Photoshop How To

We’ve all been taught to avoid shooting in direct sunlight whenever possible, to avoid blown-out highlights, harsh contrast, washed-out colors, unflattering shadows, and models with squinty eyes. In the shooting and editing tutorial below, you’ll earn how to meet these challenges and achieve beautiful photos.

Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation sliders are a popular means of adjusting colors in an image, and they’re really easy to use. But is this the best method for achieving optimum results? Maybe not.

Skin retouching is an essential task to master if you want to create alluring portrait photos, whether your model is a man or a woman. That’s because you can have beautiful light, nice composition, and an inviting pose, but all that’s for naught if the subject’s skin is unappealing.

There’s a big difference between a good portrait and a great portrait. Part of taking your portrait photography to the next level is adding some depth and pop to your photos, so they don’t look flat.

According the instructor Neil Borg, "Dodge and Burn is the secret weapon for sculpting light and adding drama to the photos you capture outdoors"—just like it was in the darkroom for the iconic masters of landscape photography during the heyday of film.

Los Angeles-based boudoir photographer Michael Sasser is here to dispel a myth. While it's certainly not ideal, you can shoot flattering portraits in harsh sunlight.

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.