Blend modes in Photoshop are still confusing lots of us even after years of using the software. This article is about two of them: Luminosity and Color. You may start using them more frequently after you understand their strengths and cases when you should use them.
When any talented individual with a dedicated set of skills finds themselves with a little free time it almost always results in something both creative and amazing. Some of the most interesting creations have come from artists and craftsman in their spare time. So it comes as no surprise that a successful photographic digital artist like Karen Alsop when presented with a newly found photo of her ancestors, would turn it into something that would surprise and amaze her friends and family.
Colorizing black and white photos is a nuanced and skilled art entirely by itself, but understanding the basics of it gives you some good practice with editing techniques and another skill to throw in your bag of tricks. This helpful video will show you how to do just that.
When a D1 collegiate athlete becomes a photographer, you should watch out. Zach Ancell is a commercial sports photographer from Portland and has been shooting for almost 10 years now. As any self-respecting creative, he does his own personal projects between the commercials he shoots. Pan"Tone," which is one of Ancell's recent shoots caught my attention, and he kindly agreed to share all we want to know about the set.
The weather. Of the many things I wish I could control, this is certainly one of them. Recently, my home of Seoul has had some of the clearest skies and nicest puffy clouds that I’ve seen in my 11 years of living here, but typically this is not so. On the few days of the year we get nice clouds, fisty-cuffs determine your tripod’s resting place at the popular photo spots, and the Internet is afire with the chatter of excited shutterbugs. However, there are so many days of the year where the haze is too thick or a monotone blanket of clouds covers the sky. I have come up with a quick and dirty method of dropping in skies from my library that I use when the job calls for it. I’d like to share that with you today.
If you're ever adjusting colors in Photoshop, you know getting it just right can be a bit tricky. This great tutorial from a senior creative director at Adobe will help you get it right very time.
The third episode of Mike Kelley's Behind the Scenes series from his architectural tutorial is now live. In this episode, Mike shows you how you can turn an overcast day into a sunny afternoon, how to photograph a resort from a helicopter, and also teaches you an effective way to make a hotel lobby look more inviting. You can also watch as the Fstoppers crew goes night diving with massive manta rays off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.
If you're new to Photoshop, you may have heard of these mythical things called "Smart Objects." This helpful tutorial walks you through a very practical application of them to help you understand their role in image editing.
Creating convincing composites is all about matching a number of characteristics, one of them being the saturation between the different elements of the final image. This helpful tutorial gives a quick and very effective method for precisely matching saturation.
If you're working as a real estate photographer, taking environmental portraits, or simply want cleaner shots, a little bit of retouching and cloning can go a long way. This helpful tutorial will show how to declutter and polish your shots.
Love it or hate it, CGI and digital compositing are here to stay. I think you'd actually be surprised at how much of it is used without you even realizing and for this reason it's something which you should be open to embracing to enhance your video and photography work.
If you're working as a photographer or retoucher, there are certain Photoshop techniques you just have to know. This amazing set of tutorials walks you through 30 such skills and explains why they're important and how to use them.
Most, if not all, have seen the picture profile settings in our cameras. These can include settings for Landscapes, Portraits, or even Cine-style formats for filmmakers looking to achieve that cinematic look. But what do these mean and how do they affect our final image?
A warm sun glow effect in portraits is a highly popular look that can create a lot of interest in an image if done right. This great tutorial shows you a quick and easy method for adding the effect that produces a nice result.
I recently travelled to the local racetrack with my brother for an open track day and decided that while he was out riding, I would try to make a few portraits of the other attending riders. I spent plenty of time ahead of the trip planning lighting, gear, locations, and more. This is a step by step walkthrough of how I created this series of portraits.
Adding an element such as fire to an image can really bring your photographs to life and give you that high-end production value without all the added danger.
Today I want to share a quick tip on cleaning up lint, dust, cat hair, and things like that from clothing or other areas of your photo. I'm super picky, and even if the image is a 5x7 and the dust may not even show up on the print, I like to fix things like that on my large files anyway. You never know when the customer may come back later and order a wall portrait from that file they only previously purchased a 5x7 from, and I don't want to have to go back in and re-retouch the image.
Not every photographer needs lavish resources and an army of helpers to create dramatic images that belie their basic production. Lia Konrad is a 23-year-old fine art photographer based in a small town in Germany, but she hasn’t let modest resources stop her from following her passion to create epic images inspired by her love of fairytales, myths, and fictional stories for her website Liancary.
