal pages start on the “wall”. The wall is a running list of posts, comments, likes, shares, and links to articles that is constantly being updated throughout the day. The only way you can view another person’s wall is to be accepted as a friend.

Facebook business pages are different. Like a personal page, by default, potential customers see your business wall the first time they look you up. However, folks who don’t already know you or know about your studio won’t be motivated to “like” you and get on your FB business fan list. This is especially true if you are putting ads in Facebook.

To solve the problem, Facebook lets you add a “static landing page” to your business account.

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I hate upgrading computers and software. It is expensive, time consuming, and it is never as easy as you expect it to be. So typically I’ll wait until something goes wrong. Once my computer isn’t working, the pain of upgrading becomes less than the pain of spending the time and money to fix it.

However, I’m ready to upgrade Photoshop. Content-Aware Fill will be worth it.

For those of you not familiar with this feature in CS5, Content-Aware fill lets Photoshop analyze an image, and try to figure out how to remove the damaged or unwanted area you’ve selected from the background.

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A realtor friend of mine recently showed me a book entitled, Magnetic Real Estate Photography. I was less impressed by the contents of the book and more impressed by the idea. The author took a series of several “before and after” photographs, described them, and created a book she sold on Amazon.

Two things immediately struck me about the book:

1. 1. It was a soft cover photo book – just like the ones we make every day here at the lab.
2. 2. Every page had a few sentences, but the important part was the photography.

Which made me wonder, why couldn’t a professional photographer do the same thing?

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Thom Rouse, an internationally known artist, will hold a 3-day workshop entitled “Fine Art Portraiture in Celebration of the Feminine Image” May 15-17 at Hicks Studio of Fenton (map). Cost for the workshop is $425 for 3 full days, and is limited to 12 participants.

Thom combines photography and advanced Photoshop techniques to create his fine art portraiture. Here’s a tutorial he recently posted in Professional Photographer Magazine and an article on Shutterbug.com that gives you an idea of the techniques you’ll learn in his class.

According to Thom, on the first day photographers will work with live models using concepts for “dressing, lighting and posing that celebrates the feminine image.” Then, on days two and three photographers will learn how to apply different fine art enhancements using Photoshop layers. By the end of the third day, “photographers will have a full set of layered images as a reference for applying the techniques to other images.”

If you are looking for a new portraiture style – or to enhance your current style – you owe it to yourself or your graphics artist to take this class.  The ability to create and display images like these on your website and in your studio will help you to justify premium prices for all your portraiture.

For more information or to register for this class, contact Thom Rouse at (815)761-1358 or thom@thomrouse.com. To see more examples of his work visit his website www.thomrouse.com

Give me a camera, and by the end of a day of shooting I’ll take several bad images. I mean really, really bad. Even after all the classes and time spent reading manuals I still, somehow, end up with a few real stinkers.

Unfortunately, some of these images mean a lot to me. I don’t want to throw them away, and I don’t want to send a single low-res image through ROES just for color correction. So I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to quickly get an image that looked bad on my monitor to look good on a print.

Then I discovered an easy Photoshop trick. Buried in the Curves window are three little eyedropper buttons that can fix the majority of density and color cast problems with an image. Here’s how to use them.

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Recently I was cc’d on an email between a client and one of his suppliers. The subject of the email was “social networking.” Here is what the email said:

As for the social networking stuff, it doesn’t work for everyone, but you have to do it anyway. An hour twice a week should be fine. Mostly I think people don’t do it because they don’t know what to do. A couple of links to articles you find online, a video from your website, new products, contests….really, anything works, just get your name in front of customers on a regular basis, and link back often to your website.

Here was my response to my client.

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If you are like most photographers, you started using Facebook as a personal profile, instead of a business page. The advantages of using Facebook as a business are:

1. You can have an unlimited number of friends

2. You can create Facebook ads

3. You don’t have to manually accept new friends/clients

If you been wanting to create a business page, but were frustrated because you weren’t able to bring all your friends and clients along with you automatically, now you can.

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Adding a vignette to an image is easy in Lightroom or Photoshop. In Lightroom, vignettes can be achieved in the Develop module. On the right column, there is a section for ‘lens correction’. In Photoshop, vignettes can be found in filter —-> correct camera distortion. Just like in Lightroom, there are sliders to adjust the lightening or darkening of your edges.

The problem with both these solutions is that if you crop your photos tightly, the vignette effect bleeds into your subject. To stop this from happening, you need to separate your subject from the background first.

Here’s what I do:

1. Make a copy of the background layer. Unlock it. Select it.

2. Use the lasso tool to outline the subject. You don’t have to be exact, just close.

3. While the “marching ants” are around your selected area, from the Select menu, pick “Feather” and set it to 3 pixels for low res images or 5 pixels for 300dpi images. This prevents hard edges.

4. Press Ctrl+J (CMD+J on Mac) to copy the selection to a new layer.

5. Click on the unlocked background layer. Apply your vignette (or any effect) to the background copy layer.

That’s it! Using this technique you don’t have to worry about your Photoshop effects bleeding into your subject.