Yes, it can be done completely in Photoshop, but if you're a fan of the real thing or simply enjoy playing in the snow, this fun and easy tutorial will show you how to create an endless supply of snow overlays for your portraits.
The power of visual storytelling to create an impact in the real world is plentiful. Of late, there is this new format of social short films that are catching up and seeding change in its own ways. How strong is the impact that these short social documentary films make?
If you're a landscape photographer, a drone can offer all sorts of new perspectives and creative opportunities. This great video talks about using one, getting good shots, and working around their limitations.
Most tutorials focus on one aspect of the shooting process or another, which can sometimes make it a bit difficult to understand why each creative decision was made at different steps of the process. This great video follows a photographer from planning to finished image, giving an overview of the shoot, what difficulties he faced, and how he overcame them.
The eyes are one of the most crucial parts of a person when it comes to portraiture and retouching, as they are the first thing a viewer looks at and generally the establishment point of human interaction. This helpful tutorial will give you a complete guide to retouching eyes to give them a natural, vibrant look that instantly draws the viewer in.
As our culture continues to be flooded by imagery more and more every day and the standard of quality continues to skyrocket, making yourself uniquely identifiable is becoming both more difficult and more important than ever. This great video sits down with one of the most well-known names in photography as he gives his thoughts on building your brand.
One of the strongest ways to create a style or mood, and even consistency is to really nail your color. For years I struggled with color, and it can be a subjective thing but there are also some basic colors that look good together. The most popular I would say is that of the orange and teal. Orange and teal together complement each other and this is a great video to show you how to get there quickly in Lightroom.
There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 ways to convert an image to black and white, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. This method shows why just pulling the saturation out of a photo probably won't give you a satisfactory result and how you can take more control of the final product.
It can be easy when you have a certain image in mind to get locked into attempting to get it, causing you to end up missing other great shots because you're either focused on the one in your head or frustrated that you missed it for whatever reason. This great video reminds us that it's important to keep our eyes and minds open when that's the case.
Import and culling have always been two of the most time consuming and, frankly, annoying parts of Adobe Lightroom. Despite all of its improvements over the years, the process of getting files into Lightroom has remained a huge bottleneck in an otherwise swift workflow application. With Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe finally made a full attempt to address this by allowing us to use the embedded previews from our raw files as previews for culling within the app and improved the overall speed of adding files to the catalog. So, what’s changed, and just how useful are those changes?
Photoshop is a tremendously intricate and nuanced program, and you can never have enough tips and tricks to navigate all its features and options and make your workflow both more powerful and more efficient. This helpful video will show you 20 more tips and tricks you might not have seen before.
Freckles are pretty awesome, and while there are lots of tutorials out there on how to enhance them, this helpful video will show you how to add them to a subject who didn't already have them. The process is super easy, and once you've created the presets, it'll be even quicker the next time.
If you look at a lot of children's portraiture, you'll probably notice a popular look that is the signature of quite a few photographers, namely natural light, shallow depth of field, and an airy, soft, and vibrant retouch. This awesome and comprehensive tutorial will show you how to replicate that look in your own work.
It's easy to get caught up in thinking of only photographically intended accessories when trying to expand your creativity and as a byproduct, getting locked into paying photography accessory prices. However, with a little imagination, some very cheap items can make for inspiring and fun portraits.
So if for some reason you've still never tried a graphical tablet for your image retouching or digital illustrations, seriously stop waiting around. Worst case scenario is that you find that you really don't like it so you turn around and sell it. Best case, you revolutionize your retouching habits; pretty much a no-brainer. You can pick up used tablets online at huge discounts or you can buy new if that's your thing. For the sake of retouching, just try one out. Give it about a week if it's your first time with a tablet. Here is an awesome video with some tips and tricks you can apply to get you flowing right out of the gate.
I became interested in the collodion wet plate process (also called tintypes) after seeing a series of portraits of celebrities by photographer Victoria Will. The incredibly unique result of the wet plate process was extremely appealing to me, and I ended up diving head first into the world of collodion wet plate.
The process, which originated during the mid-1800s as a means of developing an easier alternative photo process, is a tricky one which requires careful planning in order to be successful.
Lenses are obviously some of the most talked about pieces of photography equipment out there. However, there's one type of photography that requires no lens at all. This neat video follows a photographer as he spends a day shooting landscapes with a pinhole camera.
A portrait taken in falling snow is a neat look that can create a much different atmosphere. If you don't have falling snow ready on hand for your next shoot, this helpful and fun tutorial will show you how to convincingly fake it using Photoshop.
Making composites look seamless and realistic is the ultimate goal of a digital artist. In this tutorial, you will learn a simple and very effective technique for matching the degree of saturation of your background and subject.
In this series, I attempt to identify the key professional virtues I have found to be the most important in building my own career, as well as identifying traits of other successful photographers and business leaders that are most key to their success. Today’s virtue: adaptability.
