Recent Photoshop Articles

ISIS Is Now Stealing Photographer's Artwork As Well

When the terrorist organization, ISIS, isn't busy terrorizing people, they are apparently busy stealing photographer's artwork. In this day and age, it's not uncommon to have your work stolen. Heck, it's pretty common. But having the bane of the earth stealing your work has to be a new experience. That's not the end of the story though. It gets worse.

Calibration: What It Is, Why You Should Do It, and How It's Done

Why is my print dark? Why are the colors off? I believe we all found ourselves asking these questions inside our head (or worse, yelling at our photo printer!) during our first steps into our journey in photography. Monitor calibration is the solution, bad settings and bad color reproduction by the monitor are the culprit. Grab a cup of coffee or your favorite energy drink and read on, I'll tell you everything about it, what you have to do, what you gain, how it's done, and what you need to correctly calibrate your monitors.

How to Make A Perfect White Background Within Minutes Using Photoshop

If you’re a commercial or fashion photographer, eventually you’ll run into a client who will ask to have their product, model, etc. to be placed on a perfectly white background. This method is very popular in the e-commerce and print industries for many brands, sellers and catalogs. But some techniques in post production cause some headaches and are also time consuming. So what exactly is the best and quickest workflow to get that perfect white background for your client?

Is the Updated Photoshop Healing Brush Better Than the Legacy for Retouching Photos?

Since Adobe released Photoshop CC 2015, retouchers and photographers have complained about the revamped healing brush. However, Adobe promised their users that CC 2015.1 would offer an alternative, making the tool as good if not better than the one found in CC 2014. Photoshop was updated a couple of days ago, and the said updated healing brush setting can be found in the form of a diffusion slider. However, is it as good as the previous healing brush?

Photoshop CC 2015 Liquify Ligthen rendering issue

Adobe just updated a couple of their CC applications, one of which being Photoshop. Amongst the new features, it was almost inevitable that a few bugs would show up. One that can be quite annoying is the liquify tool lighting or rendering problem. But there is a quick and easy workaround.

Adobe Updates Professional Video, Audio, and Photography CC Desktop Applications with New Features

As announced at Adobe MAX 2015, Adobe released new updates to its professional Creative Cloud suite of applications. Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, Audition CC, Dreamweaver CC, Photoshop CC, Fuse CC (Preview), Adobe Stock, and more have been updated. You can download the new versions from the Adobe Creative Cloud app.

Retouched Magazine Now Available in PDF Format

Retouched Magazine, the interactive magazine from retoucher and beauty photographer Julia Kuzmenko McKim, has recently announced that they are also now available in PDF format. The magazine brings some of the most talented and experienced photographers and retouchers together to teach and share their insight into the field of retouching. Topics from the pro tools and methods for retouching, building your portfolio, and being successful in the field of retouching. Articles come from the top photographers and retouchers in the world including Pratik Naik, Benjamin Von Wong, and Joel Grimes.

How Do You Create the Perfect Skin Tone?

When speaking of retouching, most people think of cleaning skin and altering the body shape. However, retouching goes further than that. Colors play such a significant role in an image, that forgetting about them would be a great mistake. Just like a good makeup artist shouldn't limit their job to the model's face, a good retoucher shouldn't stop the job with cleaning skin.

8 Tidbits of Photoshop Interface Wizardry That You Probably Didn’t Know Existed

Photoshop is a veritable spell book of amazing and seemingly mystical tools that empower any digital sorcerer with the potential for creating visual magic. Adobe has done a pretty great job over the years at adding in tons of optimization and shortcutting that can make for a more pleasant workflow. Unfortunately, they often treat these workflow enhancements like Easter eggs by not making them obvious at all. In this article we will go through a few hidden spells to help you optimize your Photoshop workflow.

The Story of One of the Earliest Composite Controversies

The use and misuse of composite photography is a story we hear about quite often. Long before the days of Photoshop and digital manipulation, though, composite photography existed. Here's the story of one of the earliest controversies surrounding a composite.

Adobe Photoshop Mix and Fix Add Support for Split View, iPad Pro, and the Apple Pencil

I don't have specific numbers. I don't even have vague numbers. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me Adobe's mobile photo editing apps have seen a huge success. The biggest reason: they're free. And the second: they really work, which makes the first reason even better. Today, Adobe updated two of these apps, Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Fix, with support for split view in iOS 9, for the screen size of the iPad Pro, and for the pressure and tilt sensitivity of the Apple Pencil for use on the iPad Pro.

Luminosity Masks in Photoshop Made Simple Using Lumenzia

Luminosity masks are a powerful trick available in Photoshop. However, the way Adobe implemented them is not so great. It's a combination of playing around with the channels layers and keyboard shortcuts to get the mask you wish. Greg Benz has come up with something awesome called Lumenzia and it fixes almost everything that made using luminosity masks a pain to use.

68 Percent of Adults Edit Their Selfies Before Sharing Them With Anyone

Think we're in the middle of a Photoshopping epidemic? You don't even know how bad it is (well, now you do). According to a recent survey, 68 percent of adults take to some kind of photo editing before they share any photo with another person or online. As desktop and mobile editing tools become easier to use — with some even serving the specific purpose of being easy to use for the less technically inclined — Photoshopping images is the latest trend... and it's still growing.