I previously wrote about Benjamin Von Wong's latest project with Sarah Jane in the Blue Mountains of Australia. Benjamin’s portion was just half of the project set up by Karen Alsop. She invited Benjamin to join in on some friendly competition. While her approach and style was different, there was still some amazing images created out of this cooperative project.
Selections are really at the core of editing in Photoshop: they are what allow you to apply edits, effects, and more precisely and convincingly, while also enabling you to rearrange, copy, substitute, and remove elements of an image. In this great tutorial, you'll learn the most common tools and methods for making selections in Photoshop.
Postproduction is often so integral to a photographer's style that many photographers wouldn't dream of allowing their raw files to be seen by clients because they feel that their editing process is what makes the photo look like "their work." While I find postproduction just as important as any photographer, the unfortunate truth is that spending too much time in Lightroom or Photoshop might actually be damaging your business.
Most people have one eye that is slightly more closed than the other, and it does show in photos more than when you are just looking at the person. Today, I want to share a quick tip about how I open eyes and even them out.
There are many times in the automotive industry that when you're asked to shoot a car, you frequently cannot move the car either from where it is or far from where it's being stored due to its rarity, sometimes condition, and sometimes even questionable street-legality. This can definitely cause some problems when it comes to producing high-end images of the cars for a client. If they want only detail shots then you're good as you won't need to show much of the background to accomplish their goals. However, if they've got high hopes and want the car to be pictured anywhere except where it actually is you have to be a bit creative.
This is the fifth in the series of my bite-size Photoshop tutorials and on the face of it, it's one of the most basic. Indeed, the technical side is rather basic but my application of the dodge and burn layers is crucial to my workflow with products and fashion.
Image sharpening is one of the most important steps in a postproduction workflow. However, with a myriad of options and methods to do it, it can be a daunting understanding exactly what you're doing and why. This great tutorial will show both what sharpening an image does and how to do it.
Masking plays a crucial role in the quality of your retouching. There are so many tools available to create and refine masks, that’s often times we forget the most basics and useful ones. One of them is a bit hidden and it seems like many don’t even know it exists! However, it’s probably amongst the most useful options to refine a mask and make your adjustment shine through in a more natural and convincing way. It’s the feather option and I’m going to show you how you can use it with a real-world example.
If you take a look at the work of your favorite landscape photographers, one likely unifying factor is their colors are all vibrant without being gaudy. This tutorial will show you how to make your landscape shots pop by using Photoshop.
Photoshop offers so many different tools that achieving one simple task can be done in numerous ways. Finding the method that works best for you and the one that matches the result you have in mind is important. Greg Benz is back with a new tutorial and shows us how he uses the Perspective Warp tool to enhance his landscape photography.
Sharpening to enhance detail is a critical process to finishing any image, especially when preparing images for print. As a photographer who specializes in creating large wall portraits of dogs, I routinely apply a strong degree of sharpening prior to printing. There is one specific technique that I use for sharpening that is especially effective when editing portraits of dogs and other furry subjects. Here is my best tip for enhancing detail in fur and hair while maintaining a soft appearance.
Two things converged for me recently: an increase in questions sent to me regarding my commercial photography and the unexpected popularity of my bite-sized Photoshop tutorials. Both occurrences are born from the same inquiry of understanding how certain things are achieved. I used to bother people constantly with questions on how I could attain a certain look in post-processing, or how an image is so sharp, and so on. From time to time, I still do. So, I'm going to do my best to make the answers to the most common questions readily available with this mini series.
Don't worry, we're not about to turn an image black and white save for one spot. The Selective Color tool is one of the most powerful ways to precisely and efficiently make targeted adjustments in Photoshop. This great tutorial will show you how to take advantage of its capabilities.
One of the beautiful things about film is the variety of cameras out there. You could shoot a different one every day and seemingly never get to the end of them. With that variety, though, comes a lot of quirkiness. A new generation of photographers has embraced one of the quirkiest cameras of all: The Nishika N8000. Although no technical marvel, its resurgence in the photography community is because of one unexpected trick, creating 3D animated GIFs.
As part of a commitment to expand my portfolio in 2017 with work that showcase a broader understanding of concept and light, I decided to plan a shoot centered around a vintage travel theme. After weeks of planning the style, location, and overall shots I wanted to take away, I finally had the opportunity to execute the shoot yesterday and I’d like to share the results as inspiration for any interested readers.
With great power comes great responsibility, or something like that. Photoshop is an enormously capable application with a multitude of uses and misuses. Here are 10 such misuses you might not have thought of.
