New at Katchlight – products to help photographers!

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Pin-Up posing guide:

Stuck for poses on a pin-up shoot? This guide is chock full of ideas and scenes to kick-start your creativity. Over 30 unique pin-up poses, with ideas and inspiration for post-production and lighting also included.
Retail price: $99.

Pimped out Vivitar 285HV:

Photos © and courtesy of Vivitar.com

The Vivitar 285 HV is the Stobist’s dream flash and perfect for off camera flash work. It does though suffer from two major faults. The hot shoe is very flimsy, and sync cords can be a real pain. Now you can buy a pimped out Vivitar with a super strong metal hot shoe instead of the stock plastic one, and a mini-phone sync cord to connect to your Pocket Wizard hard wired directly into the flash unit! These two modifications make this flash great for weddings and location portraits.
Each modified Vivitar is brand new.

Retail price: $165 + $9.95 shipping (mainland USA only)

One on one retouching training – Portland:

Want to learn the secrets of advertising retouchers? Come sit with me in my retouching studio and learn first hand. Topics covered include:

Advanced extraction of subjects from a background using both the pen tool and layer masks. We’ll explore different methods of masking including color range, brushing and using the channels themselves to create a mask.

Skin retouching – more than just an action. We’ll look at the best way to give clean, super smooth but not plastic looking skin. Just like those magazine ads you drool over when eating your breakfast…

Image extension and object removal using gaussian blur and high pass. Dump that clone tool – it looks like arse when done badly. I’ll show you a trick so damn cool you’ll wet your pants. Twice.

Layers – groups – masks. Using the layers palette isn’t difficult, but using it well will keep your working files organized and make it dead easy to correct should your client want to do so. We’ll look at how advertising retouchers structure a working file for best results. Learning to use layer masks will also help you construct seemingly impossible images from different source files.

Texture overlays – all the rage these days – and they are astonishingly easy to use. We’ll look at using blending modes, masks and using blur to your advantage.

Digital fat sucking…ah yes. The liquify tool – when used well, you shouldn’t even know that Dr Photoshop has been near an image…but used badly, and you’ll look like a moron. Body reshaping using liquify, multiple source images and the pen tool will give you a million new options for your retouching.

This is a one day intensive workshop – for those with a basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and above.

Retail price: $599