Astropad Mini Updated to Support 3D Touch, Now Has Pressure Sensitivity and Is Free

Astropad Mini, the app that allows iPhone and iPad users to turn their device into a graphics tablet for the Mac, received a major update on Tuesday. The app now includes support for Apple's 3D Touch, meaning it can now recognize 256 levels of pressure, bringing it even closer to turning your iPhone into a fully functioning graphic tablet.

Adobe to Issue Another Update to Lightroom, Bring Back Features

Great news for Lightroom users: today, Adobe announced another update to the program, confirming that they will be reinstating the old Import dialog, which was replaced by a newer dialog that received harsh criticism for its excessive simplicity and removal of features.

Adobe MAX Time Travels Through 25 Years of Photoshop

Thank god for the interwebs right? Not just because it brings us badgers and cat videos but because sometimes it allows us to be places we couldn't other wise go. I'm of course talking about the 2015 Adobe MAX conference that just went down in Los Angeles. If you, like me, were not one of the "5000 most creative minds" fortunate enough to make it, then you may appreciate this glimpse from the conference floor. Adobe set up a display consisting of several mock bedrooms. Each room being representative of a time period and pivotal moment within Photoshop's 25 years.

Adobe Issues Lightroom Update and Apology to Address Crash Issues

After Monday's release of Lightroom, many users were upset to find the release had seen changes that removed features and worse, had a tendency to crash, rendering it essentially unusable. Today, Adobe has released an update that corrects the crash issue, as well as an apology.

Victoria's Secret at It Again With Cheeky Photoshop Job

The well-known underwear and lingerie company is at it again with its Photoshopping ways. Victoria's Secret has a long history of Photoshopping their models, but this time, have they gone too far with an editing job that's not just unnecessary, but very poorly executed as well? Check it out for yourself!

Adobe Announces a Slew of Updates to Its CC Desktop and Mobile Products at Adobe MAX 2015

Every year's Adobe MAX conference marks the an obvious time to expect updates throughout Adobe's product lineup. So what's different this time? Mobile. Adobe has the monopoly in the area of creative applications for media editing, but for the first time in a while, it feels like they're competing with some unknown entity. This year's updates bring so many new features across the widest range of Adobe products ever that there's no doubt they're serious about their making customers happy with a huge concentration on mobile.

Photoshopping the Wonders of the Universe

As New Horizons has shown us, the geniuses at NASA are not only solving the mysteries of the universe, they're also capturing its beauty. Just like you and I, though, they don't just publish those images straight out of camera. Read how Photoshop helps NASA to fully represent the universe in all its awe-inspiring beauty.

A Simple Technique for Creating the Effect of Punching Someone Across the Room

Ryan and Josh Connolly of Film Riot always brings us the coolest do-it-yourself filmmaking and special effects tutorials. In this "rewind" episode (read: old) they show us how to create the killer effect of throwing someone clear across the room. What's doubly cool is how easily this can be done with just a still camera and software that most of us already have (Photoshop and After Effects).

Give More Depth to Your Images in a Couple of Clicks

Retouching can vary from photographer to photographer. But it can also vary depending on the genre you are shooting. I know it does for me. My wedding retouching is far from being as refined and time-consuming as my portrait retouching. When dealing with hundreds of pictures, you have to find techniques that get you close to a perfect result, but as quickly as possible. One thing I had trouble getting my head around was maximizing my dynamic range in my wedding pictures without stacking multiple raw developments. That was until I made a lucky mistake when sharpening an image using a high pass filter.

Adobe's Free Color App Allows you to Sample The World's Colors with Your Mobile Device

We here at Fstoppers can forgive our beloved Trevor Dayley for jumping ship and joined the crew over at SLRLounge as long as he keeps turning us on to useful tools and tips like the Adobe Color CC app. This thing is so cool and it's free. Adobe never seems to stop enriching it's eco systems with improved connectivity and functionality. The Color CC app allows you to sample real world colors (you'll see what I mean by that in Trevor's video) or create color palettes from photos straight from your mobile device.

PSA: What You Need to Know Before Upgrading to OS X 10.11 El Capitan Today

While some physical improvements with Spotlight, Photos, Safari, and other Apple apps are definitely welcome with today's new OS X release, perhaps the most exciting aspect of El Capitan are the under-the-hood improvements for performance gains. There’s no need to explain how time-saving performance upgrades can be for working professionals — and for those reasons, everyone will want to update immediately. But there are some things to always take into consideration before an operating system upgrade.

20 Photographers are Given the Same Portrait to Edit, Check Out the Results

As we all know, the human experience is unique. Your life and your opinions will never be the same as any other persons. This is why there is a subjectivity to art. When viewing and creating art, there will not be two artists who imagine the same piece. Since photography and retouching are both art forms, it would be plausible that the same applies.

Film and Photoshop: The Story of a $900,000 Stock Photo

It's a photo so ubiquitous that if you type "iceberg photo" into Google, it's the first two image results. And the sixth. And the tenth. Ralph Clevenger's iconic photo of an iceberg's tip peeking out from the water while the substantial body of it remains below has graced countless publications, from full-page magazine advertisements commissioned by major corporations to the ever-famous "Imagination" motivational poster. It's a photo that is so famous that it's been copied, stolen, manipulated, parodied, and imitated an innumerable number of times over its nearly twenty-year existence. It's even made rounds on the internet as a hoax that Snopes picked up.