Actually, a lot of what he talks about is setting up for the shooting itself. After all, if the exposure is made the way you want, any photoshopping can be minimal. I much prefer to have the image come up the first time on my monitor the way I want it and not have to go in a tweak things with photoshop or any other tool.

The thing about digital is that you are responsible for the color balance, something that in film days was determined by the film -- tungsten, daylight balanced and so forth. Whatever film you had, that would establish the color balance you are going to get. But now you have to rely on your camera's auto white balance, or pick from a pre-established list of lighting conditions, such as incandescent, fluorescent , cloudy, etc. Then you have to remember to change it when the lighting conditions change.

Or, you can manually adjust the white balance before you shoot. He has a whole chapter on using color cards and stuff for determining how best to take the shot given the lighting conditions. I bought a device recently that goes over the lens and I stand in the model's location and aim it back toward where the camera will be, set my white balance control to "set" and push the button and it determines the neutral white balance for the light it is detecting. Seems to be working pretty good.

And he's got another chapter on setting up lights to best bring out the skin, and tricks such as using a very light coating of baby oil to enhance the skin texture. How to place lights for the various kinds of effects and so forth. But I don't have the many lighting tools that he talks about, so I have to make do.

Looking forward to seeing some of your work.