Color has always been an Achilles' heel for me. When I first started in this industry, I was always looking for the magic answer: a specific Photoshop action, or a Lightroom preset, or a plug-in that did some kind of magic that created the color that I had wanted. Boy was I barking up the wrong tree.
Sometimes our creations behind the camera simply cannot be taken with just one frame, or perhaps you cannot travel to the destinations that would work perfectly with your concept. This is why some photographers choose to composite their images. Antti Karppinen shows off his most used composite image technique from his latest project "Kuopio Inspiration is a Force of Nature."
We have all been guilty of watching someone’s Instagram account and wonder how the hell the pictures are edited. Sebastian from TechGenie has recently been creating videos to demonstrate how to mimic some famous Instagramers editing style. The latest one on the list is named Sam Kolder and his desatured teal and orange look.
In Part 1 of this series, I explained the basics of how Lightroom works, the best way to import your photos, and the different options you have when culling your images. In Part 2, I want to show you the essentials of the Develop module. This module is the area of Lightroom where you can color correct, crop, straighten, sharpen, and perform several other adjustments as well.
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.
As previously reported on Fstoppers, Capture One's new "Spectrum" Styles Pack is designed as a finishing tool for cinematic color grading applied to your photographs, providing a wide range of toning options for stunning yet subtle results that make no impact on exposure or contrast to keep the dynamic range in tact. Phase One offers a number of Styles as workflow-enhancing enhancements and time savers; Spectrum is the latest and at $49, the least expensive in their lineup. Here's what I found after putting the new style to the test.
Today's tip is a more basic tip aimed at newer retouchers, and is a common quick fix that I feel is necessary when your subject has red in their eyes. This is a 20-second fix which can be made even faster by turning it into an action and assigning a hot key shortcut.
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?
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.
I am excited to announce the release of one of the most epic projects Lee and I have been working on this year. As many of you know, Fstoppers teamed up with Landscape Photographer Elia Locardi back in 2014 to produce two separate tutorials on landscape and cityscape photography. This year we caught back up with Elia and followed him around his favorite country and some of our favorite mega cities for "Photographing the World 3." If you have been anxiously waiting for the next installment of PTW, the wait is finally over!
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.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed with the many different features of Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom has so many possibilities, that even after years of using it, I still am consistently learning something new. I have found that there are so many new photographers who either feel too overwhelmed to start learning the intensive software, or they still aren’t confident that they have been using it correctly. Because of this, I wanted to create a simple beginner’s guide to using Lightroom. This is the first of what will be a multiple part series of articles on Lightroom basics.
On Tuesday this week Apple released their latest mobile operating system, iOS 11. Now Serif, the creators of photo editing software Affinity Photo, have also updated their iPad app to take advantage of the capabilities introduced in iOS 11 such as drag-and-dropping images to and from the new Files app.
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.
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.
As Adobe Lightroom Mobile has become more and more powerful with each update, more photographers are starting to adopt mobile workflows to get images out to both social media and clients faster. The ability to quickly make edits on your phone or tablet then share those images almost instantly has a lot of uses. Now in his newest video, photographer and YouTuber Peter McKinnon gives a quick tutorial on how to apply presets within Lightroom Mobile.
Photography is all relative to the creator and the viewers, so the decision of whether to underexpose, overexpose, or to expose your portraits evenly is obviously subject to personal preference. There is merit to any of the methodologies that you could apply to your own photography and it really just comes down to figuring out what works best for you and your gear.
In his latest photography tutorial, noted French photographer and prolific video tutorial maker Serge Ramelli discusses his top five Lightroom tips.
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.
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.
Alien Skin, creator of the award-winning photo editing software Exposure, recently announced the upcoming release of the newest version of its popular product, Exposure X3. If you are unfamiliar with Exposure, it is a non-destructive raw photo editor designed to be an all-in-one software for editing and organizing your photos. It is probably most well known for the hundreds of presets included in the software that can emulate analog film, as well as dozens of other modern styles.
Adobe is updating its video applications and adding new features across the board. Many of these features include improvements for editing virtual reality content, smarter automated tasks, and some other features modeled after Final Cut 7, which Apple announced will not be supported in its upcoming MacOS High Sierra update.
A few weeks ago, I came across a post on social media from the Jônt about a shoot out contest inside a staged multi-million dollar estate which piqued my interest. Reading more about the shootout, it would be geared toward several different genres of photographers, as they would have vendors on site providing food, drinks, cars, and models at our disposal for the shoot out. First, you had to submit your info along with your portfolio to be one of the selected photographers to join the contest, I figured I would go ahead and throw my name into the hat and see what would happen.
I absolutely love shooting commercial work in the studio. Who doesn't? Shooting in a studio environment allows the photographer full control over the lighting and the subject. It also allows for full creative freedom over what you can composite into the shot if needed by easily matching up the lighting. Earlier this week I had a few hours of downtime and decided to shoot a bottle of Bacardi Dark Rum in my studio. Using a softbox I built myself a few weeks ago, I decided to take it on a test run using the bottle of Rum as my subject.
I love Lightroom. It is an amazing tool that is able to do almost everything that I need when I edit, and do so in an organized way. The one problem that we’ve all had with it though is the lagging speed that can be infuriating. This past year, I spent a considerable amount of time with one goal: to do anything I could to speed up my editing process. I can honestly say that after implementing the following tips, my Lightroom is running as fast as ever and I rarely notice the lag that would torture me before. Here is a step-by-step guide to what I did.
