If you’re a photographer, then there’s a good chance that the most signficant announcement of the year is not a new camera or new lens, but the release of Photoshop CS4. While Photoshop can’t turn a crappy photo into a masterpiece - you still need decent gear and a fair amount of skill to capture a good image - it is still the best tool for realizing the final vision that you had when you shot. Photoshop serves many different disciplines from photography to design to research, and Photoshop upgrades often add features that are of little use on the photographic side of things. And while CS4 packs a few new items that most shooters will have no interest in, the new features are largely additions that all photographers will be interested in

The American Southwest is one of the great deserts of the world. A trip across the Southwest will take you through an incredible variety of desert climes. From the Sahara-like sand dunes of Death Valley, through the Coyote/Roadrunner terrain of the Mojave to the high deserts of New Mexico, the great American desert yields an incredible variety of truly exotic landscapes. When most people choose to explore the Southwest, they hit the high profile locations: The Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches, Monument Valley, Canon de Chelly. These are all places that you should see, but don’t think you have to go to a big national park to see something special in the Southwest.

Nikon’s Capture NX2 offers revolutionary image editing tools wrapped up in a full-featured editing environment, with a built in browser. Real World Capture NX 2 will walk you through every function of the program, while teaching you good post-production workflow, and image editing tips. Aimed at the novice and experienced user, the book is ideal for anyone who wants to use the program.

The Rebel XSi is a great camera (and you can learn more about it here). If you’re lucky enough to have one, you can learn more about how to use it with my Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450 Companion. While that’s a bit of a mouthful, I promise the text inside the book is concise and to the point, and should do a good job at teaching you how to use your new camera.

One of the great advantages of shooting digital is that you can shoot tremendous volume without having to spring for expensive film and processing costs. While this freedom allows you to experiment and learn much faster than you could with film, it also means that you need to have a lot of storage at the ready when you’re shooting in the field. Flash memory cards are cheaper than ever, but it’s still hard to beat the price-per-megabyte of hard drive storage. If you’ve been looking for a portable, hard drive-based tool for offloading images in the field, then you’ll want to take a look at the P-7000 Multimedia Viewer.

Capture NX2 is the eagerly-awaited follow-up to Nikon’s excellent image editing, raw conversion software. While the raw converter only works with Nikon cameras, the editor itself is also compatible with TIFF or JPEG files. Why should you care if you don’t shoot with a Nikon camera? Because Capture NX includes extremeley powerful editing tools wrapped up in a completely non-destructive editing environment.

Canon has positioned their new Rebel XSi at the “entry-level” end of their product line. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to divide digital cameras into “entry-level” and “mid-range” and “high-end.” In the early days, there was a single distinguishing feature that made it simple to tell what market a camera was aimed at: the image quality of an entry-level camera was markedly different from a high-end, “pro” level camera. Those days are now long gone, and – just as with entry-level and pro-level film cameras – you can now shoot high-end image quality with an entry-level camera. Canon’s Rebel XSi marks the high end of Canon’s low end, and the new model offers important changes over its predecessor, the Rebel XTi.

I have a few Macs that I use for my various jobs, but the main machines that I use are a MacBook Pro, and a Dual 2.7 GHz G5 tower. Since the tower is connected to a large monitor, it’s what I use as my primary image editing workstation. After a few recent jobs, including a computationally-intensive video gig, I started to wonder if it wasn’t time to think about upgrading to a faster machine. A friend mentioned that he was going to build a Hackintosh. As his machine came together, and he sent me some benchmarks, I decided that this was the upgrade path that I would choose. The result? A machine with Mac-Pro like performance that crushes all the other Macs in my house, and cost only about $1000.