The Zigview-R ships with the Zigview-R unit, a shutter-release cable, an assortment of eyepiece adapters, charger, storage pouch, and user manual, which does a good job of laying out the features and directions for use, though it could use editing to correct for its poor use of English. After you select the correct eyepiece adapter for your camera, you attach the eyepiece adapter to the Zigview-R using the included screwdriver and screws. The shutter-release cable that comes with the unit only works with certain cameras, so users need to check the camera shutter-release-compatibility chart to determine if a different shutter-release cable is needed, which would have to be purchased separately. Once the eyepiece adapter is attached, the Zigview-R slides right onto the camera's eyepiece as easily as the camera's original rubber eyecup. Next, you plug the shutter-release cable from the Zigview into the camera's shutter-release socket, turn on the camera and Zigview-R, and you're ready to shoot.

Note: By pressing the shutter-release button on the side of the device, the Zigview-R can also be removed from the camera eyepiece and used as a basic remote shutter release. When used manually, the Zigview-R provides basic shutter-release functionality, including timed and bulb.

You access the user interface for the Zigview-R by moving the joystick to the left and holding it there for a second or two. And the 2" LCD makes it easy to read. The user interface allows you to make adjustments to the remote release settings. The intervalometer can be set to fire up to 999,999 times over a period of 999 days, with the delay between shots being programmable between one-half second and 99 days. The motion-detection feature operates by detecting brightness changes in the camera's viewfinder. The sensitivity of the motion detection can be changed via the user interface. The Zigview-R allows you to use either the entire visible viewfinder area or one of nine available sections for motion detection. When setting the Zigview-R for motion detection using sections, you can make the settings independently for each section, allowing you to control which section fires the remote release.

While the entire viewfinder is not visible in the Zigview-R LCD, enough shows to give you a good idea of what is visible in the camera's viewfinder. The Zigview-R performed well enough in field tests with only minor weaknesses exposed while trying to shoot fast-moving subjects. In these cases, setting the camera to motor drive with the focus manually preset, or with autofocus set for continuous, solved the problem. There were virtually no issues for slower-moving subjects.

The Zigview-R is a photography gadget, but one that many photographers will enjoy and use a lot.

299.95 Mac/Windows

To do Artlandia justice, if the user takes the time to read the 82-page manual and the tutorials that come with the program, the mystery of broken patterns will be solved-but not necessarily fixed. None of the plug-in's controls (on the File>Automate menu) allow you to interactively drag an element in the image to identify the pattern seed. So, if you need to move the pattern-generating area down by several pixels, you must use the Control Path slider's X and Y controls. To alter the size of the pattern-generating area, you likewise need to change both the height and width and then re-center the Control Path-with multiple iterations to get it right.

If you can deal with these annoyances, the output is excellent and you may lose a few hours just trying the various effects. In addition to the standard 17 symmetries, there's a variety of other traditional repeat systems, such as the brick, half-drop, and spot repeats. You can re-edit the pattern as often as you wish and SymmetryShop remembers how it created the current version. You can also export pattern tiles directly to the Photoshop Pattern Preset library.

If you do a lot of pattern design, this is a good addition to your toolbox.

291 (download $265) Mac/Windows

We'll use the same image as in Part 1 (pumpkingirl.jpg).

You can alter the frame in many different ways or you can choose a different color for it. Let's experiment with some different color possibilities.

1. Double-click on the color icon on the left of the Color Fill 1 layer in the Layers palette. The Color Picker appears. Move it so that it doesn't cover up your image.

2. If you place the cursor over your image, you'll see the eyedropper. You can click on any color in the image to make it the new Fill color. Try clicking on the child's face, her lips, the orange of her costume, her yellow hood, her mother's green sleeve, or the blonde streak in her hair. Without making a final choice, you can preview each of these colors. I happen to like the blue, so we're going to click Cancel, but if you prefer a different color, choose it now. The following images show different color choices. My main point is that you can try out any color that you'd like without committing to it, and see exactly how it will look in the image.

