There's this interesting (and pretty cool-sounding) concept in photography called Hyperfocus. Hyperfocus is a physical property of a given lens which, when fixed at a certain focal point and set at a certain aperture, makes everything from half that distance to infinity appear in sharp focus! Too much to digest? Let's throw in some numbers to make it clearer.

If I'm using a 50mm lens and I set the aperture to f/22, when I focus the lens to a distance of 20 feet, everything in the scene from 9'6" all the way to infinity will be in sharp focus. Sounds interesting? If you're a landscape photographer, it sure should.

Read more: Hyperfocus: Everything's clear now

Good photos begin with good technique.

More than having a capable camera and great equipment, it's all about mastering the nuances of composition, understanding the capabilities of your equipment, and knowing how to capture the situation and subject. But even in the best of cases, it's good to know that you can use tools that'll help you lift the quality of your image just enough to push it into 'exceptional' territory.

The capability of today's digital cameras to resolve the tiniest of details in a scene can actually be detrimental--with their multi-megapixel sensors and high-quality optics, digital SLRs are especially relentless when it comes to capturing the good and the bad in a subject. With portraits, you can capture the colored serrations in your subject's iris as easily as the blemishes on their cheeks or the discoloration in their teeth. So while some schools of thought might deem this to be cheating, I say why not use technology to flatter your subject--be it a beautiful friend, a stunning landscape, or a luscious plate of chocolate cake!

Photoshop Lightroom 2 offers a great set of tools for touching up your photos--you can be as subtle or blatant as you want. Here are some of the tools I use when it comes to portrait photography, so that I can show my subjects in the best possible light (pun intended!).

For portraits:
When it comes to touching up portraits, I use the following tools in Lightroom 2 to make a few subtle changes that can make a stunning difference. Note that I first went through the basic image correction procedures as described in my previous blog post.

Read more: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: Portrait tricks

I recently had the opportunity to put this fine photo editing application through its paces--one of my cousins got married a couple of days ago, and I shot about 350 RAW images across the different marriage ceremonies (you'll find some on my Flickr Photostream).

Faced with the prospect of churning out high-quality images from these RAW images in record time, I happily dug into the famed Lightroom 2 workflow. After several bouts of trial and error with color configurations and tweaking sequences, I arrived at the following workflow which I believe enabled me to extract the maximum quality from my RAW images in the shortest possible time. Remember that I already used Presets and Default settings to bring my photos to a more natural, higher-quality level before performing editing individual photos using the following steps.

Read more: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: Development workflow

Ok, it's official: I'm hooked onto Lightroom 2. The sheer power of this program, its slick interface, and brilliant attention to user interface makes this the best imaging application I've ever used for my photographs. If you haven't read my initial experience with Lightroom 2, you'll find it here.

The groundwork
Lightroom 2 offers several methods to help you streamline your photo processing workflow. The following steps will help you set up your Lightroom 2 environment with pre-defined settings that will lift the quality of your photographs during the import process, even before you begin tweaking them! This will let you reach your final result faster. You only need to perform the following actions once--they will subsequently invoke automatically each time you import your photos:

1. Define a camera profile: When I first started using Lightroom, I noticed something strange while importing photos--when each photo first flashed on the screen during the import process, it appeared to have nice, vibrant colors. But after getting imported into Lightroom, they appeared rather dull and faded. I needed to do a fair amount of tweaking with the saturation, highlight and black level settings before I was satisfied with the result. I later discovered that I wasn't using my camera's profile. Lightroom lets you define a profile that is specific to your camera model. Using this profile delivers a significant improvement in color rending, resulting in more vibrant and balanced images, so you'll need to do lesser work to bring your photos to the final satisfactory level.

Read more: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: Initial configuration