Photoshop

Ever take a photo during the daytime and wish it was at night? Some of you may shake your head, but it there are legitimate times in commercial and editorial projects where this is completely necessary in order to fulfill client/creative requirements. Glyn Dewis has put together this effective and straightforward Photoshop tutorial on how to do just that. Read below to download the original file and try it out yourself!

Announced this morning to kick off Adobe MAX, Adobe has released a series of applications for mobile devices that are designed to increase productivity, especially when on the move. They were able to show me some of these pieces of software during a briefing last week, and I must say, these look to have incredible potential for photographers, videographers and graphic designers.

There are dozens of "How To" articles when it comes retouching. Very few, if any, focus on vital tips that are often overlooked, that will take your retouching to the next level. Here's a list that the Professionals in the industry never share with you.

Retouching problems start well before we sit down in front of the computer and begin pushing pixels around. I know this because as I reflect on my past work, I realize that I’m as guilty of making countless mistakes as much as anyone else. Rather than talk about techniques like dodging and burning, frequency separation, etc. let’s focus on more high level problems that might be leading you in the wrong direction.

Dirty backgrounds are something that most of us have had to deal with at some point. Sometimes, all we need to do is clean the background. Other times, it's actually better to do a full background replacement. The full replacement can be as subtle as eliminating shadows and sensor dust or something as drastic as changing the background color. In this tutorial, we go over an easy, but precise, way to do this.

The Pen Tool is one of the most advanced and accurate ways to make selections in Adobe Photoshop. Because of this, it can also be one of the most intimidating and frustrating features. I often find myself doing everything I can to avoid having to use it... but then the image never ends up looking it's best and it's back to the drawing board. For those looking to master this powerful feature, like myself, check out these two entertaining new training methods!

Svitlana Sangary, a California attorney, has recently been dubbed the "fake lawyer to the stars" after it was revealed that she photoshopped herself into an entire album of star studded images that were on her website for public display.

So many times people post cropped photos on social media in order to get rid of their ex or someone they don't care about anymore. While cropping gets rid of the unwanted face, it still leaves other body parts in the frame, and makes the photo look weird - and makes people focus on the fact someone was cropped out instead of focusing on that great photo of you. This very informative and easy to follow video shows a very easy way to get rid of a person in just few minutes, and how to leave no trace behind.

A common issue that we're often faced with when using hard light modifiers such as a beauty dish or open reflector, is that of over-exposed highlights on our subject's forehead, nose and under eye areas, which also results in lost skin texture in those regions. While raw processors offer up the ability to recover highlight detail, this rarely leads to satisfactory results. In this tutorial I'll show you how to recover the texture while leaving the overall luminosity in-tact to produce a well-balanced result.

I hang out with a lot of wedding photographers and have heard them raving about RadLab, the Photoshop-based editing platform from the guys at Totally Rad!, for the last three-or-so years. The thing they love most about RadLab is the ability to visualize the change a setting will make before applying it — no more Command Z. Over the last couple months I've been using RadLab in tandem with my normal Lr and Ps workflow and have, overall, been very pleased with the results.

So it goes without saying that there are a ton of different ways to match skin tones across your subject or between images in Photoshop so it's often just a matter of picking the option that is most convenient or intuitive. Despite the wide array of choices, I seldom see people use the selective color adjustment layer for this task. The beauty of selective color is that it allows us to go off the numbers rather than intuition and achieve an accurate result in little time.

Though there are other programs out there that say they can quickly cutout objects from the background via masks and leave you with a clean end result, I've tried a few of those programs and they just don't seem to cut it. The process to create these masks also seem very awkward. Now you can quickly create (pretty darn good) masks on your iPad using Photoshop Mix, a mobile offering from Adobe we told you about earlier this year.

Scott Kelby over at KelbyOne recently shared this video showing you a quick and easy way to edit video in Photoshop CC. I personally tend to lean more on the still-photography side of things and am not entirely versed in video post production. This tutorial gives me and photographers / videographer like me a simple option and alternative to the under-equipped iMovie for quick video edits.

