Recent Photoshop Articles

How to Create a Fun Bokeh Effect Using Photoshop

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.

An Easy Way to Create Luminosity Masks

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.

A Quick and Effective Photoshop Color Correction Technique

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.

Twelve Photographers Come Together to Create a Heart Warming Fantasy Book For Sick Children

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.

Two Helpful Shortcuts to Make Photoshop's Clone Stamp Tool More Useful

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.

Make the Clone Stamp Tool Aware of Your Image's Perspective

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.

One Habit Photographers Should Get Into: Shooting Backplates

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.

Color Grading Video in Photoshop in 14 Minutes

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.

A Unique and Powerful Color Correction Technique for Photoshop

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.

How to Make Ultra-Difficult Selections Using Alpha Channels in Photoshop

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!

An Effective Way to Blend Exposures Using Photoshop

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.

How to Use the Orton Effect for Dreamy Landscape Photos

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?

Channel Your Ultimate Inspiration by Retouching Old Photos From Your Archives

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.

The Difference Between Vibrance and Saturation in Photoshop

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.

Adding Background Blur for a Shallow Depth of Field

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.

How to Add a Lovely Rim Light Effect Using Photoshop

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.

Use Color Contrast in Photoshop for More Depth and Richness in Portraits

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.

Using Radial Gradients in Photoshop to Draw Attention

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.

Five Ways to Change the Color of Objects Using Photoshop

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.

What Really Goes Into Retouching High-End Fashion Images

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.

How to Use the Healing Brush on Edges

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.

How to Add Handwritten Text to Your Instagram Pictures

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.

How to Create Rain in Photoshop

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.

Improve Your Color Grading Skills in 20 Minutes With This Detailed Video Tutorial

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.

Why Less Is More for Portrait Retouching

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.

Create Unique and Dramatic Black and White Images With This Technique

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.

How to Reduce or Remove Eye Bags in 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.

How to Make Your Skies More Dramatic Using Photoshop

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.