The word portrait often comes associated with studio and lights. But let us not forget the fun in shooting with natural light. This quick article is about the importance of understanding the light when you are making natural light portraits.
Quick Masks in Photoshop are used while making selections within your image and can help speed up any local adjustments needed. Here’s a jump start at getting familiar with the tool and its potential.
Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid brings us his latest Photoshop tutorial giving us an overview of the Quick Mask mode inside Photoshop CC.
Portrait photography (or any genre involving people) is difficult because no matter how good your technical skills are, there's a prominent human element, and your success hinges on being proficient at working with your subjects. This great video will examine five common portrait photography mistakes to avoid.
Some nice bokeh balls can be a great way to add a little something extra to a portrait. This quick tutorial will show you how to take almost any nighttime photo and create your own bokeh overlays using Photoshop.
Every genre from landscapes to fine art macro shots of insects of the southern United States has its clichés. And while there's nothing inherently wrong with them, doing something different can help you distinguish yourself. This great video will help you create your best portraits and stand out more.
YouTube's relationship with its creators is notoriously shaky, with seemingly arbitrary decisions and poor communication often having very real effects on the bottom lines of those who use the platform and leaving them upset at the lack of consistency and transparency.
B-roll is supplemental footage that provides alternate angles, tangential storylines, or just filler for a voiceover or to help set the pace of a film and provide you with extra footage in case something isn't working in post. Although it's a standard thing, one filmmaker thinks you should stop shooting b-roll.
We often draw inspiration from several mediums; art, music, and film to name a few. These inspirations are blended together and found within our work. This article digs deeper into what may give our work moody undertones and makes us feel exactly how we feel when looking at it.
Concert photography is probably one of the most appealing genres to shoot for any photographer. When I first picked up a camera, the only thing I wanted to photograph was my favorite bands as they played live.
There are few universal measures of success in photography, but surely, one of them is having a readily recognized style. Finding yours can be a bit difficult, but this helpful video talks about what it takes to get there.
Getting started in freelance photography can feel like getting on a road you've never taken before and hoping if you drive on it long enough, you'll reach your destination. This great video examines how to deal with the anxiety and expectations you'll experience on your way.
When you're working in Photoshop, it's easy to stare and stare at an image for hours and somehow still miss some little detail; we get tunnel vision, our eyes get tired, etc. This is when check layers can be an incredibly useful way to ensure you don't miss a thing.
Lightroom tips are a lot like puppies: you can never have too many of them. And while I can't offer you a puppy (likely because I'm keeping them for myself), I can offer you this great video that will give you 25 helpful Lightroom tips in just 2 minutes.
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.
Portraiture is all about bringing out the character of your subject. This great video goes behind the scenes of a shoot, showing you how lighting was designed to match the intended portrayal of the subject and the resulting photos.
Portrait photography can be a tricky genre, as it relies very heavily on your ability to interact with and bring the best out of the people in front of your lens, making it just as much psychology as photography. This great video will give you some tips for working with subjects as well as some helpful career advice.
Of all the focal lengths, I personally think wide-angle lenses might take the most getting used to when it comes to creating compelling imagery that takes advantage of their unique properties and avoids their pitfalls. This helpful video will give you some great tips for taking better shots with them.
Some days, the light just doesn't cooperate to give you that beautiful blue sky in the background of an image. But your subject may be so compelling, you know you have to fix that sky to make elevate your image from mundane to impressive. You could always replace the sky in Photoshop, but there may just be an even easier way to do it using the Black and White Filter.
I have always loved shooting in ugly places such as gas stations and abandoned buildings, but it took me a while to learn how to make these places look magical in my images. You can't just put a beautiful woman in front of these places and expect it to work.
Newborn babies tend to have different skin than their older counterparts and thus different retouching requirements. This helpful tutorial will show you everything you need to know about retouching newborn skin quickly and effectively in Photoshop.
You book a commercial job and the client wants a beautiful face to grace their next ad. The client relies on you, the photographer to help with the process of hiring the model. The crew you hire rely on you to select the right candidate for their needs. That's great, right?
Baber Afzal is well known for his dramatic looking fine art cityscape and landscape pictures. In this 12-minute long tutorial, he’ll show you how to achieve the same look on your pictures by taking you through one of his edits in Capture One and giving precious tips along the way.
Love it or hate it, drones are becoming more and more commonplace in all areas of photography. See how Canadian-born photographer and director Joey Lawrence uses drones to film war zones and learn what challenges shooting in such a difficult environment can bring.
Workflow can be a make or break situation in how your business is run. Spending all your time with file naming, culling, or unproductive backup techniques can create not only time constraints but also a negative relationship with your images after your shoot. Following some quick and easy workflow tips will get you back on track and more importantly back to shooting.
It happens all the time: I see a post from a friend or in a forum with a desperate plea for help because someone's hard drive failed and they have no backup of their work. It's absolutely crucial that you back up your files properly, and this helpful video will give you an overview of how to do that.
I'm no painter. In fact, if we ever play Pictionary together, do your best to get on the other team. So, when I wanted to make my own custom backdrops, I knew I was way out of my depth. Like many photographers, I've drooled over Sarah Oliphant's hand painted backdrops for years. When I saw Jeremy Cowart draw his own backdrop on an iPad Pro, I thought I may have something within reach.