If you’ve shot in any studio, then you know the rules. Larger studios may require the use of protective booties on a freshly painted cyc wall or some practice the unsaid "no shoes" rule when stepping onto background paper. But, unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen and if the subject is jumping or moving look after look that background is going to get dirty. We all know the pain of re-touching that dirt.

500px has taken the world by storm since their launch in 2009. In many ways it's become the new hub for sharing and expoloring work from some of the greatest photographers around. This nifty little pluggin from the developers at 500px (available here) will alow you add one quick step to your workflow to share your images on the site.

Almost a year ago I posted The Ultimate Guide To The Frequency Separation Technique article and soon after that I created our Retouching Academy community group for retouchers and photographers who retouch their own work. We have been seeing a lot of before & after images posted there by artists of all levels from complete beginners to seasoned pros.

And in there we all have been witnessing that one of the most abused and misused techniques by those who work with images of people is Frequency Separation (FS). Mainly by beginners, of course....

The team over at Dubai 360 shared with us a rather unique view of the world. In the video above, you'll get to watch a full day's revolution of the Earth directly above the Dubai International Airport. You'll see airplanes fly in and soar off, you'll watch them taxi into their various gates and you'll see it all from a spectacular 4K panoramic "little planet" downward view! The team mentions that Terminal 3 actually serves as an hour hand on an imaginary clock with midnight at the top and midday at the bottom, allowing you to know the time of day each frame was taken!

Glyn Dewis goes through his process of retouching a creative grunge image from start to finish, showing how he uses Photoshop as well as plugins from Topaz and the Google Nik Collection. This video is great for some quick retouching tips which includes a simple lighting effect using paint brush and is some excellent inspiration for filters and effects to add to your images. As always, Dewis shows you how to work non destructively so that you are always able to go back and tweak your many filters and layers.

If you ever tried to extract a good still frame from a video, you probably know there are few different methods of doing this, but none of them are really great. The most popular way of getting a still frame is playing the video on full screen, pausing on the right frame, and using Print Screen to capture that frame - it's a very limited method and the results are average at best. In this video, Photoshop product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows two new methods available on Photoshop CC in which you can extract specific frames from any video file and save them in hi-res.

Artists all over the world use Photoshop to retouch images and for graphic design. Because of that, Photoshop has become the #1 image editing software out there. We know Photoshop has put a lot more implementation into its 3D capabilities, but that's not what Photoshop is really for and it still has a long way to go. So it's great news that a group of Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and University of California, Berkeley have come out with software that allows for full 3D manipulation of objects in a photograph.

Liquify gets a bad rap. Its misuse accounts for a pretty alarming number of Photoshop disasters. And although it is easy to learn, it does take a great deal of time and energy to master. Luckily, Aaron Nace over at Phlearn is here to help. Known primarily as the "digital plastic surgeon" of Photoshop, the liquify tool can also be applied to tremendous effect when it comes to making clothes fit to perfection - and that's exactly what this video shows.

In this quick-and-easy tutorial, Howard Pinsky teaches you how to create the ring light effect in your subject's eyes using Adobe Photoshop. Applying a custom shape, layer styles and blending tweaks, Pinsky demonstrates an effective way to produce this reflection without using a physical ring light. Some experimentation with blending, size and effects will help you to create a realistic reflection that adds that extra point of interest to your photograph.

Thanks to Deviantart artist Karen Graw, you no longer have to imagine what famous Disney characters would look like in real life. Graw translated some of Disney's most famous animated characters into composite portraits and the results are very realistic. Graw admits they aren't perfect, but we think they are a very good representation.

In this Adobe Photoshop Playbook video, Bryan O'Neil Hughes suggests a variety of options to help you tackle noise when processing your photographs. Due to the improvement of pixel quality, noise isn't usually so much of an issue. However, it still can be a problem especially in your low light images.

