Recent Hacks Articles

How to Remove Shadows With Frequency Separation

If you want to lift your retouching skills to the next level, you should familiarize yourself with frequency separation and how it can aid you in various photo editing tasks. One of those can come up in cityscape and architecture photography. Especially during blue hour and nighttime, you can get unwanted shadows in your photos. In this article, I explain how to remove those with frequency separation.

How to Take Spectacular Photos on Overcast Days

When I travel, I stay in each location I visit for several days to increase my chances of encountering great light. But even a week is sometimes not enough to get a single colorful sunrise or sunset. Either the sky remains free of clouds or it's completely overcast, preventing any interesting light from breaking through. Night photography is one way of dealing with a clear sky. But what can you do during gray weather?

How to Improve Your Blue Hour Photos During Photo Editing

As you've learned in a previous article, a great time to photograph cities is during blue hour. But the blue hour often lacks dimension and depth in the sky. If you're lucky, you'll have some clouds that provide structure. But if you have a clear blue sky, it'll often appear flat. In this article, I show you a trick you can use to make such a sky more interesting and improve your blue hour photos.

Tricks for Masking in Adobe Lightroom

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.

Does the New DJI Mic Have a Noise Problem?

I finally received my DJI Mic after pre-ordering it more than a month ago, and at first, I was disappointed. When I did the initial test with the DJI Receiver connected to my Canon R5, the audio I recorded was much noisier than what I was used to from my old setup, for which I used a Zoom H1 with a Rode Lavalier GO. But there's a solution to this problem, and in this article, I share it with you.

The Best Camera Hack to Get Sharper Photos

There are a couple of things you can do to get sharper photos with your long lens. But what if we want to go even further? This lens hack might be a bit crazy, but it is the best I have ever seen because it really works, and it is feasible on location. Find out how to get sharper telephoto shots.

Making White Light with RGB Gels

Based in Zurich, Maya and Daniele used three separate lights to create white light. It’s not an easy thing to do, and this is a great example.

The One Technique Everyone Should Be Talking About

Edward Weston began his career making soft, almost out-of-focus images that emphasized patterns and light. After a trip to Mexico in the 1920s, he decided that photography was really about details and realistic depictions of the world. He made a complete turnaround in his work and began making work that was simple and focused on tones and textures. He got so into "straight" photography that he didn’t even believe in cropping his images.

How to Trick the Eye While Also Fixing an Obliquely Taken Image

Some discoveries in life are intentional and some are just happy accidents that work out in ways we never anticipated. I rely on the Transform tool in Lightroom to correct lines and perspectives, but I learned that it can completely change the look of an image to add interest and trick the eye of the viewer.

Shoot and Edit Infrared Photos With Any Camera

Infrared photography can be a wonderful new avenue to explore and can really get the creative juices flowing. It can also produce some otherworldly and beautiful images. Unfortunately, the cost and commitment of converting an existing camera to be capable of infrared is a barrier for many to trying it out. But, as this video demonstrates, you really don't need any specialized equipment to create great infrared images.

How to Convert Low-Res Logos to Sharp, High-Res Images

Have you ever needed to use a logo or image that just isn't high enough resolution or doesn't have clean enough edges to use? Here's how to quickly and easily convert a low-resolution image to a more useable high-resolution image in Photoshop.

How to Make Photography Easy With Aperture Priority Mode

Discovering how to use Aperture Priority is a revelation for many photographers, especially when you know a few extra tricks to make it do even more work for you. Learn how to make the most of this incredibly useful shooting mode.

Shooting Through a Window? You Can Still Make a Great Image With These Tricks

Whether you’re using your iPhone or regular camera, shooting through windows and transparent surfaces can be one of the trickiest situations you’ll encounter. With just a few simple tricks, you can greatly improve the results next time you try photographing through a window.

5 Tips for Making YouTube Videos Faster

Creating video content can be so time-consuming that it is off-putting for people starting out on platforms like YouTube. In this video, and experienced videographer and YouTuber, Sidney Diongzon, goes through five tips to help speed up and smooth out your workflow.

How to Build a Set on a Budget

An image isn’t just about a subject, such as a model, or the clothes or hair or makeup. A huge aspect of image-making is the setting or set design.

Build Your Dream CRM Using Automate, Notion, and Mailerlite

There are endless apps and web services available for small business owners to build a CRM database. For those not familiar with CRM, it stands for Customer Relationship Management. Basically, it's where you store, categorize, and update your customer’s information.

Make Your Own Canvas Backdrop on a Budget

Hand-painted canvas backdrops are a thing of beauty, it is another form of art in itself. With that, there are many canvas backdrops out there that are not very budget-friendly. If you have the time and space, here's how you can make your own.

10 Ways To Give Your Apple Boxes Some Character

A great way to add variety to the poses during a session is to add a prop. Having an assortment of props can be very beneficial, and some good ones to have are apple boxes. They seem to be a very popular choice in portraits, especially more editorial-styled ones. These are a must-have for any photography studio, at least in my opinion.

Posing Men Who Aren't Models: Tips to Help You Get Great Portraits

A subject who’s not used to being a model can make for some slightly awkward portraits, so having a stock of ideas that you can use can be very useful — particularly if they are men. Check out these ideas for some natural, relaxed portraits of a reluctant male model.

100 Photography Tips for Beginners

If you're just starting out in photography, it can be daunting with how many terms, rules, and acronyms there are floating around, and that's without the practical side. So, here are a staggering 100 tips to help you get started.

50 Non-Photography Items You Might Want To Carry in Your Camera Bag

Everyone has a pocket or two in their camera bag filled with odds and ends that they might find useful. If you’re the type of photographer that travels a lot or is often on-location you’ve probably developed a list of non-photographic items for various scenarios, based on your own experiences. Here is a list of all the things that can be found in my camera bags.