Recent Post Production Articles

One Million Ways to Do Things in Lightroom

If there's one thing I've learned over time, it's that there are often different ways to accomplish the same task. Likewise, every Lightroom user does things in different ways. That doesn't make it wrong; it's just different.

How to Create LUTs With Photoshop

Ever wondered how to create your very own LUTs using only Photoshop? Look no further, Unmesh Dinda at PiXimperfect just released the perfect short and easy to follow tutorial for you.

Watch Amazing Retoucher Marina Dean-Francis Speed Retouch

Last week, we featured an interview with the awesomely talented retoucher and photographer Marina Dean-Francis. This week, she's shared a video with Fstoppers showing her retouching on a hair and beauty image. Although the video has been sped up tremendously, it's not hard to see that there aren't many quick tricks in play here. It's no secret that maybe the greatest skill in retouching is patience.

Pay close enough attention, and there are some very useful tips in this video - my personal favorite comes in around the 2:30 mark and is a great way to add highlights on...

Take These Four Important Steps Before You Outsource Your Printing

Professional-quality photo printers and paper are expensive. It can be difficult to justify the steep price of the machine and upkeep for most photographers who shoot as a hobbyist or even a starting professional. Outsourcing your printing needs to a pro photo lab alleviates the cost, but there are some inherent complications in not being able to print from home. These four helpful steps will minimize the disconnect when sending out your images to the lab.

5 Common Editing Mistakes Made by New Photographers

Learning all the technique that goes into using a camera to create a compelling, well-composed photo is an undertaking all itself, but then comes the post-processing that is required to create a polished, complete image. Just like using your camera, there are some common mistakes new photographers make when editing their images. This great video tutorial discusses five such mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Three Ways to Sharper Photos With Adobe Lightroom

Creating sharp photographs can be challenging, a vast array of camera settings and subject matter can make it tricky. But there are three ways to successfully enhance the sharpness of images using Lightroom.

The Ultimate Photo Editing Workflow

In this article, I share the photo editing workflow I use for all my photos, and if you want to achieve high-quality results, this is for you.

A Beginner’s Guide to Adobe Lightroom: Part 1

It is easy to feel overwhelmed with the many different features of Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom has so many possibilities, that even after years of using it, I still am consistently learning something new. I have found that there are so many new photographers who either feel too overwhelmed to start learning the intensive software, or they still aren’t confident that they have been using it correctly. Because of this, I wanted to create a simple beginner’s guide to using Lightroom. This is the first of what will be a multiple part series of articles on Lightroom basics.

Are These the Most Absurd Photography Purchases You’ve Ever Seen?

Photography might well be the most gear-intensive pastime on the planet, which means that while there is some incredible gear available for purchase, there are also plenty of duds to waste your money on. Are these some of the worst photography purchases you've seen?

Focus Stacking Made Easy With Helicon Focus

A few weeks ago I published an article here on Fstoppers about handheld focus stacking. In this article I share my in-the-field workflow, as well as the automatic stacking option Photoshop offers to put all images together during photo editing. This option has its limitations though and because I lately had to work on some very complex stacks, I had to look for a better solution. And with Helicon Focus I found it.

Three Ways to Separate Yourself From Other Photographers

Social media consumption is at an all-time high and is on pace to increase at an exponential pace for the foreseeable future. We all seem to have capable technology on us always, whether it be a cell phone or dedicated interchangeable lens camera. With this rapid rate of consumption and the accessibility of technology we are living in a world saturated with quality content everywhere we look. Standing out among other photographers is getting more challenging daily and that’s why I put together these three ways to help separate yourself from other photographers.

How I Edited One of My Favorite Wildlife Images in Lightroom

For many, wildlife photography is all about natural colors and objective realism. The light, composition, and behavior captured should do all the talking. And for the most part, I agree — for that other tiny little bit, though, I beg to differ. Please allow me to elaborate in more ways than one.

DVLOP Releases New Lightroom Feature: Leaks and Tweaks

In the latest version of Lightroom, Adobe has implemented a new profile browser inside the Develop module. The team over at DVLOP has already put this feature to work with some awesome new ways to edit your images.