What we do in our free time is often connected to our innate passion. Such one random act of passion led us to launch a social documentary filmmaking brand. A lot of us, especially wedding photographers, have this bandwidth of free time where we are not shooting any weddings. In this off-season, do the things we do sum up to make a difference? This post is about how we chose to make short social documentary films and how transforming the experience was on the whole.
Getting great light in an event setting whether inside or outside is a tough shoot. You have to understand exposure, people are moving sometimes erratically, ambient light is moving over your subjects randomly, and you still have to create sellable imagery. I photograph several nightclubs in Dallas, TX regularly and the imagery I’m creating is their marketing for new patrons. What I have to show is an inviting and fun environment whether it’s packed or not and where people will want to spend their weekday and weekend nights, and let’s be honest, their hard earned money. This lighting isn’t tough to do, but takes some thought to execute as you move throughout a room or outdoor area.
Antti Karppinen is a digital artist, photographer, retoucher, and instructor from Finland with a unique eye for visual storytelling through photography. His work relies on traditional photography skills combined with an active imagination and complex Photoshop editing work to create fantastical images. He spoke with me about his work, process, and the inspiration behind a couple of his most popular composites.
The color grade is one of the most essential aspects of any bit of video work. Not only does it help provide the finishing touch that makes your work look professional, it's a chance for you to really add your style to your work to develop a signature look that's more memorable. This helpful video details five mistakes to be wary of when you're working on a color grade.
Oh hi, Fstoppers readers. Do you have any guilty pleasure movies — films you know are bad that you still enjoy anyway? Ever wonder why it is you enjoy them in spite of their questionable style, dialogue, acting, and/or execution? This great video essay examines why some movies are so bad they're good and how good films take advantage of their hilariously bad qualities.
Knowing how to visualize a shot in your head before you take it is an important step in the creative process, else you're simply firing off shots and hoping for a good edit to come out of the process. This great video follows a landscape photographer from pre-visualization all the way to printed photo.
Sometimes, a photo needs a little text to really complete the message or the look, but slapping it on without trying to blend it in just makes it look like a terrible watermark. This fun tutorial will show you how to blend text into whatever object you please to make it look realistic.
A lot of photography revolves around your ability to be prepared when the moment strikes and be able to adapt quickly as the scenery and required settings change. One of the best ways to be more efficient and increase your chances of getting the shot is by using custom controls, which this great video goes into detail about.
Nothing makes me forget that winter is just starting and I'm basically going to be uncomfortably cold for the next five months like a nice photo of somewhere warm with sun rays peeking through. This fun tutorial will show you a relatively quick and effective way to add sunrays to a photograph.
In a lot of genres, you have to shoot quickly and efficiently, lest you'll possibly miss an important shot. In other genres and situations, being in too much of a rush can be what actually causes you to miss the shot or come home with less-than-stellar results. This great video examines the idea of patience.
Is your photography business leveraging the power of video to reach new clients? If not, you’re missing out on a great opportunity the likes of which haven’t been seen or may never be seen again. This was the powerful message that I heard at the Social Video Marketing Summit. Having been in attendance I want to share with you what I think are the top three ideas I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Peters, Sue Bryce, and Sally Sargood that I think will help photographers take advantage of this medium.
Using new creative techniques for your wedding clients is the best way to stand out from the crowd. While this technique is not considered new by any means, it might be the kicker that sets you apart from the others on your prospective brides' list of photographers.
Whether you're shooting a high-fashion model, a mom to be, or a high school senior, the clothes always matter. I'm a sucker for over-the-top drama in my own work but am not always able to find a stylist to help me out with these shoots. Even if you don't have a need to do this yourself, give it a go from time to time. It will improve your work from behind the camera too, as photographing people is usually involving fashion in one way or another. In addition to keeping up with the latest trends, you might even start to confidently help your clients out when they ask for your opinion about what they're nervously wearing.
Philip Bloom is a world-class filmmaker with an impressive body of work in broadcast TV, feature films, and independent productions. Most recently he has been the cinematographer on the acclaimed CNN show “The Wonder List.” When I found out that he was partnering with MZed to create an immersive course on filmmaking, I jumped at the chance to review it and also had the opportunity to speak to him about the project.
Are you frustrated with your photographs and wondering why you can’t seem to produce the images you see in your head? Maybe you’re shooting all the time but don’t feel like you see the kind of progress you expected, or you’re beginning to give up the hope of becoming a great photographer because it seems like there is just so much to learn. If this is you, don’t despair, you’re simply in a stage of progress on the ladder of mastery known as “conscious incompetence,” and better work is only one rung away.
There's a certain mysticality that often gets assigned to work as a creative — the gifted artist that somehow conjures genius from thin air. This image is inaccurate at best, and it's downright poisonous for the artist themselves to subscribe to it. Here's how a professional really thinks and works.
