Recent Post Production Articles

Can You Fake Medium Format?

Medium format photography offers a wide variety of benefits in terms of image quality, but is it possible to try to achieve those results when shooting on a camera with a much smaller sensor?

Tips to Get You Started Color Toning Your Images

It's no secret that color toning in photography is a incredibly deep subject that helps bring life to the vision you have in your head. This video is a great entry point on the subject to help get you going in the world of color toning.

Fstoppers Reviews Skylum's Aurora HDR 2019

Winning awards such as Apple’s Best Mac App and Digital Photo Editors’ Choice, Skylum software is set to unveil the next iteration of their AI-powered photo editing software in October. High dynamic range (HDR) image editing can often get the best of both newcomers and veterans alike, but Skylum aims to change that with their latest release.

How I Blended Multiple Landscape Photos in Alaska

What should a photographer do when surrounded by thousands of dead fish, some of the fastest ocean tides in the world, and wild bears that want to eat anything in sight? You take a deep breath and attempt to capture the beautiful scenery. Welcome to Valdez!

Where Did All the Color on Instagram Go?

Years ago Instagram was filled with poorly filtered and over processed HDR images. Thankfully we have moved away from those days but how did we end up in a world without much color?

How Neutral Tones Unlock a Landscape’s Believability

Most landscape photographers will agree that post-production is essential to the art, but while the debate of how far you should go is left to individual preferences, the question is how far you can go while maintaining the image’s believability.

My Top Five Favorite Photoshop Tips for Workflow

Editing your images can be a love/hate relationship depending on how you feel about post production. Getting tied down in your workflow can be a result of not having the right displays and shortcuts for better visualization of the final result. A few key tricks will lay out your most used tools and displays to get you in and out of Photoshop.

Visualize the Light You Want Even When You Can't See It

By now, most of you have figured out that light is everything in photography. When the time of day isn't a variable you have control of, you may have to visualize how the available light will work with your subject.

It’s UltraWide Time!

For all you creators out there! LG understands there’s more to the final output. There’s also the “process.” All the hours spent working, toiling, creating, that no one ever sees. The endless brain-strain and ideating a creator dedicates to their goal is what makes up their UltraWide Time. Few will ever see or understand the process, where all the work and magic happen. But LG understands.

Tilt-Shift Effects and Corrections: Better Done in Camera or Post?

Tilt-shift lenses are expensive, niche optical instruments, and as such, it can be a bit difficult to tell if you really need one or not. This quick and useful video will show you if you need one or if you can just stick to Photoshop for the times you want that effect.

Everything You Need To Know About Smart Objects in Photoshop

The Smart Object has to be one of the more powerful tools in the Photoshop arsenal. If it still confuses you a little — and I know it does — check out this in-depth video on the myriad ways in which it can be utilized.

Retouching When Time Is Short

Sometimes, you find yourself in a bind and need to get some work done quickly without spending your usual amount of time retouching. Check out this video for some techniques to get things done if you find yourself in a bind.

Are You Guilty of These Common Photography Mistakes?

Making mistakes is part of learning, even if the criticism stings sometimes. And after seeing some of these common photography mistakes, I had to put my hand up and say, "guilty as charged." I guarantee you will too.

How to Make Amazing Smoke Art

Have you ever wanted to add a little something extra to a portrait or product shot, but just didn't know quite what would make the difference? Why not include some crazy cool smoke art to add another level of interest?

Remove Surface Glare On Your Interior Photos With This Quick Tip

When photographing commercial interior images, a common issue is an unsightly glare on reflective surfaces. Removing these reflections by compositing image layers significantly improves your images, separating you from the pack of "run-and-gun" real estate and interior photographers.

Stop Wasting Your Money on Lightroom Presets

Nowadays, it seems that every YouTube photography celebrity has a batch of presets that they want you to buy. This begs the question: is it worth handing over your hard-earned cash when you might be better off investing your time rather than your money?

In the six years that I've been using Lightroom, I've never paid for a preset. In the past, I've downloaded a few free packs, clicked laboriously through every preset and decided that they were all useless: blunt tools creating over-edited results and deploying settings that I could easily have achieved myself had I...

