There are those of us who want vivid color, and those who want accurate color. These two factions battle with each other from time to time, and when they do, it’s epic. It’s like Spock and Kirk in the Amok Time episode.

For accurate color, Adobe Camera Raw has a great feature that will let you calibrate your color, through the use of a ColorChecker chart and the AcrCalibrator script from Chromoholics. » MORE

Many digital cameras don’t do black and white natively. Those that do shoot in black and white are actually shooting in color and converting in-camera – and they usually do a less than adequate job of it.

Something happened around the late 1990′s that saw a dramatic decrease in the number of black and white pictures being published. Though there were still a good number monochrome pictures being produced, it suddenly became more trendy for commercial photography and photojournalism to be shot in bright color.

I think with the loss of film, many of us started losing our taste for black and white images. Maybe that’s because it’s trickier to get a good looking black and white image now, as the one-stop “convert to black and white” button in cameras rarely do a stellar job.

Though black and white is still a very popular way of finishing a picture, within the realm of digital photography it’s more realistic to shoot in color and convert the picture in post-processing after the fact. This can be done differently in different software, but we’ll approach the Photoshop and the Lightroom method. Any application that gives you control over color channels and a conversion tool will allow you to get similar results, though. » MORE

Photoshop is still the defacto photo editing application for many people, despite the fact that Lightroom and Aperture have stolen some of its thunder in the photography market. If you use Photoshop to edit pictures, you may be interested in a few of these shortcuts which will save you some time and effort when performing some of the most common tasks.

While Photoshop may still be the “industry standard”, Adobe Lightroom is quickly making inroads and also has a few quick keys that may make working on photographs a little easier.

Photoshop

• Pressing Space Bar will get you the Hand Tool while you hold it down.
• Pressing Tab will make your tool palettes disappear/reappear.
• F will toggle between standard, maximized, and full screen mode.
• Holding down the Alt (or Apple) key will let you zoom with the scroll wheel.
• [ and ] let you increase or decrease brush size. Holding down shift while you use [ or ] let you do the same with softness.
• 1->0 will let you change opacity on a tool starting with 1 (10%) up to 0 (100%). Quickly following it with another number will let you fine tune the opacity change.

Lightroom

• 1-5 will let you set a rating for the photograph.
• P, U and X will let you set flags. P for Picked, U for Unassign Flag, and X for Reject. (see here)
• Tab will show or hide the display panels.
• L will toggle through Lights Out mode, first a dim background, next a totally blackened background.
• G will take you to Grid mode.
• E will take you to Loupe mode.
• ~ will toggle between Loupe or Grid mode.

Learn them and use them, they’ll save you a ton of time when working on images.