Sharpening is a mystery to many, some do it well and others don't. There are quite a few methods to sharpen an image including the use of a High Pass Filter, Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen and Camera Shake Removal in Adobe Photoshop CC. However, it’s similar to hearing nails on a chalkboard when I see an image that is over sharpened. I'm no saint, I'm certainly guilty of cranking Unsharp Mask, I just never found the right solution. Until now.

I find it interesting how often I see new photographers make the exact same editing mistakes I made when I started out. Every photographer who has at least a few years of experience can look back at some of their first sessions and find a number of things that they continually did wrong. I recently took a look at some sessions from my first year of photography, as well as asking a few other photographers to do the same, and continually found the same common issues.

Even though I am not a landscape photographer and I have never attempted any sort of astrophotography, I have always appreciated beautiful photographs of nightscapes. Recently, I borrowed the new Tamron SP 15-30mm f/2.8 Di VC USD lens and tried to photograph an interesting night scene here in Charleston. Truth be told, it was quite the learning experience. In this video, I will share my first ever approach to shooting the night sky and hopefully give you a few things to think about when tackling this interesting genre of photography.

There are plenty of things about Lightroom that bug me and despite being a hardened user of more than 6 years, I thought it was about time give something else a go. The newly updated Capture One caught my attention and opened my eyes.

In the first year or so of learning how to edit images, photographers are completely bombarded by information regarding the dos and don’ts for what makes a good photo. This is one area of post-processing that continues to be misinterpreted.

One of the most complex areas about retouching beauty shots is definitely fixing hair. If you see any editorial or advertisement that has perfect hair, you can be rest assured that there was some retouching involved. Although this isn't the only way to retouch hair, the guys at FX-Ray put together a good video showcasing some tips and tricks. There are definitely many methods of doing it, but this should come in handy for the common trouble areas.

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most complex and malleable tools in a photographer's arsenal. With many fatigued from the debate over whether an image is edited or not, perhaps you want to weave in some magic to your shots.

According to his bio, Jesse Chen is a software engineer at Facebook and recent graduate of UC Berkeley. Jesse has a personal blog which we recently stumbled across that includes a blog post from 2012 that detailed how to go about stealing copyrighted images and removing watermarks.

A true master of a craft is someone who knows the right tools for the job and how to use those tools to maximize their capabilities in any given situation. Learn the best ways to use some of Lightroom's most mystifying yet vital tools.

I have been teaching retouching and photography for a couple of years, and I found that even my advanced students often didn't know some basic tools or techniques. Those gaps in knowledge are to be expected among self-taught photographers and retouchers, of course. However, I have just returned from my trip to Italy where the amazing Italian Photoshop guru and Wacom evangelist Marianna Santoni organized a series of educational events, in which I taught Beauty photography and retouching.

I've never been a huge fan of photo editing in Lightroom. In the past, I used it to organize my photos and for basic raw processing. But since the introduction of the new masking feature, I do a large part of my post-processing in Lightroom. Here, I share two videos, in which I show how I use Lightroom masks.

In this article, I show you an awesome Lightroom editing technique you can use to add atmosphere to your photos. If you take this method to the extreme, you can even turn a normal day into a foggy scene. It works well for woodland photos.

Do you want to get pin-sharp photos with amazing dynamic range every time? Then, use this very simple technique.

I can assure you that this isn't another boring tutorial on how not to overdo eyes with Photoshop. Searching for the perfect method has come to an end. Before diving into the simple method, it’s crucial to understand everything about the human eye and how it reacts to light.

Do you have old grainy photos that you'd love to modernize and bring new life to? Photoshop has a new filter that lets you do just that in a matter of seconds.

Photoshop Camera, the new free app from Adobe, is chocked full of filters for selfies, food, and scenery snaps. It also has AI-powered features that make your shots look even better than ever.

