A lot of people associated HDR with over-processed, surreal images. This is not always the case. Shooting HDR can be very useful in different circumstances. It is often seen in real estate and landscape photography and can be very useful to balance a wide range of light levels. There are many programs out there for merging images together to create an HDR photo, but one of the simplest ways to create these dramatic photographs is using Photoshop's built-in HDR Pro.

Photoshop is an extremely nuanced and complex program, which means there are often several ways to accomplish what you need to do. One of the application's most useful features, Blend If, is a bit hidden behind those multiple layers of menus, but it is one well worth knowing, as it gives you powerful and versatile capabilities for a range of editing scenarios. This excellent video tutorial will show you the ins and outs of Blend if and demonstrates how it works through a series of double exposure edits.

Adobe touted much faster speeds with the release of Lightroom Classic CC (essentially, Lightroom 7). However, results seemed inconsistent. Even so, these early inconsistencies seem to have gone away with subsequent updates and bug fixes. And thankfully, Adobe will soon release another update to Lightroom that promises even better speed increases. We’ve been playing around with it for a few days to get a better idea of what to expect.

The Clone Stamp is the bread and butter tool for a lot of photographers, and rightfully so: it's a tremendously flexible and powerful feature that's strikingly simple in its operation, particularly compared to many other tools. This helpful video shows you a couple of quick shortcuts to get even more versatility out of the Clone Stamp.

Frequency separation is one of the most powerful retouching tools you can use, but it takes careful technique and restraint to do it correctly. This excellent video tutorial will show you how you can incorporate frequency separation into your post-processing workflow.

Sometimes a background element distracts from the focus of an image too much, but it can't be avoided in the composition. That's where this video from Colin Smith at Photoshop Cafe comes in handy, as he shows you how to quickly remove those distracting elements in three simple steps in Photoshop.

In a recent article, I shared a selection of easy-to-avoid photo editing mistakes. Today, it's time for five more. Some of them might sound obvious, while others are more subtle. What they all have in common: they can ruin an otherwise great edit.

Colors casts can happen for a wide variety of reasons ranging from white balance issues to weird venue lighting or poor filter design. And just like the multitude of reasons for their presence, there are numerous ways to fix them. This technique allows you to quickly and precisely zero in on the corrective color you need without needing to eyeball it, making it one you'll definitely want to know.

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.

Want to get better at Photoshop quickly? Master Photoshop blending modes to improve your photo editing skills immediately.

If you're often frustrated by how little detail can be seen in your Instagram posts, this technique and free Photoshop template are for you.

Have you ever edited and sharpened a photograph you wanted to print or post online only to have halos around the edges? Have you ever wanted to know how not to make that happen? If you answered yes, then this helpful video is for you.

If you are a user of one of the popular Nik Collection photo editing plugins, you have probably experienced errors in using the software recently. After Photoshop’s latest update, several users have reported that using the plugins will now force Photoshop to close when the plugin attempts to save its changes. This not only limits your use of Nik’s software, but it also will also cause you to lose all unsaved changes to your image prior to using the plugin. Luckily, there is a very simple workaround.

When looking at retouchers’ portfolios, you can separate the great ones from the rest by looking at their color correction. For example, when skin tones are not uniform, it makes the makeup artist look terrible just as much as the retoucher. There are multiple ways to correct color issues, but let’s see one that’s incredibly fast and easy to use for small localized issues, no matter what your photographic genre of choice is.

Gradient maps are a powerful tool in Photoshop and when utilized correctly, make for a quick and easy way to effectively tone your images. Travel Photographer and Videographer Travis Transient has a quick tutorial on how to best utilize gradient maps to color grade your images.

This week, ON1 Software released their new Photo RAW 2017 processor. It functions as both a raw processor and a simple editing workflow that can be used as a standalone application or as a plugin within various other editing applications such as Lightroom. In this article, we will take a quick look at Photo RAW 2017 in order to provide some first impressions on what ON1 is touting as one of their most powerful tools to date.

In my recent Natural Light Tutorial with RGGEDU, I went through every aspect of natural light photography and retouching... Or so I thought. During a shoot this week, I realized I missed one thing: enhancing freckles with Photoshop. In this article I will show a simple method to making those freckles pop.

