Software How To

We’ve all captured photos that would be truly outstanding, other than the fact that colors are way off. That’s sort of like saying you’d be a great dancer if you didn’t have bad legs.

The image color of even a conventional black and white silver print is rarely black, white and grayscale shades. It may be warm (golden) or cold (blue) neutral or toned (sepia, magenta). Over many years print makers and chemists developed paper and developer combinations, as well as after-printing toners, to add additional color to monochrome silver prints. For example, using a warm-tone paper such as Agfa Portriga and a warm-tone enhancing developer, such as Selectol Soft, could alter image color. This yielded brownish blacks and creamy whites. A cold-tone paper could be developed in Dektol and after fixing toned in a mild dilution of rapid selenium toner for added “snap”, resulting in a “harder” bright white/deep black effect.

Most photographers love printing their best work, especially this time of year when a beautiful framed photo makes a great holiday gift for family and friends. It’s also a great idea to decorate your home or office with images you love.

Landscape photography can be very challenging for a variety of reasons, including complicated scenes with numerous objects, a wide range of tones throughout the frame, and a broad density range from light to dark. These same variables can make the image-editing task difficult as well.

Shutterbug columnist Scott Kelby is a Photoshop and Lightroom master. But in the below software tips video, Kelby shows how you don’t need to be an expert to fix a common problem in your images.

Photoshop can be an intimidating program, so we love quick and easy Photoshop tutorials that will help transform your images immediately. In the below 1-Minute Photoshop Tip from software expert Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect, he shows you a “juicy HDR effect."

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.