Blending modes are one of the fundamental features of Photoshop: they allow you to combine layers in varying fashions. It can be a bit of an experimentation game working with them, though. This comprehensive video will show you exactly how each blending mode operates and allow you to take more control of your work.
Adobe's software bundle is something almost every artist or creative professional in the visual art industries uses. We can't really go without it, and on a personal note, it's like a marriage. Photoshop has done some amazing development with their software, and now, they've teamed up with Cornell University to develop new imaging technology that makes it possible to transfer a photo style from one image to the next, and still make the image look realistic.
Peter McKinnon is back with another video, this time to show how to create a fantasy composite in Adobe Photoshop. A composite image is an image made up of various photos which are placed and blended together to make one image. When it comes to fantasy, it’s just that... fantasy. When you have an idea that you want to bring to life, you have to use the tool in your trade to bring it to life, as you can't just snap a photo and be done with it.
I have a question for you, which of these pictures do you prefer? One of them has had the smallest adjustment that you might not even spot yet unconsciously it will have affected your decision.
By and large, one of the most common uses for Photoshop is editing portraits. Retouching skin is a delicate art that takes a while to master, but this great video will help you get started.
Adding color to an otherwise boring grey background in Adobe Photoshop isn't terribly complicated. In this short video tutorial, I'll show you how to accomplish that in just a few short steps.
In one of my recent articles, I showed you how to create dynamic luminosity masks manually. In my opinion, it’s the best way to create masks based on brightness levels and confirming this idea is the introduction of a similar feature in Greg Benz’s panel, Lumenzia. The recent update of the luminosity masking panel added a couple of new features, including a "blend if" method for masking layers.
Luminosity masks are well known amongst landscape and nightscape photographers but often underrated by many other creatives. They are an incredibly powerful tool and can help you apply adjustments only to certain areas of an image according to their luminosity. In past articles I wrote, I’ve shown different ways to create these masks. However, with time, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is one way that seems to always be the most effective and yield the most natural-looking results.
Alien Skin Exposure has long been known as a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. But since Exposure X was released, it’s trying to compete with the big names in the raw processing department. The software has grown into a standalone app and isn’t just a plugin anymore. Today, Alien Skin is announcing an update for Exposure X2, making it more powerful than ever.
Earlier today, we posted about Target forgoing the use of Photoshop in their latest ad campaign, when one of our eagle-eyed readers pointed out that it may not be true that Target went Photoshop-free, which would not be the first time the company was caught in such a fiasco.
When shooting images outdoors, particularly in bright sunlight and towards the sun, the appearance of lens flare is often an unintended consequence. It can reduce contrast in your image and create nasty artifacts that can ruin your shot. Conversely, creating a flare in post can produce vibrant results that I find many clients asking for in their images. Here are three easy to use methods for adding a flare in your images tastefully and non-destructively, each providing a unique look and feel.
Going through retouching related Facebook groups, it seems like the frequency separation trend is fading away. Some people even call the images edited with split frequency "filtered" as if it was as bad as using some kind of filter. Instead, many are learning to grow some appreciation for the art of dodging and burning. It’s said that with the latter, you won’t lose skin texture and it’s not destructive. But if it really is this great, how can some people still manage to have a plastic-like effect on their model’s skin? Let’s have a look at the most common mistake that may keep your images from that sought after natural look.
Mastin Labs out of Seattle is the creator of some of my favorite film emulation presets for Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Today they're releasing their latest preset pack, Portra Pushed. Check it out my review of the pack after the jump.
Being able to preserve the ability to alter any of the edits you have already made while working on a photo is critical to ensuring that you are able to maximize the influence of your creative vision on a photo. There are few greater frustrations than realizing that an adjustment you have made was not quite right but it is so far back in the history that it cannot be altered without starting over. In order to avoid such situations it becomes quite critical to build an editing workflow designed to let you make alterations at any time to any aspect of the photo without the need to start over to undo work.
We have featured a few techniques to reduce noise on night sky images using multiple exposures. For a change, Greg Benz shows us how we can achieve almost similar results with images we shot in a single exposure. The process is slightly more complex than when having multiple frames, but surprisingly, the final image is quite clean! So, let’s discover the workflow offered by the maker of Lumenzia.
The modern sleep-optional lifestyle means that more and more of us have permanent bags under our eyes, which in turn means being able to retouch them is a required skill. This great tutorial will show you how to do so in almost no time.