Professional-quality photo printers and paper are expensive. It can be difficult to justify the steep price of the machine and upkeep for most photographers who shoot as a hobbyist or even a starting professional. Outsourcing your printing needs to a pro photo lab alleviates the cost, but there are some inherent complications in not being able to print from home. These four helpful steps will minimize the disconnect when sending out your images to the lab.

Opening Photoshop for the first time can be pretty overwhelming. But whether you're new, relatively new or looking for a good refresher on the basics, Aaron Nace at Phlearn has assembled a can't-miss, three-part series on the need-to-know elements of Photoshop. In part one, the very basics are covered: opening and saving a file, Photoshop preferences, keyboard shortcuts, color space, basic saving for web, using a tablet, tools and layer masks. In parts two and three, things get a little more complex...

Being a member of the media has a set number of luxuries. One of those being, working with Adobe and getting early access of products, and exclusive news. Thanks to Adobe, I used Creative Cloud for an entire year free by attending a media exclusive Adobe event back in the summer of 2013. However, since I've started paying for it a month ago, my frustrations have hit an all time high.

Last year we teamed up with Mike Kelley to produce the 7+ hour tutorial: How To Photograph Real Estate, Architecture and Interiors. We were fearful that Mike's fancy equipment would be discouraging to new photographers so we asked Mike if he could create a signature image with much cheaper gear. Mike shot an incredible, world class image with the original Canon Rebel and kit lens and only a few accessories.

Jeff Rojas is challenging you to see just how much retouching you can finish in 6 minutes. Dubbed the Dirty Edit Challenge, Jeff explains that sometimes you don't need to go overboard for certain clients. Maybe you're not getting paid enough, or maybe you have a ton of images that need retouching. In either situation, this is a great way to see what your strengths and weaknesses are in Photoshop.

In this valuable tutorial Glyn Dewis takes a quick snapshot and shows you how to pull detail from highlights and shadows to make it a beautiful image. Dewis mentions some great workflow tips and tricks in Adobe Lightroom as well as how to bring your image over, non destructively, to Photoshop camera raw.

I ran across the incredibly imaginative portfolio of John Flury a few weeks ago. When I viewed his image "Provincial Uprising" where a womans dress was made of human hands I couldn't figure out how it was made.

In this brilliant tutorial from Phlearn, Aaron Nace shows you how to create an artistic, composite image to replicate the double exposure effect. Despite being a little complex, the instruction is easy to follow. Nace’s great tips include: finding an appropriate blending mode, using detailed masking and grouping as well as using the gradient tool to add that extra something to your image.

Reddit has become a place where people have truly come together to help make a difference in others lives. Recently, a grieving father, Nathen Steffel, posted a simple request to have a picture photoshopped which resulted in a response that was more than what he expected. His daughter, Sophia, passed away Thursday after a long battle in the children's hospital. All he wanted was an image of her without tubes because he never had the chance to take one.

We said it was coming, and now it's here: Nikon Capture NX-D is available for download completely free of charge. If you're a Nikon shooter just starting out and don't have anyting you love for RAW processing, it certainly doesn't hurt to give this a try.

Last year, photographer duo Dylan Howell and Sara Byrne (of Dylan and Sara Photography) posted an awesome video showing you how to create beautiful double-exposure photos in-camera, a technique popular in fine art, portrait, and wedding photography. I just stumbled across this awesome tutorial by event and wedding photographer Andrew Klokow showing you how to replicate this cool look quickly and fairly easily in Photoshop.

Last week, we featured an interview with the awesomely talented retoucher and photographer Marina Dean-Francis. This week, she's shared a video with Fstoppers showing her retouching on a hair and beauty image. Although the video has been sped up tremendously, it's not hard to see that there aren't many quick tricks in play here. It's no secret that maybe the greatest skill in retouching is patience.