A Guide to Creating Stunning Sunbursts in Your Landscape Photography

Nothing says sunrise or sunset like an explosive sunburst. The geometric pattern can double the interest in your photos when composed soundly, but you need to get a few settings in order. Here’s a guide to picking the right lens, mitigating flare, and composing the shot just right to create crisp, gorgeous sunbursts!

Using A Color Checker Chart

Color reproduction, loading color profiles and calibrating monitors & printers can become an endless tangled mess that leads to frustrating headaches.

Proper use of a color chart can get you a lot closer to actual colors and save you a lot of time dialing in your post production work by adding a simple step to your workflow.

A couple years back I pickup the X-Rite ColorChecker Card and by doing so I have saved a ton of post processing time.

sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB: Which to Use and Why?

Have you ever been confused about which color space you should use and wondered what the differences are? This video will help you understand, and most importantly, choose the correct one.

Is This the Fastest and Easiest Way to Scan Films at Home?

If you’re a film aficionado, you’re probably used to trying to make the process of converting your negatives into print-ready digital files as painless as possible. One photographer has ditched his scanner in favor of an incredibly simple setup using his Fujifilm X-T3 and a rather unique Lightroom plugin.

DxO PureRAW 2 Can Work From Within Lightroom, Increases Speed, and Adds New Cameras and Lenses

DxO PureRAW is a permanent part of my photographic workflow. Before anything else, I take my raw files from my mirrorless camera and my drone through PureRAW first. It checks my camera and lens data and outputs a raw file with corrections that eliminate lens distortions, vignetting, noise, and a host of other issues specific to my hardware. Here's my review of what was a must-have the last time around.

Using Channels to Selectively Edit Your Photos

Have you ever wondered what that obscure tab called “Channels” in Photoshop does? You know, the one with black and white layers of your photograph that are anything but red, blue, or green? Turns out they do some pretty amazing things and aren’t really that hard to understand once you get familiar with them.

Top 5 Make Up Artists on Instagram and How They Will Make You a Better Portrait Photogapher

Just like ever camera owner is a photographer, every person who owns an abundance of MAC products is a makeup artist. At least that is how it seems on Instagram these days. There are now more makeup artists on social media than ever, and finding the right ones to follow can be tricky. Following the best makeup artists can make a portrait photographer better. If you follow them closely, you can step up your game.

Fast High-End Retouching in Photoshop

When learning to retouch skin in Photoshop, most people start with frequency separation. Has Adobe now made skin retouching even easier with Neural Filters?

How to Make Your Stories More Engaging and Appealing

Instagram Stories have been around for quite a while now, and we have actually already shared a few articles regarding how you can make better use of them to build engagement on your account. In this new write-up, I wanted to share with you a couple of techniques that aren’t too tedious to use on a regular basis to help you build higher quality stories. The goal is to create stories that people will want to follow on a daily basis and thus start to engage more with you. Content may not be king on social networks anymore, but it’s still the only thing that retains followers.

Improving Your Dodge & Burn Retouching Results With Better Brush Settings

Anyone who is interested in portrait, fashion or/and beauty retouching knows how wonderful the Dodge & Burn technique is for skin retouching. We have talked about various methods and the fundamental knowledge of light and shadow rendering in 2-dimensional art before, and I would like to offer you yet another important piece of the D&B puzzle - the brush settings in Photoshop, which will help you achieve greater results when using this technique.

How to Retouch Headshots Using Frequency Separation: A Step-by-Step Guide

Retouching photos is as much an art as a skill, and portrait photographers must understand the proper way to retouch images, even if they prefer to have a retoucher do this work for them. Although there are a variety of ways to retouch an image, using frequency separation is the most common method and is considered one of the best. In this article and the accompanying video, I detail the process I use to retouch my headshots and portrait work.

Learn Photoshop's 19 Adjustment Layers in 30 Minutes

Photoshop’s adjustment layers are some of the most powerful tools available for post-processing photographs. With the ever-increasing number of sliders available in Lightroom and Camera Raw, the adjustment layers in Photoshop seem to get less visibility, which is a mistake.