How to Get That Perfect Blend in Composites

Composites are one of the best ways to give your image a whole new look and feel. It can take something from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Understanding how to create these images to stack in a realistic way is all about understanding how to blend your subject seamlessly.

Bring Your Still Life Photography to the Next Level With Gels

Colors are very important in a composition and should be considered at the moment of capture. When shooting in still life, for example, gels can bring a good shot to the next level as Dustin Dolby from Workphlo shows us in this video.

Use Long Exposures to Make the Most of Bad Light

Do you feel frustrated when the weather doesn't cooperate for your landscape shoots? Check out this video on how to make the most of bad lighting to create beautiful long exposure photographs.

Simple Technique to Enhance the Eyes Using Selective Adjustments in Lightroom

A retouch of the eyes is on every portrait photographer's image editing to-do list. This important alteration is also one of the easiest adjustments to spot when unintentionally overdone. See how this Lightroom-specific technique will help bring out that shine in your subjects eyes, without pushing things too far.

Try This Shadow Fix on Your Next Interior Shoot

When photographing interiors, flash is your friend, but a friend who needs some management. While flash brightens rooms, reduces glare, and brings out true colors, it can also produce the frustrating issue of ugly shadows.

How to Create Vertigo Effect With a Drone

The Vertigo Effect, also known as the dolly zoom has been a popular technique, first used by cameraman Irmin Roberts in renowned director Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. But, have you ever wondered how this effect is achieved with a drone?

Take Control of Skin Tones Using Curves in Photoshop

We all know what it is like to shoot in difficult lighting situations and to end up with shots where the skin tones of your subjects just look off. If you don't want to spend hours playing with a bunch of controls or spend a bunch of money on fancy actions and presets, then check out out this quick tutorial, which walks us through color grading for skin tones simply by using Curves in Photoshop.

Fstoppers Reviews the Hair Retouching Course From Retouching Academy

Hair retouching is something that most retouchers and photographers cringe to think about. It's also something that we really need to be fluent in because the situation will come up where there will be things you need to fix. The Hair Retouching course by Retouching Academy with Michael Woloszynowicz is a full overview of the variety of hair issues and how to fix them.

How to Turn Your Daytime Photos Into Night

Have you taken a photo on-location of a wonderful building and wish you could have stayed longer to capture it at night? Sometimes our schedule can get a bit chaotic or perhaps the location isn't accessible at night, so what can you do?

Speed Up Lightroom With These Five Tips

Are you in the market for a faster Lightroom? If so then today must be your lucky day. Here are some under the hood suggestions to achieve just that.

How to Create Smoke Easily in Photoshop

Using smoke in photo shoots has been popular recently, but adding a smoke effect in Photoshop has a longer history, and it is easier than you think.

How to Get Beautiful Skin Tones in Adobe Premiere Pro

Skin tones are a hot topic in Lightroom and Photoshop, but there are fewer resources for videographers, who need to get them correct just as much. Here's how you can get beautiful skin tones in Adobe Premiere Pro, every time.

Make Your Subject Pop With This Simple Trick

Sometimes the simplest of changes can have a drastic impact. In this video, you see how localized coloring and saturation can make your subject really stand out.

Five Quick Lightroom Tips to Get the Job Done Well

As professional photographers, we spend a great deal of time in post-production making our images look their best. Sometimes, we spend too much time there. So, let’s look at five quick tips to keep your Lightroom workflow efficient and effective.

Why Hardcore Purists Can't Make a Quality Photograph of a High Contrast Scene

Purists say they don't edit their photographs at all and they don't have to if the right camera settings were used. I'm fine with that philosophy if cheap old low-end cameras are used and they only can shoot in JPEG mode. Otherwise this approach is a complete waste of money on expensive cameras.

Black and White Portrait Conversion With Photoshop

As with most processes in Photoshop, there’s more than one way to achieve a desired look. Black and white image conversions are no exception. Whether you add a black and white layer, utilize a plugin like Silver Efex Pro 2, or dare I even suggest resort to merely desaturating the image, the possibilities are abundant.

Simple Lightroom Tools to Enhance Your Photos

For many of us, gaining a stronger understanding of Lightroom's basic editing tools is always welcome. Learn how to develop your photos with the power of Lightroom’s built-in sliders.