Making composites look seamless and realistic is the ultimate goal of a digital artist. In this tutorial, you will learn a simple and very effective technique for matching the degree of saturation of your background and subject.
Isn’t Facebook time hop great?! Every day I get to see the last seven to eight years of my photography. Like almost every photographer, I sucked when I started out. My actual composition and use of the camera weren't too bad, but my post-production was horrendous. The best way to describe the post processing is “heavy-handed.”
Antti Karppinen is a digital artist, photographer, retoucher, and instructor from Finland with a unique eye for visual storytelling through photography. His work relies on traditional photography skills combined with an active imagination and complex Photoshop editing work to create fantastical images. He spoke with me about his work, process, and the inspiration behind a couple of his most popular composites.
The photographer behind Lupita Nyong's new Grazia UK cover feature has been forced to apologize after the actress spoke out upon finding parts of her natural hair had been removed.
Sometimes, a photo needs a little text to really complete the message or the look, but slapping it on without trying to blend it in just makes it look like a terrible watermark. This fun tutorial will show you how to blend text into whatever object you please to make it look realistic.
Nothing makes me forget that winter is just starting and I'm basically going to be uncomfortably cold for the next five months like a nice photo of somewhere warm with sun rays peeking through. This fun tutorial will show you a relatively quick and effective way to add sunrays to a photograph.
Whether or not you are a purist, there are times when you have to change the color in post production of something you've photographed. This video will tell you how you can easily alter hair color of a portrait to whatever hue you want.
Whether it's because you're shooting in the dead of winter or just because your model is naturally pale, sometimes, you'll want to add slightly more vibrant tones that give your subject richer skin. This helpful tutorial will show you how to do just that quickly and effectively.
In one of the more ridiculous things I've seen on the Internet lately; simply removing the main subject matter from these bouldering images has revealed a completely different photo. The people left appear to praising or worshipping these large rocks, and the variety and groups of people in some of the photos just adds to the level of absurdity.
Matching the tones is the most challenging part of creating composite images. You may find numerous tutorials on the Internet about matching tones and smooth blending of the composite elements, however this technique by Antti Karppinen is the best I’ve seen so far as it even helps with blending images that are shot under different lights.
Editing Milky Way, star trail, and deep-sky astrophotography images can be a daunting task. With dozens of layers and adjustments, we can feel overcome with getting the most out of our nightscape photography. With the new and improved version of OrionH, those days may well lie behind us because this plugin panel for Adobe Photoshop aims to lower the amount you sit at the computer. OrionH comes with three different panels that each have their nightly specialty and in this review, we will discuss version 2.0’s new and improved algorithms and features for each of those panels.
Gradient maps are a powerful tool in Photoshop and when utilized correctly, make for a quick and easy way to effectively tone your images. Travel Photographer and Videographer Travis Transient has a quick tutorial on how to best utilize gradient maps to color grade your images.
Color grading is one of the important parts of the editing process, as it can give your video footage a very personal look that differentiates it from your peers. This awesome video will show you not only how to color grade your footage, but how to create and save your own looks to apply down the road.
If there's any genre that requires the photographer to constantly be creatively resourceful, it's probably product photography. This helpful tutorial will show you how to create an interesting shot of a watch using common items you probably have around your house and some creative editing in Lightroom and Photoshop.
Photoshop has a multitude of distortion tools that allow you to correct parts that distract from your image or they can creatively alter the image into a new reality. With so many options is it best to know which tools work best for optimal results in the final image. With the three most popular and sometimes misunderstood explained here you will be able to take those images that might have been discarded and create something new.
There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 ways to convert an image to black and white, but of course, not all methods are equally effective or offer the same level of control over the final product. This method takes a bit more time than most, but will give you the exact results you desire.
The cool part about Photoshop is that for any desired result, there are numerous ways of getting there, allowing you to choose the method that works best with your workflow and what you know. This helpful tutorial will show you another way to color grade your images that you might not have seen before.
One of the coolest things you can do with Photoshop is get rid of stuff you don't want in the picture fairly easily in most situations. If you're relatively new to the app, this helpful video will show you two such tools for doing that: the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush.
The irony of staring at an image forever is that it can actually become easier to start to miss things — a sort of photographic tunnel vision, if you will. This simple trick makes it easy to see every blemish on a subject, ensuring you won't miss anything in your retouching and making your work more efficient.
Hot spots and shiny skin can be a bit tricky to retouch, but they can also be rather distracting, so it's important to know how to reduce or eliminate them. This helpful tutorial will show you several ways to go about that in quick time using Photoshop.
Being that I’m primarily a wedding and documentary photographer, it’s not every day that I get the chance to take a portrait of a celebrity. Add to this that I live in Northwest Arkansas, which isn't really a hub for celebrities, makes it even less likely for me — especially one as well known as William H. Macy. So I thought it would be interesting to line out how I pulled it off and got the final image.
For any one thing you want to do in Photoshop, there are probably at least 50 ways to go about accomplishing it. However, perhaps no tool is more versatile than Curves, which allows you incredible control over luminosity and color and in tandem with masking, can give you tremendous creative editing capabilities, as this fun tutorial will guide you through.
While the general public may be less focused on the technical details associated with an image used for an album cover on Pop Singer Ariana Grande’s “My Everything” album, the Internet’s Photoshop police are suddenly calling Photoshop fail. What do you think?
Adobe just announced some major photography-centric updates to its Creative Cloud programs. Alongside a new release of Lightroom Classic CC (the new name for what we all used to call "Lightroom"), Lightroom CC is a brand new application that works across all platforms: desktop, web, and mobile. The new software offers nearly all of the same editing features we're used to, but with an entirely new organizational structure reliant upon the cloud. While there's a standalone Lightroom CC plan, the current Photography Plan includes both the CC and Classic CC applications. So which should you use?
Adobe MAX is always a big time of the year for photographers, but this year's announcements and updates are the company's biggest since the introduction of Lightroom. Going forward, the now-old desktop-run Lightroom CC is called Lightroom Classic CC. But there's nothing classic about it when it comes to its performance improvements. This time, it's for real. Lightroom CC is now a completely new, 100-percent cloud-based product that works on any platform: desktop, mobile, and web. And Photoshop CC improvements help tie everything together no matter what you're using.
When you're creating a composite image, it's a game of balancing and matching a ton of parameters to make the different elements convincingly look as if they all originated in the same frame. This helpful tutorial will show you some of the most important aspects you need to have mastered to create your best composite work.
It’s obvious that color is important in our work; Hand selecting that perfect blend can take our images from decent to legendary. And it's not just photographers that notice the color mishaps. Everyone is influenced by colors. Our eyes are always naturally observing and comparing them. Color is so impactful on the masses that they are meticulously chosen for ads that reach millions of faces a day, there's no reason why you shouldn't start using the same tactics in your work.
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.