Car photography is a sharp learning curve, with the incline coming primarily in post-production. A tutorial like this can save you incredible amounts of time learning techniques.

The 2017 edition of the Pirelli Calendar has finally been revealed in Paris, and in the words of Al Green, it is simply beautiful. Shot by German Photographer Peter Lindbergh, it features actresses Robin Wright, Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman, and Lupita Nyong’o amongst others. It has been titled “Emotional.” Expect to see nakedness in a different way, because the calendar of this year was all about “stripping down to the very soul of the sitters” without shedding all their clothes.

I personally have never used a Wacom tablet or stylus in my life. They always seemed like the most useful post-processing tool ever, but I never bit the bullet and tested the waters. However, after filming Elia Locardi edit over 40 images for his "Photographing the World" landscape series, I am confident enough to finally give it a try myself. Luckily my good friends over at Phlearn have laid out five of the most useful tips for making your Wacom tablet easy to use.

Creating convincing composites is all about matching a number of characteristics, one of them being the saturation between the different elements of the final image. This helpful tutorial gives a quick and very effective method for precisely matching saturation.

Celebrities are often known for excessively Photoshopping their images, often to the point that they become almost unrecognizable from the real person. That occasionally leads to some ridiculous fails, like this case, in which a Kardashian gained an extra toe she doesn't actually have.

As a retoucher, an issue I have to fix at times is light falloff that occurs in studio. This can happen when the light modifier used isn't ample in covering the model fully. Thankfully, there is an easy fix that allows you to correct this problem. Prior to, it was a little more difficult without being able to harness the power of the raw file to fix it naturally. Once you get used to the process, you can use this technique to correct other exposure issues as well.

Adding to or accentuating the color tones in an image is a very effective way of telling a story, eliciting an emotion, or strengthening the aesthetic. In this short walkthrough, I'll explain how I can speedily color grade my images.

Many makeup products can make the skin glow and can look great when associated with a good contouring. However, shiny products when used under strobe light can be difficult to dose out correctly. In a previous article I showed you a technique to diminish that glowing effect when too much highlighter or too few setting powder is applied. Let’s see how we can amplify the glow of the skin when more products could have been used to give a fresh look to your model's face.

Controlling color is one of the primary skills that allows photographers to develop their own style. Learning to balance the different aspects of color in your image is one of the more important things you can do.

Dodging and burning remains one of the most classic and powerful techniques to shape the light in your photos and emphasize your subject in a straightforward and natural way. This quick and helpful tutorial will show you an easy way to dodge and burn your images using Photoshop.

Working in Photoshop with multiple layers and then trying to navigate to those layers to make tweaks to your edits can sometimes be time-consuming and at times also very annoying if you have forgotten to name the layer.

If you decide to watermark your images, making sure it's something that's both classy and not overly distracting is the best way to go. This video shows you not only how to create a watermark, but how to customize it to conveniently stamp on any image with ease.

Since Adobe adopted a subscription-based licensing system, many users have started looking at other alternatives. While ACDSee had attractive solutions until now, their latest creation, ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2018, seems to be a serious contender to Photoshop CC and Lightroom. Even better yet, you can process your raw files and then edit them within the very same software, no need for round trips.

This is a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to thank you in advance for indulging me. There seems to be a rampant misunderstanding in certain levels of the photo community as to what editing presets are, and what they actually accomplish. I (like many of you I would assume) am a member of various photo-centric groups on Facebook. In particular, I am a member of groups for people who have purchased Lightroom and ACR preset packs from a variety of creators. Almost daily I see posts in these groups that go something like this: "I thought my photos were beyond hope, but then I applied "WHIMSICAL PRESET NAME" and they were saved! These presets are amazing!!!1!111!!!" Sound familiar?

Natural-looking images are making a comeback. If you look at recent issues of big magazines, you will see that makeup is often a nude with some shine to it, retouching is less "doll like," and even simple 1-light setups seem to be the standard. Some people will argue that it has been like this for quite some time. It is true, but I find that retouching is more flagrant than before. Even well known high-end retouchers seem to leave more imperfections in their images than a year ago.

