Love it or hate it, Halloween is right around the corner and it’s the perfect time of the year for spooky costumes, creative photography, and in the case of this video, some slick composite work in Photoshop.
Adding a rainbow to your images can be done in many different ways. However, not every technique is easily put into practice or can offer a remarkably consistent result. For example, the prism method is very efficient to get the effect on your files straight out of camera, but it can make focusing and composition a bit difficult. In this tutorial, Jessica Kobeissi will show you a couple of simple techniques using only Photoshop.
Earlier this year Newsweek ran a cover featuring everyone's favorite president to hate as their cover, depicting him lazily hanging out in the oval office pounding back the calories in about the least presidential way possible. Newsweek contracted legendary conceptual photographer C.J. Burton to create this inevitably notorious cover. Naturally, Burton quickly realized there would be no chance of him getting access to either Trump or the Oval Office for such a shoot so needed to leverage the power of compositing to create the image desired by the client.
Half the fun of having a professional wide-aperture telephoto lens married to a DSLR or mirrorless camera is all you can do with bokeh. However, if you don't have such a lens or want to have some fun with a past shot, this tutorial shows you how to easily add a bokeh effect using Photoshop.
In a lot of genres, particularly landscape photography, luminosity masks are some of the most useful tools you can employ to make selective edits. This helpful video will show you a quick and effective shortcut for creating your own customized luminosity masks.
An image can have a global color cast for a wide variety of reasons, and there are a multitude of techniques for correcting such issues. This clever technique can resolve a color cast with one click and also provides a way to do so for more difficult images.
The Get Well Tree is the latest touching project from the talented collaboration The heART Project. Many of the previous projects have been featured here. Each one brings amazing artists and sponsors together to help bring love and smiles to a family that has experienced some form of hardship. This time the project follows two childhood cancer survivors on a fantasy journey through a dream-like world. 12 photographers came together to create a 14-page photo storybook staring these two heroic little girls.
The Clone Stamp is the bread and butter tool for a lot of photographers, and rightfully so: it's a tremendously flexible and powerful feature that's strikingly simple in its operation, particularly compared to many other tools. This helpful video shows you a couple of quick shortcuts to get even more versatility out of the Clone Stamp.
The Clone Stamp tool is without the shadow of a doubt one tool that everyone who works with Photoshop uses on a regular basis. It’s quite an incredible tool, and it can help save some tiny mistakes without too much work. Despite being easy to use, there are times where it doesn’t do exactly what we’d like it to. For example, in the case of recreating a pattern or texture that needs perspective correction, the tool won’t match your image vanishing point to the T. At least that’s what we are usually taught when learning Photoshop. However, there is a way to make the clone stamp tool smarter and correct the perspective for us.
It doesn't matter what kind of photography you do, shooting photo backplates each and every time you go out and take pictures is one of the best habits you can get yourself into. Not only does it save many hours in postproduction, it will also help open up a world of creative possibilities to you as a photographer.
Have you ever color graded your videos in Photoshop? Although Adobe’s video editing software or Final Cut X is mostly preferred by video editors, some good results can still be achieved by using Photoshop’s video editing feature. Aaron Nace of Phlearn explains these techniques in this 14-minute video.
Colors casts can happen for a wide variety of reasons ranging from white balance issues to weird venue lighting or poor filter design. And just like the multitude of reasons for their presence, there are numerous ways to fix them. This technique allows you to quickly and precisely zero in on the corrective color you need without needing to eyeball it, making it one you'll definitely want to know.
Learning to make selections both precisely and efficiently is a skill all its own, and no method is perfect for every situation. This technique is a great alternative for extremely intricate selections and is both precise and quick in the right situations. Check it out!
Modern digital cameras have some pretty impressive dynamic range, but the world at large still has many scenes that are simply too much to capture at peak quality in one exposure. This helpful tutorial will show you a powerful and effective technique for blending multiple exposures using Photoshop.
Over the years, I have come across several different ways to give your photo a dreamy look. When I first started my journey into photography I came across a lens filter with the sole purpose of creating the dreamy look, but I found that too much detail was lost so I never used it again. So what is a good way to add the dreamy look to your photos?
We all have them, those cloudy days when you just can't create no matter how much you want to. As normal as this is, it's very frustrating. I'll spend hours doing random things before getting to work in hopes of stumbling upon any crumbs of inspiration left behind. I've found a few things that always work like going for a walk, sitting outside or talking with other artists. However. I've found value in working on old images.
