Photographers love their affordable, fast, and easy-to-carry "nifty fifty" lenses that can be used to capture a wide range of scenes from landscapes and portraits to nature photos and more. When your images fail to meet expectations, and you're not sure why, it's likely because you're making one or more common mistakes when shooting with a 50mm prime.
It's not often that a helpful post-processing trick slips by Adobe impresario Matt Kloskowksi, and there's a good chance that you may have missed it too. This technique isn't exactly new but it's quick, easy, very effective, and it's takes barely five minutes to learn.
Beginning Lightroom and Photoshop users tend to become so enamored with all the transformative tools that they often go overboard with post-processing effects, which is a sure way to ruin an otherwise nice shot. As you'll see in this tutorial from instructor Johny Spencer, there are six warning signs that your edits are overcooked.
It's a dead giveaway that you're new to post-processing if the images you edit are oversaturated because you took a heavy-handed approach with one of Lightroom's most overused tools. By doing so you just spoiled an otherwise great shot because it no longer appears realistic.
Sooner or later we all fall into a rut and run out of fresh ideas. This tutorial will definitely get your creative juices flowing again the next time this happens to you, with what one pro calls "a totally underrated landscape photography editing trick."
Let's say you capture a nice image, and you want to bring out a bit more detail during the editing process. It doesn't matter whether the photo is a portrait, macro shot, a landscape scene, or something else. What's your strategy?
This eye-opening tutorial begins with a provocative question: "Have you ever found yourself, camera in hand in hand, staring at some incredible lighting hitting a scene, only to waste so much time trying to configure your settings that you miss the light altogether?" Unfortunately this dilemma is rather common, but we're going to make it a thing of the past in video below.
We've all heard the blather from so-called "purists" who insist that images should be presented straight out of the camera without any post processing at all. Not only are we told to avoid adjusting exposure, color, sharpness and the like, but creative cropping is verboten as well.
But here's the rub: When we turn to post processing to rehabilitate a problem image, here too there are several preventable mistakes that compromise the enhancements you make. This eight minute video from instructor Jalen Oban identifies nine of the most common errors made by Lightroom users, and then he demonstrates a better way.
A common practice among nature and wildlife photographers is to shoot at maximum aperture to separate the primary subject from a soft out-of-focus background. This tutorial, however, explains when this can be a bad habit and actually spoil an otherwise great image.
Whether you process images in Lightroom, Photoshop, or another full-featured editor, it's difficult not to get carried away by all the capabilities available. But sometimes you'll achieve much better results by restraining yourself and taking a subtle approach so that you don't ruin photos by giving them an "over-cooked" look.
This tutorial is the first installment of an eye-opening series describing conditions under which you shouldn't trust a camera's meter to deliver accurate exposures when shooting images in certain situations. Today you'll learn how much to underexpose a photo when faced with a low light, high contrast scene.
This post-processing tutorial explores some of the most useful (and underutilized) sliders in both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. If you're in the habit of skipping over Lightroom's Classic's Basic panel, or Lightroom's Light and Color panels in search of more advanced tools you'll want to pay close attention to this tutorial with pro Forest Chaput de Saintonge.
Some photographers prefer using a camera's Live View mode to frame images on the rear LCD, instead of doing so through the viewfinder. It's fine if that's your reference, unless you experience the problem described in the video below. We'll give you a hint: It has to do with your vision.
A couple weeks ago we posted a tutorial explaining how to use Lightroom's AI Denoise to rehabilitate underexposed photos. As it turns out, there are a few issues with this new tool that you really must understand to avoid potential problems with your edits while using this powerful technique.