OK, so you’ve taken the perfect picture — only when you go to process it, you notice that there are shadows and/or highlights that make it less than perfect after all. No need to toss it into the digital trash bin, though — instead you can use the Dodge and Burn tools in Adobe Photoshop to fix the problem.

For example, I took this image of some sheep in the woods and loved the smiley face of the little lamb. However, in the original a dark shadow was cast across the lamb’s face and the mother ewe’s face was distractingly uneven. It was time to hit the video2brain library for a solution.

In this free lesson from his course Adobe Photoshop Elements 10: Learn by Video, Tim Grey showed me how to use the Dodge and Burn tools — and I had a feeling that just might do the trick for my shadowed sheep. Tim’s recently released course Photoshop CS6 Image Optimization Workshop also offers some great tips on dodging and burning.

I am embarrassed to admit that I was initially intimidated by the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop. It just sounded so technical. However, once Tim showed me that it’s really just painting with light and shadow, I was able to vastly improve my image. I was thrilled to add these tools to the arsenal of “things I know how to do in Photoshop.”

You can do so many awesome things to your images with Photoshop — but only if you know how to. Tim Grey’s new course Photoshop CS6 Image Optimization Workshop will show you how to maximize your effectiveness and make your workflow more efficient so you can get back out there and shoot some more amazing images. Not only will you learn about Photoshop basics like cropping and color correction, but you’ll also learn more advanced techniques like working with curves and dodging and burning.

Novice and experienced Photoshop users alike will benefit from Tim’s advice. For example, in this free lesson he demonstrates how to simulate a high dynamic range (HDR) image using a single image and the HDR Toning Effect in Photoshop CS6. Really cool stuff!

On a perfect May afternoon this week, trainer Tim Grey and the v2b crew were out shooting an upcoming live action photography video. The set was Graz, Austria, video2brain’s European home base. Here are a few shots from their day, including the Schlossberg clock tower, built in 1550.

Tim Grey on set in Graz (photos: Barbara Luef)

Yesterday marked the debut of the first of our new series of Learn by Video courses — produced, as always, in partnership with our pals at Peachpit Press. The Learn by Video series presents in-depth training on major topics, wrapped of course in the unparalleled video2brain interface, complete with project files and a 48-page booklet of supplemental material.

In Joe Chellman’s Introducing WordPress: Learn by Video, you’ll learn everything you need to know to create and maintain your own blog with this popular software. This is Joe’s first course for v2b, but he is an old hand at teaching and has a friendly, engaging, and easy-to-follow style.

For a free sample, spend a few minutes with this free video where Joe explains how to choose and install one of the many free themes (visual styles) that are available for WordPress.

HTML5 and CSS3 open up worlds of new possibilities for web development. But why take my word for it — check out Andy Olsen’s new course Core HTML5 and CSS3 Web Development to see real life examples of all the super-cool things you can do with these emerging technologies. He’ll show you how to work with HTML5 features like semantic tags, the selector API, new form input controls, improved accessibility, and more.

You’ll also learn about the advantages of using CSS3. For example, in this free lesson Andy shows you how to spiff up your web pages by adding colors, drop shadows, and rounded corners using CSS3. It’s like adding candy for your eyes!

CS6 has officially launched, and we’ve got courses for you on everything from Dreamweaver and Photoshop to Flash, After Effects, and Prelude CS6. To help you find all of our new CS6 courses in one spot, we’ve created a CS6 landing page. You can use the code v2b20 to get 20% off any of the titles on this page for the next week.

10 courses are already out (including two that are completely free). We’ll be updating this page over the next several weeks so you can quickly see what CS6 courses are available and find out what new ones are coming soon.

Enjoy! And if there are other courses you’d like to see, please drop us a line at editor@video2brain.com.

There is nothing like the feeling of looking at a perfectly sharpened photograph. Everything just sparkles and pops and you feel like you are right there in the image. And by the same token it’s so disappointing to look at an image that is either too soft or ridiculously over-sharpened. If you are trying to find that sweet spot of perfect sharpness for your digital images, you will really enjoy this lesson from Tim Grey’s new course Optimal Output with Photoshop CS6 .

The course covers much more than sharpening — you’ll learn about all facets of preparing and improving your images, including color management, printing, and how to troubleshoot your workflow when you are not achieving the results you’d like. The tips and techniques in this course really helped me improve my images, and I think you’ll be pleased with your results as well.

Teaching photography is a passion of mine. I enjoy teaching nearly as much as I enjoy shooting! The look on someone’s face when they see the huge difference in their photos after just a little direction means the world to me. I work with students of all ages, from primary schoolchildren to retirees. That’s one of the beauties of photography — you’re never too young, or too old, to learn.

However, as much as I’d love to visit with each one of you personally, I just can’t do it. I’m sure the airlines would appreciate the business, but it might be bad for family life. So I wrote an eBook on basic photography, but since photography is obviously a visual art form, I really wanted to take this education to the next level.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of photography training videos out there. Some are extremely expensive, and some are extremely… dull. I really wanted to take my methods of teaching, combine them with the superb video2brain format of small, concise videos, and create a Photography 101 series that would educate, inspire, and with any luck, even entertain!

My Photography 101 course is just over two hours of video, but contains more education than you’d get in a weekend workshop — and I should know, I’ve taught several of them! The beauty of this format is that you can watch a video, try it out, rewatch it, and get it in just a short amount of time. Need a refresher on what aperture means? No more flipping through a 400-page book, scanning paragraphs for that section. No more fast-forwarding through a four-hour monotonous video course looking for the right moment. Just tap play on the five-minute “Aperture Priority” technical video, or the two-minute “Changing Aperture” creative video, and refresh your memory one more time.

In this free video from the course, I’ll show you one simple tip that I promise will keep you from missing important shots!

Have you ever done this? You are working away on correcting your photographic image and you think you’ve really improved it. Then you take a look at the original image without any changes and you realize you’ve really overdone the corrections and you prefer the original. It’s easy to do, and Tim Grey’s new course Lightroom 4 Image Optimization Workshop is going to really help you out in this department.

In this free lesson Tim demonstrates how you can monitor the changes you are making to your image in Adobe Lightroom 4 with the before and after feature that allows you to compare your edited version to your original as you make changes. Then you can have a nice cup of coffee instead of having to redo your changes all over again.

In this free video from his upcoming video2brain course Getting Started with SpeedGrade CS6, Chad Perkins asks and answers the question “What is SpeedGrade?”

The short answer is, SpeedGrade is a professional-quality color grading application that is a new addition to the Adobe Creative Suite in CS6. But of course there’s more to it than that. Watch this video to get a tour of SpeedGrade’s interface and a taste of what it can do to improve the quality of your video.