Despite the veritable multitude of options offered by the program, most photographers can get through their entire careers only using six or so of Photoshop's blending modes. Nonetheless, there's a lot of hidden power in the lesser used modes, and this great video shows you how to take advantage of two of the quirkiest of all: color dodge and color burn.

At the most basic level, photographers seem to be in two camps when it comes to image file types. There are those who care about the look of their images and shoot with big RAW files and those who don’t and use the smaller JPEG files.

RAW files offer a tremendous level of control over noise, tonality and color; a hearty file that can cope with the demands of our creativity.

New features added to Photoshop and Lightroom today might change how you edit your photos, but it entirely depends on what kind of images you make and what your current workflow is like. This is my review of the new features and whether you'll want to dive in or avoid them.

Depending on the environment you're photographing or the camera you're using, you might not be able to get all of the dynamic range of the scene into a single exposure. That's when you'll want to take multiple exposures and refer to this helpful video on how to blend them in Photoshop.

Photos with shallow depth of field are a very popular look in most genres involving people in some way, but they also require pricier lenses to shoot. This helpful tutorial will show you how to fake the effect using Photoshop.

Not every photographer needs lavish resources and an army of helpers to create dramatic images that belie their basic production. Lia Konrad is a 23-year-old fine art photographer based in a small town in Germany, but she hasn’t let modest resources stop her from following her passion to create epic images inspired by her love of fairytales, myths, and fictional stories for her website Liancary.

One of the most well-known features of the new AI-processing technologies in various post-processing programs is automated sky replacement, which takes a lot of the time and effort out of what is traditionally a rather tedious task. Adobe is the latest to offer their own version of the technology, as demonstrated in this new video.

One of the most common things you'll deal with when it comes to portrait subjects is red skin. This super quick tutorial will show you a fast and effective way to get rid of it in Photoshop.

In case you haven't had a chance to play with Adobe's new Dehaze tool, Photographer Bimal Ramdoyal, a redditor with the handle "manual_mode", shared this before and after image he shot during a blizzard that he then processed through the new tool in Photoshop (also available in Lightroom). The results, needless to say, are pretty impressive.

Do your photographs on Instagram not look as good as they do on your computer screen? Are you looking for something to improve the look of your photos on Instagram? Well, watch this video to improve their appearance on Instagram.

As photographers we like to believe that everything we shoot is flawless straight out of the camera. The truth is that, most of the time, each of us spends more time and effort editing our work than actually shooting it. We will completely change the color or the crop of an image without thinking twice. Why then don't we at least consider one of the easiest way to completely change an image; the "horizontal flip."

With all the sharpening techniques available to you in Photoshop, sometimes, it can be hard to find the right one for you to use. And I am always amazed when someone finds a new way of doing something that we all thought we understood.

There are approximately 2,374,890 (and counting) ways to create a black and white image. However, this technique stood out to me a bit for its ability to isolate the subject and create a very eye-catching look. Here's how to accomplish it using Photoshop.

Focus stacking is a technique in which one takes multiple shots of the same scene at different focus distances, then merges them together to create a final photo that is as sharp as possible from front to back. This helpful tutorial will show you how it's done.

It is no secret that both Lightroom and Photoshop can be resources hogs that do not run particularly quickly, though in fairness, they are also pushing around and manipulating a lot of data. Between your CPU, GPU, RAM, drives, and more, there are a lot of places where an upgrade could possibly speed things up, but of course, you do not want to waste your money. So, what components should you upgrade first? This helpful video will show you some useful tests to help you figure it out.

Mark Duffy is an Irish photographer, graphic designer, and drummer with a shaved head and a glorious beard. He has a pretty slick new YouTube channel where he intends to teach people how he goes about editing his photos using Photoshop and Lightroom. In this video Duffy teaches us how to create double exposures in Photoshop.

I hear a lot of photographers talk about tone curve shapes: the s-curve for contrast, for crushing blacks, etc. But really taking advantage of tone curves is less about memorizing shapes that produce specific results and more about understanding exactly what they do. This great video will get you up to speed in no time.

Today at Adobe MAX 2018, Adobe announced further updates to popular photo-cataloging and editing applications Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC.