Software How To

Sometimes we can't choose the time of day when we come across a beautiful landscape scene. So we take a few shots, despite the terrible midday light, and our images seem destined for the trash.

There are numerous reasons you may want to adjust or change the color of objects in your images. Maybe a model's dress clashes with the background, or perhaps you're shooting seascapes at golden Hour and the warm light biases the tones of the water. The list is almost endless.

We've featured effective White Balance tutorials in the past, but the lesson below from the Camera Focus YouTube channel is about as simple as it gets. It works really well and deserves a prominent spot in your image-editing bag of tricks.

Think of Generative Expand as Cropping in reverse gear.  It's mind-blowing. Instead of making the image smaller and deleting pixels, the new feature allows you to expand image content beyond its original borders by using the Adobe Firefly-powered Generative Fill function to create additional content that never existed but blends naturally with the original image. The new content can be an extension of the original data or based on the Command Prompt you type. This description is an oversimplification—read on for some real-world examples you haven't seen anywhere else.

We've been working our way through all new features in the latest update to Photoshop, so you know the best way to use them. The tutorial below from Photoshop Café demonstrates the power of an oft-ignored tool that one of our favorite image-editing instructors says, "changes everything."

Photoshop's powerful Layer Mask tools enable you to enhance photos in a way that's not possible with other methods. Unfortunately, some photographers avoid this technique because of a misconception that it's beyond their skills.

One reason Lightroom can be so complicated is that it's a very robust program that's not designed exclusively for photographers. Art directors, web designers, and other content creators use it to, hence there are some tools you may never use.