Let's go a bit farther and add a small frame near the outside edge.

1. Choose the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and leave an even border at the edges (just use your eyes).

2. Choose Select>Inverse to select just the border area.

3. Add another Solid Color Fill layer. The color doesn't matter at all right now.

4. In the Layers palette, drag the Fill slider to 0%. The layer effectively becomes invisible; however, the Fill only affects the contents of the layer but any Layer Styles added to the layer will be fully visible.

5. Click on the RGB channel in the Channels palette to make that active. The Color Fill layer mask is active by default and if you leave it active, you won't be able to choose a color from the image to add a Stroke effect to the layer.

6. Choose Layer>Layer Style>Stroke. In the Stroke dialog box, click the red stroke color patch to open the Color Picker. Click on the orange of the child's costume to make that the new Foreground color. Choose an Inside stroke with a width of 4 pixels.

Click OK to exit. Here's our image now.

Adding a frame around the edge is not your only option. (Of course, you could do that on the destructive version too). On the destructive version, however, you can't group other layers to the vignette. You can if you use my non-destructive method. This is the last change that you'll try here, and although I artistically prefer the blue background with the orange stripe for this image, the grouped pattern method is also interesting and would be an excellent choice for many images.

1. Download and open the tiny image shown below. This is a seamless tile that I created from the child's head, then reduced the tile to 30 pixels wide.

2. With the pattern image active, choose Edit>Define Pattern.

3. Make the Color Fill 1 layer active and choose Layer>New Fill layer>Pattern. In the New Layer dialog box, click Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask. (If you're using Photoshop 7, you'd choose Group with Previous Layer.)

4. If the girlpattern is not visible in the pattern dialog box, click on the pattern shown and select the correct pattern to use. Click OK. The pattern will fill only the area of the vignette as you can see.

The stroke effect is now lost in the shuffle. You need to make it wider and change its color. That isn't really easy if you want to pick up a color from the image. If you double-click the layer to open it, the Stroke dialog box will only show you the black or white of the mask as color options. Here's how to trick it into letting you choose a color from the image:

1. Make the Color Fill layer 2 active (that's the border layer).

2. Click on the RGB channel in the Channels palette.

3. Choose Layer>Layer Style>Stroke or choose Stroke from the Add a Layer Style icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Do not double-click on the layer style in the Layers palette. The Channels palette will stay on the RGB channel.

4. Change the width of the stroke to 6 pixels.

5. Click the orange stroke color in the dialog box to open the Color Picker. Click her yellow hood to choose yellow for the stroke color. Click OK to close the Color Picker and OK to exit the Stroke dialog box. Here's our final image.

You can group other layers to the vignette base and alter the blend modes if you wish to create a more complex background. You can easily remove the pattern fill if you decide you don't like it: Just turn off the Eye icon to keep the option of using it again.

I hope that you've enjoyed this tutorial and can see the benefits of working non-destructively.

Sherry London writes the "Photoshop Quick Tips" column for Photoshop User magazine. She's written numerous books on Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, and related graphics. Sherry can be reached at pracingpixel@yahoo.com and her website is http://www.sherrylondon.com.

There are many different ways to create vignettes in Photoshop. The most common method is to simply draw an elliptical marquee around the subject, feather it heavily, and then inverse the selection and delete to the background color in the toolbox. This is quick and easy. The problem is that you have almost no ability to change your mind after you see what the effect looks like. You need to depend on Photoshop's Undo or Step Backward commands.

A much better way to create a vignette is to make use of the non-destructive editing capabilities in Photoshop. "Non-destructive editing" means using layers, layer masks, styles, and other features in Photoshop as they don't alter the original pixels in an image. By preserving the original pixels, and by taking advantage of layers that can be easily changed (such as Fill layers), you can make many different changes to your image, preview your results, and always be able to recover or back up without needing to start over.

Let's take a look at a non-destructive way to create a vignette and see the flexibility that it offers.