Photoshop is a powerful program full of hundreds of functions, many of which seem to behave very similarly, but definitely have distinct purposes that make them more or less appropriate than related tools depending on the situation. This video examines one of the most common cases, vibrance vs. saturation, and how you should use each in your editing.
Do you have a great shot but wish you were able to get a little more depth of field background blur in the photo? It is always better to get it naturally in camera with a fast lens, but what if you are not able to? Well, if you want to spend the extra time post-processing your photos, you can add some extra background blur to your shot. Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE demonstrates how he added background blur to simulate the lovely blur without adding halos to your photo.
Rim lights can be some of the most underappreciated yet important parts of a setup. They can add definition and drama to an image and are the main source of subject-background separation in many scenarios. This helpful tutorial will show you how to add a lovely rim light effect using Photoshop.
There are so many different ways to process your photographs. Some people will spend hours on a single image, others will spend a few seconds, and the rest of us fall somewhere in between those ranges. For the most part I think we all strive to get as much as we can in-camera through the time we spend metering subjects, dialing in exposure settings, and controlling our lighting whenever possible. Post-processing is just another part of that creative process where we harness the capabilities of the image created in the negative and use our own preferential techniques to create the final image.
So much of post-processing revolves around editing to bring more attention to your subject, whether that be a person, a waterfall, or whatever you please. One versatile and effective way to do this is through the use of radial gradients. This helpful tutorial will show you just how to use them.
One of the coolest fundamental things you can do with Photoshop is convincingly change the color of something. This helpful tutorial will show you a few different methods to do that, as well as how to add and precisely match colors in your images.
Photoshop is tremendously complex and nuanced, and there are always techniques or entirely new features to be discovered. This helpful video will give you five lesser known tricks to add to your arsenal.
The first trailer for the latest "Tomb Raider" film has been released along with an official poster, which is drawing all the wrong kinds of attention due to a Photoshop fail.
High-end retouching is all about keeping details and texture intact in an image so that it looks as natural as possible. Making sure the picture looks unretouched but polished is a matter of patience and wise choices in retouching techniques. In this video, watch retoucher Pratik Naik editing a photo shot by Andrea Belluso.
The healing brush in Photoshop is a potent tool to clean things up. It can be used in numerous scenarios and works well most of the time. However, if there's one scenario where it doesn’t perform like we would like it to, it’s in the case of edges. For example, when you need to alter the edge of a face on a portrait or the border of a building when shooting architectural images, it tends to mess things up and create some sort of blurry areas instead of clean lines. In this tutorial, Joseph Parry shows us how to make the healing brush work the way we want it in those situations.
It’s been quite trendy in the past few months to see handwritten text composited onto images on Instagram. Perhaps you’ve been wondering how it’s done or maybe you’ve just been looking for a way to make your writing even more personalized. No matter the reason why you’re reading this article, if you want to give a more personal dimension to your images with handwritten text, be sure to watch this tutorial.
Rain can be a great addition to an image, as it can communicate so many things: sadness, romance, etc. We don't really get much control over when it happens, however, and even if you're handy with a garden hose, spraying water everywhere probably won't be appreciated by your model or your camera equipment. Here's how to fake it using Photoshop.
Color grading is amongst the most important step of retouching. Along with lighting, it sets the mood of your image and can also help tie together the different elements of your composition. Learning all the different ways of altering colors in a picture is probably as important if not more important than knowing how to retouch skin or remove objects. In this 20-minute long tutorial, Michael Woloszynowicz explains everything there is to know about the color balance layer adjustment and how to use it to color balance your images in the best way possible.
I regularly get asked on Instagram how I edit my studio headshots and yet keep them looking natural. In truth I’ve spent years learning the intricacies of Capture One Pro, Photoshop, and the various retouching techniques that are frequently discussed.
There are approximately 2,374,890 (and counting) ways to create a black and white image. However, this technique stood out to me a bit for its ability to isolate the subject and create a very eye-catching look. Here's how to accomplish it using Photoshop.
There are tons of different ways and several products on the market that people buy to reduce the appearance of bags under their eyes. So it shouldn't be a shock when a client asks you to help them out and reduce or remove the bags under their eyes in the photo. Just as there are many ways to reduce the appearance in real life, there are many ways to do it in Photoshop as well.
So much of a landscape image is in how you edit it; many different personalities and effects can shine through the same scene when processed by different photographers. If dramatic skies are something you favor, this helpful tutorial will show you a neat trick for bringing out more detail and creating moodier looks in Photoshop.