It's no secret that we all have to start somewhere. Usually, that place is not very good. At the very least we all start out in the “room for improvement” category. Assuming that progressing with our work and improving our images, style, brand, knowledge, and skill set is the goal, how to we go about getting better at a quicker-than-a-snail pace?
One of the trickier things about photography is that our various skills and taste may develop at different rates, leaving images with a lot of potential that are held back by one specific issue. If you experienced this when you were still learning, now might be the time to take a look at your catalog and consider reviving old images.
For any of you out there who are like me and move between PC and Mac for your workflow, or those who are considering migrating your workflow completely from the Windows world to the Mac environment, here is a simple step-by-step guide for moving over your most important asset.
When you think of product photography and lighting, you likely think of intricate, multi-light setups that precisely sculpt every last highlight and shadow. Nonetheless, there's a lot you can accomplish with simpler setups, and this great video will show you how to get a professional shot of a perfume bottle using very minimal gear.
By virtue of the process, photography can be a rather solitary thing. And while there's nothing wrong with working alone, there are many benefits to collaborating with others. This great video examines why you should consider working on a team for some of your shoots.
Whether you're shooting stills or moving images, lighting is just about everything when it comes down to it. This excellent guide will show you how lighting shapes and sculpts the face, adding dimension and helping you to tell a story, and how you can use it to better your own work.
Everyone wants to get better in their photography skills and we keep learning constantly. Eventually, we keep accumulating so much knowledge that once in a while a reminder of few of the basics is always good. Here is a quick tip that will make you a better photographer anytime.
Sometimes, you'll come home with an image that seems rather unremarkable, but when you play with it for a bit in Lightroom, it suddenly becomes something you hadn't envisioned when you first shot it. This great video will show you how to split toning saved an image.
Relying on your camera screen to nail exposure is a sure recipe for disaster. Depending on the lighting situation, the contrast of your display, how it’s back-lit, as well as other parameters, you’ll see the luminosity values differently. To make sure you get it perfect, there are tools available to you.
Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw house some solid color and toning options. These can be applied in a non-destructive way, and in general will get the job done, our photos finished and out into the world. However, for many others, Photoshop with its plethora of adjustment layers is hard to best when heavy color work is applied.
The Pen Tool elicits a range of emotions, most commonly fear and love. If you've mastered it, post-processing life is good. For everyone else, learning the Pen Tool always seems to be put off for a rainy day that never comes. This quick and easy tutorial has five great tips to help you better use this essential tool.
Most of us are relatively familiar with the history of photography in the last decade or so, but I'd argue its early years were far more interesting, with patent wars abounding and chemicals making people crazy (ok, maybe I'm glad that part is no longer an issue).
At the core of any image editor is the brush tool, and although many of us don't give it a second thought, it really is one of the most important features to master. Density, opacity, hardness, and flow all affect how the brush works in very different ways. Make sure you know the difference between these settings so you can work smarter when editing your images.
We're unfortunately living in the days of the algorithm, and that means working with Instagram is nowhere near as straightforward as it used to be. Nonetheless, it's still a powerful tool for creatives to get their work out into the world and network. This great video will examine three things that might be holding you back when you try to increase your Instagram following.
"How did you retouch that?" This is the common question I see most when I post my images online. Unfortunately, answering that question directly won't get photographers any closer to being able to replicate that style on their own. In order to broaden the dialog here are five things you must understand if you want to get skin looking beautiful in your portraits.
So much of photography is built on social relationships. Models, makeup artists, hair stylists, designers, and assistants all play a crucial role in contributing to the creation of an image. At the center of the photographer's work is the model, yet photographers may find it difficult to reach out to modeling agencies for collaboration.
When you're first starting out, you can't just call up an agency and expect to shoot with a model. Most of us started by grabbing friends and bribing them to stand in front of our lens. Of course, most of our friends aren't trained in posing, however. This helpful video will show how to pose people who aren't models.
Photography of any kind at night can be a slow process getting started. Photographing the Milky Way, however, may require a little bit of extra technical knowledge ahead of time before really letting your creative side take over. In this video from PhotoRec TV, Toby Gelston breaks it all down before jumping into it.
Candlelit portraits are cool, especially when shot inside the studio in a planned way. With a little imagination and a simple technique, you can create vivid candlelit portraits.
Hey introverts, it's the guy you've never actually met at a party because he was busy playing with someone else's dog in the corner, and I've got some good news for you: introversion is not a disease.
If you're a photographer living in a coastal city, hobbyist or otherwise, it's almost a given you've taken your camera seaside to snap what you were hoping to be some stunners. This has been the case for me, and I was sorely disappointed when my photos were nothing like what I had imagined they would be.
The price of videography equipment has its reasons, but those justifications often remain a mystery to most of us. From cameras that cost thousands of dollars or cine lenses that are close to the price of a car, it’s hard to justify such prices to ourselves, let alone explain to your loved one why you got a new lens instead of going on vacation!
If you haven't tried out night photography before, you sure are missing out on some fun and creative opportunities. One thing for sure, it's quite different than shooting during the day, so I understand why some of you may be hesitant to venture out at night with your camera.
We are now up to episode 10 in our behind-the-scenes adventures with Elia Locardi. After photographing some of the most beautiful locations in Italy, it was time to travel from Europe to the Middle East.