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What’s the first thing you do after opening an image in Photoshop to begin the editing process? For many photographers it’s messing with the Shadow/Highlight sliders to arrive at what you consider a good exposure.

One challenge with outdoor photography is that landscape scenes tend to be complicated, often confusing viewers and directing their gaze away from your main subject. One of the best methods for simplifying a busy photo is to blur the background, thereby emphasizing what you consider the key point of the shot.

Unmesh Dinda is one of our most popular Photoshop instructors, and in this basic tutorial he demonstrates how add creative effects to a photograph with a simple Photoshop Layer Mask trick.  

Photoshop’s Selection tools offer a variety of ways to improve an image. They enable you to lighten or darken one portion of a scene without affecting the rest of the image, selectively adjust colors, remove distracting elements, or cut out an object from one photo and place it on another.

If you’re like most folks, photographers and “civilians” alike, you probably have a bunch of old family photos lurking in shoeboxes and tattered albums just waiting for some TLC. And because you’re a photographer, relatives will likely solicit your help to restore their often-damaged mementos.

Today’s Photoshop primer is designed to broaden your editing skills by demonstrating how to use simple selection tools that can make a big difference in your photos. Whether you’re creating a fun special effect or engaged in a more “serious” task, the video below explains everything you need to know.

Photoshop has a number of tools for accomplishing similar tasks, and sometime the approach you take is a matter of personal preference. Other times, however, like in the case of Flow, Fill and Opacity, tools may appear to control the same variables but the differences are worth noting.