Photoshop How To

As the great Ansel Adams once said, “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationship.” And that holds true whether you’re working with film in the darkroom or editing digital images on the computer.

Adobe is constantly at work updating Photoshop and Lightroom with effective new features. Some familiar tools may fall by the wayside, but as you'll see in today's tutorial from the Photoshop Café YouTube channel, these are usually replaced with more powerful options.

One of the most common image-editing tasks is cleaning up a photo by eliminating distracting elements. Until recently the standard approach involved turning to Photoshop’s Object Selection tool, and using or one or more time-consuming options to vaporize and fill the mess.

Shadows can be an important element for adding impact and drama to an image. Other times though, background shadows are simply an unwelcome distraction in images with a clean, minimalist look. In this Photoshop tutorial instructor Brendan Williams demonstrates a "sneaky selection trick" for eliminating shadows fast.

When most landscape photographers edit their images they strive for a bright and vivid effect, especially during autumn when beautiful warm, golden tones are just about everywhere you look. But how about marching to the beat of your own drummer by giving images a dark and moody effect that's full of eye-catching drama?

Photographs often have more depth and drama when there are shadows in the scene, but unfortunately the light doesn’t always cooperate. In the quick video below you’ll learn how to use Photoshop to create and manipulate a shadow so it appears totally real. 

Professional photographers often add vignettes to their photos to create impact and direct a viewer's eye to the most important part of a scene. Less-experienced shooters tend to ignore this powerful technique that is actually very simple to accomplish.