Software How To

Everyone loves people pictures, right? So why do so many photographers shy away from portraiture? Perhaps it’s because of the popular misconception that expensive, complicated lighting gear is required for quality results.

You’ve no doubt admired beautiful landscape photos with soft flowing water and cotton-like clouds, and perhaps wondered how they were captured. The typical approach is to use neutral density (ND) filters that significantly reduce the amount of light entering the lens, thereby permitting very slow shutter speeds that create this ethereal effect.

Even if the nomenclature is unfamiliar, you’ve no doubt experienced ugly color fringing that sometimes appears around the edges of objects in a photograph. Known as “chromatic aberration,” this effect typically occurs in high contrast images because premium lenses can’t always focus wavelengths of all colors at a single focal point.

Regardless of what software you use for processing images, keyboard shortcuts are very important tools. That’s because they dramatically speed up the process, streamline the workflow, and increase your productivity.

There are few things worse than dull and flat monochrome images. After all, striking contrast and drama are two of the reasons many photographers forego color in favor of b&w. Fortunately, you can transform a photo from boring to dramatic with a few simple steps in Lightroom, Photoshop, or whatever editing application you use.

Photoshop’s Vanishing Point Filter is a powerful easy-to-use tool that simplifies the process of editing images with perspective planes like walls, sides of a building, or other rectangular objects. And once you specify the planes in an image, your subsequent edits will maintain that perspective.

It often takes considerable concentration to capture compelling images, and every so often we miss a distracting background element while focusing on our main subject. Other times we’re aware of the distraction, but make the shot anyway because there’s no way to recompose and avoid the problem.