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Michael Zhang

Great Two-Hour Lectures on How to Use Photoshop and Lightroom

Looking for free lessons on how to get started with using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to post-process your photographs? Look no further than the official YouTube channel of New York City camera shop B&H Photo Video. The store often invites well-known professional photographers to hold lectures on subjects they're knowledgable in and passionate about. The collection of videos aren't as shared as other shorter tutorial videos you'll find online due to their great lengths -- they run up to two hours each -- but they're fantastic resources for learning the ins and outs of photography.

In the video above, photographer Tim Grey offers an overview of using Photoshop CS6 for optimizing your photos. His topics include adjustment layers, image cleanup tools, cropping, rotating, correcting perspective, and applying local adjustments.

Jon Martin

Checklist for Buying Used Cameras and Lenses on Craigslist

Editor's note: The checklist presented in this post is also available as a text file for you to print out and carry along for reference. This post was first published here.

Almost all of the camera equipment I have ever owned was purchased used. While this isn’t something to be proud of, I do like to think I know a thing or two about cameras and lenses. I have run into the occasional problems with lenses, but I made sure I had the option to return them if they had issues. I have also purchased a few lenses and cameras from people on Craigslist as well and as long as you know what you’re getting and tried it out when you made the purchase, you should be covered. There are a few things that I always check and I’m putting them up here in the hope that you might find some of it useful.