"Oh no, it’s the same location, yet again!" That’s a statement you’ll hear frequently from wedding photographers when they are assigned to shoot in a location they’ve visited frequently. I agree that shooting at the same location over and over can be testing. It might look like reinventing the wheel with very little space to innovate. This post is about how you can win over such a tricky situation of a repeated location on cards for your next outdoor shoot.
Whether it's because you're shooting in the dead of winter or just because your model is naturally pale, sometimes, you'll want to add slightly more vibrant tones that give your subject richer skin. This helpful tutorial will show you how to do just that quickly and effectively.
The Sony a7R III is the highly anticipated update to the very popular a7R II. Since it uses the same sensor as its predecessor, it might seem like this is more an incremental release, but this helpful video will highlight the newest and most improved features to help you decide if it's worth the upgrade.
We all like to get results and to know that our efforts have not been for naught. Sometimes, though, getting that killer shot is just not in the cards, often because of forces outside our control, which is when it's important to remember how effort and persistence will eventually pay off.
Half the fun of shooting portraits is the veritable multitude of ways you can use photographic techniques and creative ideas to represent a person. This fun video will show you three such techniques that only require bare-minimum equipment and a subject.
The new season of Photographing the World 3 behind the scenes is now in full swing! In this week's episode, the gang heads down the Amalfi Coast and settles into the small town of Atrani. Here Elia Locardi teaches something I didn't think was possible: capturing star trails in a light polluted town. Of course, our food adventures continue but we also share some of our photography tips for getting great time-lapses straight out of camera. Oh, and yes Donald Trump takes his oath of office.
Adobe Lightroom was a pretty slick piece of software to begin with, but over the past several updates it has become an incredibly powerful tool for photographers. Of all the different controls and tools available within the software, the Detail panel has become one of my favorites. If you use Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Photoshop, you can find the same set of controls that we're talking about today which of course is within Lightroom. Adobe has been streamlining their systems for a long enough time now that handling raw files, although from a cataloging perspective is quite different, is almost identical between Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Photoshop.
Working for free can be a little controversial and I'm sure there are many creatives out there that completely disagree with it. There are plenty of reasons as to why someone shouldn't work for free but the debate continues. I, on the other hand, would consider working for free depending on a number of factors. Sometimes making money isn't the objective for me and working for free can be very fulfilling. For instance, offering free work for a charity is something I've done regularly and felt very good about. On other occasions, however, I have worked for free as part of a strategy. This is a more risky method because it doesn't always pay off, but, when it does, it can pay off really well.
When I was a kid, I used to shoot a ton of film, so much that I was eventually given a roll a week by my parents to shoot whatever I cared to. But of course, I had to carefully choose what I shot over the course of each week. The thrill was getting the envelope of prints back from the grocery store a few weeks later. This fun challenge recaptures a lot of that nostalgia and exercises your photographic brain.
As Halloween comes to a close and we reflect on all the creative costumes roaming the streets, I think it’s a good time we take a moment to talk about cultural appropriation. We are blessed as photographers to be able to view images from any culture in the world through the Internet. It’s pretty cool that we have access to unlimited inspiration from just about everywhere, something the founding fathers of photography had nothing close to. It's important for photographers to have a vast basic knowledge of cultures, subcultures, and social classes so that we can always use culture with respect and honor in our images.
Lightroom is likely where you spend a lot of, if not the majority of your post-processing time. And so, any little shortcuts or tricks you can pick up can add up to more efficiency and better output down the road. This helpful video will show you five such tricks to add to your arsenal.
For many photographers, particularly hobbyists, making an image black and white is almost arbitrary. I remember in the early days of my photography, I was the same. I would mutter: "I wonder if this would look good in black and white," and then, I'd try it. Sometimes, it would look better, but usually, it would not. I presumed it was all just down to taste, but that's not true. After years of reading around the subject and experimenting, I began to understand why it worked when it did and conversely, why it often didn't. Here are some key elements that ought to be present in black and white images, and why.
In a previous article, we discovered how we could transition from Lightroom to ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2018 by importing old catalogs. We also discovered the different files management options and tools ACDSee Ultimate 2018 has to offer. With this second and last part, we are going to go through the main photo editing tools you’d use in Lightroom and see their counterpart in ACDSee. If you are making the switch from the Adobe solution to ACDSee Ultimate 2018, be sure to read this article.
Although I now work in the commercial world, my passion started with documentary photography. I was, and still am, obsessed with Annie Leibowitz’s work with the Rolling Stones and I loved William Egglestone’s color observations of the mundane world he found himself in. When I find a free day, there is nothing that I enjoy more than walking out with my camera to document someone else's life. However, unlike the plethora of studio lighting tutorials available, there seems to be a real lack of articles on documentary photography. Here are six tips on how to improve your images.
