Videos

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.

Most of us have experienced the frustration of returning from a shoot, uploading our images to the computer, and discovering that some of them are darker than we’d like. There are several ways to recover shadow details in an image, and the method you’ll learn today is one of the easiest and most effective.

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.

Unmesh Dinda is one of our most popular Photoshop instructors, and in this basic tutorial he demonstrates how add creative effects to a photograph with a simple Photoshop Layer Mask trick.  

If you’re ever tried to manually mask out a sky in Photoshop, you know that achieving a precise selection can be difficult—especially when your shot includes complex objects in the foreground. There are many methods for tackling this challenge, and today you’ll learn one of the easiest and most effective.