1. Download and open the image shown below. To download the image, Control-Click on it on the Mac or Right-Click on it in Windows and choose Save Picture As (or whatever Save option your browser gives you). Of course, you're welcome to also try this on your own images.

2. Choose Image>Duplicate>OK. It's best never work on the original copy of your image!

3. You need to crop this image because too much of the image shows areas of little or no interest. I cropped from the left of the green jacket to almost the right side of the image as you can see.

4. Choose the Elliptical Marquee tool. Reset the tool to the defaults (Control-Click on the Mac or Right-Click on Windows on the Marquee tool icon at far left of the Options Bar. Then choose Reset Tool from the drop-down menu.) This brings you back to a known state of the Elliptical Marquee tool (Feather 0; Anti-alias On; Style Normal) The Elliptical Marquee tool will create the selection that will be the sharp center of interest in the image.

5. For those of you who simply want to make an oval selection, place your cursor just a bit below the place where the young girl's chin and hood meet the pumpkin costume. Hold the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on Windows and drag the marquee out to the sides until the right edge of the marquee clears the hood of the costume and until the top edge of the marquee is about halfway between the girl's head and top of the image. Release the mouse button and then release the modifier key (Option orAlt key); then place in the image, where you first click is the center of the new selection. If you need to move the marquee because it's not where you want it, you can do so by holding the Spacebar before you release both the mouse button and the Option or Alt key.

Note: I know that many of you obsess over centering the oval marquee. Here's a fast way to do it: Make a tiny oval selection in the white part of the child's costume, choose Edit>Copy, deselect, and then choose Edit>Paste. The white spot in the new layer is the exact center of the image (assuming that you were looking at the image at a level of magnification that shows the entire image). You can then turn on the Rulers and drag a horizontal and vertical guide to the white dot. Place your cursor at the intersection of the guides, hold the Option or Alt key, and then drag out the marquee. Delete the extra layer and clear the guides when you have made the selection. Here's my selection in the image.

6. Choose the Eyedropper tool and sample the dark blue in the jean's to the left of the child's face. That will be your first try at the color for the background.

Up until this point, the destructive instructions are the same as the instructions for the non-destructive version. In the simplest (destructive) form of creating a vignette, you would now guess at the feather amount that you wanted, inverse the selection, and fill with the foreground color. Your image would contain only one layer, and if you didn't like either the feather or the fill color, you would need to revert back to Step 5 and 6 and try again.

To keep all of the image pixels available, you will, instead, inverse the selection and add a Solid Color Fill layer as follows:

. Choose Select>Save Selection to save this hard-edged marquee as an Alpha channel so that you can easily re-do the vignette effect at any time. (You could also click on the Save Selection as Channel icon in the Channels palette.)

. Choose Select>Inverse to select the frame area of the image.

. Choose Layer>New Fill layer>Solid Color. The layer automatically takes the same color as your Foreground color patch in the Toolbox (unless you select a different color). Click OK in each dialog box to create the layer. As you can see, you have a frame with a very hard edge.

A vignette usually has a soft edge. This soft edge could have been placed on the original marquee selection using the Select>Feather command, but you can't see the effect of the feather command until it's applied. You can get the same effect as a feather by using the Gaussian blur command on the layer mask of the Solid Color Fill layer. The big advantage to this is that you can then preview the effect to see exactly how your image will look.

1. Choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Slide the Radius slider until you like the degree of softness on the edge of the frame. Here's what a Radius of 3.9 looks like.

Now, here's a Radius of 100.

And here's the image with a Radius of 20.

Click OK when you like the result.

2. If you like the image, you can save it and consider the image "finished."

This need not be the end, however. Look for Part 2 of this tutorial later this month, where we'll use the layers that you've created to alter colors and add some patterns to the background of the image. You'll be able to easily change the image in ways not possible using traditional methods.

Sherry London writes the "Photoshop Quick Tips" column for Photoshop User magazine. She's written numerous books on Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, and related graphics. Sherry can be reached at pracingpixel@yahoo.com and her website is http://www.sherrylondon.com.