Photo How To

When shooting portraits, nature, or other types of outdoor images, one of the best ways to accentuate a key foreground subject is to create shallow depth of field with an out-of-focus background. You can often do that in the camera by selecting the proper focal length and aperture setting, and positioning your subject close to the camera.

This tutorial is a perfect follow-up to a lesson we posted this morning, explaining how to capture stunning photos of the nighttime sky. Whether you're photographing nightscapes or other low-light scenes, high ISO settings and the possibility of noisy images is something you have to confront.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is an important technique that enables you to shoot or edit photos that appear more like what one sees with the human eye. The concept involves balancing out light and dark areas of a scene to capture more detail in both highlights and shadows.

A common problem when shooting outdoor scenes full of bright highlights and deep shadows is arriving at a proper exposure. The quick tutorial below from the PHLOG Photography instructional YouTube channel explains a Photoshop HDR editing technique that's easy enough for users of all skill levels.

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.

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.