Software How To

The use of sliders is a familiar practice for everyone who edits their images, regardless of the software employed. The most common practice is to simply click and drag on the slider handle.

Have you ever tried to bump up the saturation in a drab image, only to have a subject’s skin tones go out of wack? As you’ll learn in the Photoshop tutorial below, the solution is to properly adjust your image using both saturation and vibrance controls.

Adobe Lightroom is a powerful tool, and for those of you new to the software here’s a tutorial illustrating how to use the adjustment brush to accomplish some basic but important editing tasks like selectively toning up or toning down parts of an image. 

Got Questions About Photography? Professional Photographer and Photoshop Expert Scott Kelby Has Got Answers

Mango Street Labs is a great source of short, simple tutorials that can make a big difference in your images, even if you don’t have a lot of technical expertise. In the quick video below, you’ll learn three easy techniques for dramatically enhancing your photographs.

I’ve worked with all the popular film emulators and black-and-white conversion plug-ins, looking for the one that met my workflow and esthetic requirements. After countless hours, I’m still not fully convinced of their efficacy as such. Still, they are fun to use and do fill a niche. So far, I’ve found Alien Skin’s Exposure X2 does the most convincing job so that I feel comfortable enough within my own alien skin—see what I did there?—that I’ll continue to use it, so to speak.

It’s not too difficult to turn a good photograph into a great one by making some simple adjustments to contrast, sharpening and toning in Lightroom. The helpful video tutorial below shows you how to do just that while retaining a natural look.