Double exposures are one of my favorite effects. Luckily for us, unlike in the age of film, we have vastly more control over the final image thanks to the power of Photoshop. This great tutorial will show you how to create your own.
Out of all the remarkable things you can pull off in Photoshop, changing someone's hair might be my favorite thing to do. Besides being just plain fun, it'll exercise a lot of techniques that you'll want to have mastered in many other situations as well. Check out this great tutorial on swapping hair.
A lot of us have or have had braces at some point in our lives. And while they're a perfectly normal thing, some people are a bit self-conscious of them, so being able to remove them is a good skill for photographers to possess. This helpful tutorial will show you how to do exactly that.
Even when shooting at f/16, not every part of the photo will be in focus. Depending on where you focus is at, there will still be some fall off. What if you wanted to get your entire photo in focus? You can merge multiple exposures where the focus point has been changed to get one photo showing everything in focus. Landscape Photographer Mark Denney shows us how easy it is to merge multiple exposures into one image using Lightroom and Photoshop together. If you do not use Lightroom, you can still achieve the same results only using Photoshop, so don't worry.
I absolutely love shooting commercial work in the studio. Who doesn't? Shooting in a studio environment allows the photographer full control over the lighting and the subject. It also allows for full creative freedom over what you can composite into the shot if needed by easily matching up the lighting. Earlier this week I had a few hours of downtime and decided to shoot a bottle of Bacardi Dark Rum in my studio. Using a softbox I built myself a few weeks ago, I decided to take it on a test run using the bottle of Rum as my subject.
The Pen tool is incredibly powerful, but not always the easiest to use for newcomers. Even those familiar with other Photoshop features are often less proficient with using the Pen tool to select specific areas or create paths. While it's not meant to replace the original Pen tool, the new Curvature Pen tool previewed in this video helps make a faster and more accurate selection around objects with curved edges in a way that could even be faster for those who are already good with the traditional Pen tool.
One of the most distracting things you can have on a subject is unintentional harsh shadows. Once they're there, they can be very tricky to deal with convincingly in post. This helpful tutorial will help you tackle and reduce them to manageable levels.
One of the most common retouching tasks you'll be faced with is whitening teeth. Like many things in Photoshop, the key is applying the correct technique in moderation to obtain a realistic result. This helpful tutorial will show you three such ways to do just that.
Earlier this year I reviewed ACDSee Ultimate 10. However, ACDSee just released the 2018 version of their flagship photo editing software and thus it’s time for an update. The brand new iteration promises to offer a more efficient workflow, layered editing for advanced retouching, vastly improved performances, and new tools for photographers to edit their pictures better than ever. Let’s see how this translates in the real world!
Tattoos can be a very unique way to add something that makes your subject stand out. This neat tutorial will show you how to take a design and convincingly place it on your subject in Photoshop.
One of the most fundamentals features in Photoshop is the Pen Tool. It's a bit less intuitive than some other features, however, and it often presents some difficulty for first-time users. This video will get you up and running with it in 30 quick minutes.
As a dog photographer, one critical post-processing skill is the ability to remove leashes from your images. It is often the single most time-consuming step of editing your dog portraits. I have tried many techniques for removing leashes, and I find this one to be the fastest while producing great results.
Many digital photographers appreciate the look of film, but don't own the necessary equipment to shoot it, whether that is due to the hassle or the cost. There are many ways to mimic the look in post-production, however, and this great tutorial will show you such methods to do it.
This week, Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE explains how to make a watermark out of your signature in Photoshop using a real signature on paper. The signature can be captured via your cell phone camera without the help of a scanner. This solution is a good alternative from classic logo watermark. The process is really easy and takes less five minutes.
Since Adobe adopted a subscription-based licensing system, many users have started looking at other alternatives. While ACDSee had attractive solutions until now, their latest creation, ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2018, seems to be a serious contender to Photoshop CC and Lightroom. Even better yet, you can process your raw files and then edit them within the very same software, no need for round trips.
Catchlights are those beautiful, almost imperceptible, reflections in the eyes of your model that bring their expression to life. When photographing portraiture every effort should be made to capture this light in their eyes, but sometimes they come out so faint the impact is simply not enough. Fortunately, there is an easy fix.
Silhouette portraits are always fun to experiment with, and it’s easy to assume that we are limited to sunrise and sunset for capturing this type of image. With knowledge of camera exposure settings and a single off-camera flash, this style of portrait can be produced at any time of day or night.
