Many of the images that you take particularly cityscapes, like most portraits, can do with some spot fixing. I’ve been traveling through Europe a lot lately and because it’s considered almost de rigeur to smoke there, many of the photos that I have are littered with cigarette butts and assorted garbage.

And although you may not realize it, even small cigarette butts will detract from an image. A few minutes spent cleaning up an image can result in it having a way more polished look. Here are my top techniques for cleaning up litter and unsightly blemishes.

A word of advice before you begin: make a duplicate of the original image and work on this. Then you have the original image to look back at and see just how much improved the image is after the spot fixing is complete.

There have been questions posted as comments recently asking about the role of Lightroom in a photographer’s workflow. Many posters who are not currently using Lightroom aren’t sure whether Lightroom it is an alternative to Photoshop or where it fits if you have Photoshop too. I thought it was a good time to look at where Lightroom fits in the Adobe line up and to explain why Lightroom isn’t a Photoshop alternative.

Lightroom was developed from the ground up as a tool for photographers and one which would provide a logical workflow for processing a lot of images in an effective and efficient way. Photographers have special needs for handling images from photo shoots and these aren’t necessarily reflected in how Photoshop is designed.

When you handle a lot of images in Photoshop you download …

With Lightroom 3 Beta having just been released, the first thing that most people will do – as I did – is to look and see if the features that you’ve always wanted in the program have been added.

One of the areas that Lightroom 2 fell a little short on in my book was the Print module. I wanted to be able to print with a colored background without having to import a background to use as a Identity Plate to achieve the effect and I wanted to be able to assemble a single printed sheet incorporating multiple images but I didn’t want them to have to always be the same size.

Ok, so the good news is I am a very happy gal! Both these problems are fixed in the new Lightroom 3 …

In this post Lisa Newton from Travelin’ Local and MLAPA looks at a great new service that merges Flickr with virtual mapping.

There’s a great new site I recently found, that makes the process of merging Flickr images with virtual mapping, much quicker and easier; and takes the entire process to the next level. Although I’m a big fan of Flickr, for a long time one of its major drawbacks was that I couldn’t embed Flickr maps.

That was then, this is now; you’re able to easily create embeddable maps by combining Flickr and Map Flickr, a “powerful tool to create an interactive map with geolocated images on it using the Google Maps and Flickr API.”

First things first, to use Map Flickr, you have to be a Flickr member first. Indeed, DPS recently had a wonderful new beginner’s guide to Flickr, so I hope you’ve already joined. BTW, a pro membership of Flickr isn’t required for Map Flickr, but for $25.00 per year, it’s a reasonable price if you’re a professional, or are involved with, downloading and storing a large amount of bandwidth for your photos.

In a recent post I showed you how to create a kaleidoscope using Photoshop. As one of the techniques for using a kaleidoscope, I suggested you could create a repeating pattern from it. One reader posed the question as to how a repeating pattern could be created given that there were spaces around the original shape. Today, I’ll show you how to solve the issue and, in the process, get a grasp on creating repeating patterns in Photoshop.

Step 1

Start with the finished kaleidoscope image document. If you didn’t see the original article, here’s a link to it.