The Internet is full of articles and videos telling you what technique will revolutionize the way you add sharpness to your images, but almost none of them tell you the most crucial step to take before sharpening, no matter the technique. In this article, I’ll show you this simple yet essential action to make your sharpening genuinely efficient.

I rarely write in first person but because this is a topic I feel very strongly about, I want to tell you about my personal experience. When I was reminiscing with my wife about the one thing that changed my photography, it was the day I saw the light. Literally. The only way I was able to conceptually grasp light and the way it works was because I started retouching. There is no way to deny it, as I mastered retouching my photography was taken to the next level.

Photographers typically spend a lot of time thinking about color, everything from editing in Photoshop, calibrating a screen, or lighting with gels and filters, to deciding on wardrobe, set design, and locations. There is no escaping the importance of color in this profession, and yet the way we see and describe color is not so simple. Color vision games can be a great way to test your perception of the world around you and compare that to fellow photographers.

If you haven't noticed from my previous articles, I love Lightroom Classic. Lightroom has many powerful features that are easy to access, and I love its digital asset management capabilities. However, some powerful features are hiding in Lightroom that you might not know are there.

Photolab 3.1 from DXO has been out a couple of months now, and early looks from photographers have been positive. It's a complete raw editor and has many features photographers will expect to see and adds some very worthwhile enhancements that will highly interest editors at every skill level.

Color grading is a term most of us associate with video editing, where the colors get shifted to create what's known as the "Cinematic" look. In recent years, photographers adapted the term and the appealing look, and made it a very popular process in the community. There are many different ways to apply cinematic color grading and achieve a cinematic look on images. Some can take just few seconds, and some can take hours.

What do you do when you get bored with photography? How do you funnel your creative energy when photography leaves your creative soul empty? Do you move on to something new or do you combine photography with something else?

Tired of endlessly cloning out every little image sensor spot on your catalog of photos? Use this automated process to remove spots from hundreds of photos at once, and go put your feet up.

For the last month I have shared a useful tip in Lightroom each week and I look forward to continuing the series. For this week I show you how to use the often overlooked color sliders to control the hue, saturation and luminance of each color in your photo. In the short video I also show how to get those mint saturated greens that are currently very popular.

You can get cool results when photographing water or cloudy skies with long exposures. For that you often need a filter that reduces the amount of light that enters the lens: a neutral density filter. But what if you don’t have such a filter? In that case there is another way to retrieve almost the same results. In this article I will explain how to shoot long exposures without the help of a neutral density filter.

Over years of teaching, I’ve gotten a chance to review photographs by all types of photographers. While there are lots of mistakes that can be made, there are a few consistent ones that stand out the most to me.

Adobe recently brought out a new feature called Super Resolution, which can increase the resolution of your images by up to four times. I tested this feature out on some heavily cropped images I'd recently edited. The results were fantastic.

If you’ve shot in any studio, then you know the rules. Larger studios may require the use of protective booties on a freshly painted cyc wall or some practice the unsaid "no shoes" rule when stepping onto background paper. But, unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen and if the subject is jumping or moving look after look that background is going to get dirty. We all know the pain of re-touching that dirt.

Most Lightroom users aren't taking advantage of this simple feature that literally organizes your photos for you, and it only takes around 30 seconds to set up in Lightroom Classic. Save time, and keep your library organized by following this tutorial.

Flawless models and perfect-looking celebrities are all around us. We see their perfect bodies on magazine covers and their smooth skin on ads and billboards. Girls today grow up having a distorted view on what 'Beauty' really is, and many of them aspire to look like the photoshopped version of the famous people they love - flawless and perfect. Check out this video of 'real' women react to being photoshopped into cover girls with flawless bodies and perfect skin, the way they always wanted to look like.

It doesn't matter what kind of photographer you are, chances are your images will benefit from being edited in some way. If you are serious about your pictures looking their best, these six key Photoshop techniques are well worth mastering.

Learn how to make cleaner, more powerful shots by following the dos and don'ts of this simple, six step formula for retouching success.