Pay close enough attention, and there are some very useful tips in this video - my personal favorite comes in around the 2:30 mark and is a great way to add highlights on...

Inspiration spurs creativity and it is often you find a photograph or artist that influences your practice. In this Photoshop tutorial Ben Secret helps you recreate the look and feel of an image by matching contrast, tone and saturation. With these brilliant tips get a handle on colour and tone through imitation, but then have fun adding your own unique style.

Watch this video where Glyn Dewis talks about his method to shoot landscapes, and his use of various techniques to develop the image in Lightroom with some fine tuning in Photoshop.

Let's be honest, everyone has had a bit of acne when they least wanted it, and a lot of those times happen to be right before a photoshoot. I shoot a lot of senior portraiture which tends to leave me having to deal with the retouching of facial acne redness quite often. This video tutorial by Phlearn really shows a great method of removing those spots on the face to create a realistic, smooth skin.

Friend of the Fstoppers Dave Kai-Piper recently shared this great little tutorial showing you exactly how he creates his beautiful monochrome images in a clever little process that takes only a couple minutes.

Curves are by far, the most powerful and versatile color and tone manipulator in Photoshop. Many photographers like Erik Almas & Brooke Shaden swear by it, and is a major part of their workflow. Curves can be very intimidating at first, but once you truly understand how to use them, they will substitute the sliders of Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, Shadow/Highlights etc. that you are used to.

With the brand new Fstoppers website, everyone can now upload a portfolio to a profile for the world to comment and rate your photos. After just a couple of days from launch Jaime Ibarra's photos exploded onto the front page, with a whole series of popular photos and with good reason. His photos are a beautiful combination of emotion, concept and color that you cant help but be stunned.

While the beta has been out since February and can still be downloaded here, according to a June 26th press release, Nikon will be releasing its new Capture NX-D software July 15th for free. The previous version of Capture NX-2 still goes for $140, so it's nice to see more value added to Nikon's products for us Nikonians out there.

In this great tutorial, Aaron Nace from Phlearn teaches you how to change hair color in Photoshop. He shows the trick to changing red hair to brown, black and blonde and this video also gives great insight into and cause for practicing your skills with blending modes as well as selective color and levels adjustment layers.

One of the most versatile and powerful secrets of Photoshop is the luminance mask. Similar to a channel mask that allows you to select very precise parts of your image based on color, the luminance mask allows you to select parts of your image based on tonal range. Using Photoshop to select those tonal ranges for you, you can quickly and effortlessly make very specific color and contrast adjustments to color grade like a pro.

After spending a fair amount of time looking through the best images that the Fstoppers community has to offer, it's pretty easy to see what sets them apart. Not only are the shots themselves exceptional, but the post processing is world class (Julia Kuzmenko McKim and Michael Woloszynowicz, Photoshop extraordinaires, hold a few of our top spots). Photographers often take on their own post work either because of budget or wanting to maintain their full creative vision. Sometimes, even great photographers call on the retouching gods to lace their images with a bit of perfection. Marina Dean-Francis is one such retoucher (and photographer) with that incredible power.

The combination of two visually striking methods resulted in this surreal video by Vincent Brady. After checking the video, read on for some more information on the rig Vincent used to shoot with, and some insight on the programs he used to painstakingly stitch his images together for the final timelapse video.

In just a few days, I'll be teaching on Creative Live! Watch me over the course of three days (June 26-28), as I will be teaching and presenting about the art and business of retouching. We'll start right from the beginning of a shoot all the way to the finishing touches! I have the pleasure of bringing in Felix Kunze to shoot the photography portion of the event.

Summer is here and chances are you're going to have to remove a few tan lines or sunburns from your photos this season. Luckily for you Aaron Nace is willing to walk you through all you need to know. I've posted tutorials by Aaron before but it wasn't until I had the opportunity to meet him over drinks in the Bahamas that I discovered how talented he really is. Because he is so talented and the summer sun so hot I think this is a great pick to share with you this Sunday.