Phil Askey publishes reviews of digital cameras that are the most comprehensive on the Web. They typically run 10, 12, even more pages. Lots of sample photos and test data. They've helped guide my buying decisions.

Michael Reichmann also posts some excellent tutorals. They are not as exhaustive or systematic as Phil Askey's reviews, but they have the benefit of a widely-recognized pro photographer testing them and offering his professional judgment.

No one has asked me, but you might be wondering what it takes to earn a "Highly Recommended" designations for the reviews of sites, tools, tutorials, or videos.

It's a judgment call. Mine, when I do the rating. When other contributors submit a review, it's their judgment to make.

I've received some flattering comments recently on the audio quality for the TLR video tutorials.

Part of that quality comes from using a high quality audio codec (there's some jargon already). When you make a video, you can choose from different methods of compressing the audio and the video. Choose wisely and you get high quality audio.

I receive requests by e-mail to help people with their photos. They'll send me a flattering message telling me how much they appreciate my work, they've seen one or more messages in a forum, etc.

I will get the new TLR Professional Sharpening Actions on the site this week. Documentation and video will follow.

I have the capture actions and creative actions being tested now.

The capture sharpening action sets have five versions: low resolution digital cameras (LRDC), medium resolution digital cameras (MRDC), high resolution digital cameras (HRDC), small film scans (SFS), and large film scans (LFS). Within each action set, you can select edge mask sharpening, surface mask sharpening, and combined sharpening. You can select four different mask widths.

I was preparing a review of Lightroom News (a site I am prepared to strongly endorse). I noticed that Lightroom News describes itself as ". . . independently published and not endorsed or sponsored by Adobe Systems."

Do you find the news items interesting? Have you read further and watched any of the videos, downloaded any of the tools, visited any of the sites?

The new version of The Light's Right is no longer just about my digital photography resources. I'm trying to make this site into a broader site where visitors come regularly for news, book reviews, software reviews, tools, site recommendations, etc.

Chat with me about this, if you would. I have a couple of new video tutorials planned for this coming week or two.

I've read a few threads on various forums about Lightroom 2.1 performance. There are still complaints about performance with the Selective Adjustments Brush.

I was reading a thread about dodging and burning on Yahoo! flickr this morning:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157603694359812/

A comment caught my attention. "I also do it in Lightroom now. I could actually live without Photoshop now, and I only use it for one in 50 photos."

This is the flip side of the discussion that Scott Kelby and Matt Klowkowski had a couple of weeks ago. They were talking abut ACR 5 and whether Lightroom was necessary.