One challenge with all forms of outdoor photography is that we're always at the mercy of the weather and prevailing lighting conditions. That fact is particularly evident when you wake up on a nice day, pack your gear, and travel to a favorite location—only to confront a pretty scene with a rather boring sky.
When it’s time to edit our photographs, most of us upload the files to Lightroom or Photoshop and jump right in. But according to one of our favorite image-editing instructors, there’s an important preliminary step that’s often ignored.
The next time you mistakenly shoot flat, underexposed portraits, and it’s too late for a do-over, the simple tutorial below will save the day. This Photoshop technique is as quick to accomplish as the video is to watch, and you’ll be surprised at the excellent results.
There are a number of reasons to remove an object from an image. Sometimes the goal it to get rid of a distracting element, while other times you may want to move a key subject to a totally different photo. Or perhaps you’re creating a special effect.
Remember when replacing a dull, drab sky in Photoshop was a cumbersome, complicated, and time-consuming process? Well that’s a thing of the past, thanks to innovative new automated features that make this task about as easy as it gets.
Everyone familiar with the classic Francoise Truffaut film “Day for Night” knows that cinematographers have a technique for shooting outdoors in daylight and making the scene appear as though it was filmed at night. You can do much the same thing with still photos, and the process is really easy.
Most photographers prefer peering through the viewfinder of a camera, rather than staring at a computer screen, and the quick video below is designed to speed up your editing workflow and get you back out shooting as soon as possible.
Most photographers are familiar with using Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, and White Balance tools to adjust or enhance the colors of an image. The interesting video below takes a different approach, with a little-known Color tool that’s available in Lightroom and Photoshop Camera Raw.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with “dodging and burning,” a term harkening back to the wet darkroom that describes a technique for manipulating the exposure of selected areas on a print. People still do that today in the digital darkroom, and this tutorial involves a powerful method that may be different and more effective than those you have tried.
Most photographers know to focus on the eyes of a subject when making portraits or shooting wildlife photos. But when it comes to editing these images, there a lot more to consider than sharpness, as you’ll see in the video below.
There are a variety of methods for converting color images to black and white, but the video below demonstrates a unique approach that not only creates a dramatic conversion, but changes the focus of an image.
We typically use a telephoto lens with a wide maximum aperture for shooting images with a very shallow depth of field. But in this quick tutorial you’ll learn a simple Photoshop trick for creating a similar effect.
If you’re looking for a way to create portraits with a unique vibrant look, check out this Photoshop tutorial explaining how to colorize images in Photoshop.
Here’s a simple but powerful Photoshop tutorial demonstrating how to rehabilitate flat and boring images with a few tips and tricks for expanding dynamic range without “clipping.” You’ll see how clipping occurs when portions of an image are either so dark or so bright that details are lost.
The last thing most folks want to do these days is swap a beautiful sunny day for a threatening rainstorm with lightning. But we’re talking Photoshop here, and the tutorial below demonstrates how to mess around with Mother Nature and turn a welcoming landscape photo into something far more dramatic.