The Pen tool is incredibly powerful, but not always the easiest to use for newcomers. Even those familiar with other Photoshop features are often less proficient with using the Pen tool to select specific areas or create paths. While it's not meant to replace the original Pen tool, the new Curvature Pen tool previewed in this video helps make a faster and more accurate selection around objects with curved edges in a way that could even be faster for those who are already good with the traditional Pen tool.
Earlier this year I reviewed ACDSee Ultimate 10. However, ACDSee just released the 2018 version of their flagship photo editing software and thus it’s time for an update. The brand new iteration promises to offer a more efficient workflow, layered editing for advanced retouching, vastly improved performances, and new tools for photographers to edit their pictures better than ever. Let’s see how this translates in the real world!
We all love a good composite, don't we? C'mon! You're probably going "No! They're all fake. It's all Photoshop, therefore it should be easy and shouldn't be a genre of photography at all! While some bad composites do exist, why not look at the other side of Dali's surrealistic, time-melting deserts and analyze the way it makes you feel when you study these types of images? How about we dive into the rabbit hole head first and find out what it takes to create a composite image?
I've actually had quite a few people request that I create a tutorial for my production processes wherein I add background textures into my studio shots. I know, it has taken me forever to get around to actually putting it together, but it's here now! The tools that I will go over in this tutorial are quite handy for a variety of uses. But for this tutorial, we will specifically use them to select and mask the background in a studio portrait shot.
Since Adobe adopted a subscription-based licensing system, many users have started looking at other alternatives. While ACDSee had attractive solutions until now, their latest creation, ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2018, seems to be a serious contender to Photoshop CC and Lightroom. Even better yet, you can process your raw files and then edit them within the very same software, no need for round trips.
Catchlights are those beautiful, almost imperceptible, reflections in the eyes of your model that bring their expression to life. When photographing portraiture every effort should be made to capture this light in their eyes, but sometimes they come out so faint the impact is simply not enough. Fortunately, there is an easy fix.
Have you ever looked through someone's Instagram account and noticed that all of their images seemed to have a consistent color palette or style about them? If you've ever wondered how that is possible, give this video a watch. Sean Tucker dives into the details of how and why some creatives choose to present a consistent style, and then he goes on to process a small set of photos to show how it can be done.
Without a doubt, Lightroom is an extremely powerful editor. So much in fact, that I can edit an entire wedding without ever leaving the program. The main things I find myself doing that cause me to leave Lightroom and enter Photoshop are multiple exposures, liquefying, more advanced cloning and healing, and adding certain overlays. What Advanced Lightroom Effects from Lens Distortions does is make it so I no longer need Photoshop to add these overlays. It saves me time from switching back and forth between programs and having to create multiple copies of the same image.
When you're working in Photoshop, it can be easy to run astray of staying organized. This helpful video talks about why a consistent workflow is key to top-notch images.
After eight months of work I finally finished this project: an aerial tilt-shift hyperlapse of Miami. The idea was to produce something different. Time-lapse videos are very common these days and most drone operators can make a decent hyperlapse with their drones. In this video I wanted to replicate the out-of-focus look normally associated with macro photography to give a miniature effect of the city of Miami. Here is how I filmed this video and what I learned during the process.
A few weeks ago, Adrian Sommeling showed how he Photoshopped his son and himself driving an Aston Martin in Iceland. He’s back with yet another video, and this time it’s a shattered iPhone 8 composite. This one is particularly interesting as it includes glass and thus reflections which are both amongst the most difficult things to keep natural looking when working on composites.
I find it interesting how often I see new photographers make the exact same editing mistakes I made when I started out. Every photographer who has at least a few years of experience can look back at some of their first sessions and find a number of things that they continually did wrong. I recently took a look at some sessions from my first year of photography, as well as asking a few other photographers to do the same, and continually found the same common issues.
DaVinci Resolve is a fantastic tool and has everything most videographers need to create perfect looking videos. However, the playback can be a bit slow and thus make the whole workflow a pain. But there is a one-click solution that will make your life much better. When I found out about it, my editing process became much faster.
When Picktorial 3 was released, it promised a solid support of Fuji RAF files. Today, it’s getting even better by offering film simulation color profiles. The profiles are available as an add-on specifically designed for Picktorial 3 and Fujifilm X-Trans sensor cameras. Using the Fujifilm Film-Simulation look this way will allow you to retain all the details and data of your X-Trans Sensor output to take the most out of your raw files.
The DJI Spark is one of the most attractive options out there for people who want to get into aerial photography and videography. However, when getting into this whole new world, it may be overwhelming to learn everything about the genre. Casey Faris created a short five minute long tutorial to help you out making your Spark’s footage look better.
HDR is a beautiful but rather complicated editing process, or at least that was the case until Aurora HDR was designed by Macphun and photographer Trey Ratcliff. It’s now become an effortless and unintimidating retouching technique to bring the most out of your architectural and landscape images. Today, the California-based developer announced the release of Aurora HDR 2018 and it promises to make HDR photography even easier and more fun!
When it comes to processing your digital images, there are so many tools available to you and sometimes the process can seem a bit convoluted. Personally, I like to use a mix of both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to make the most out of my images. Perhaps I'll throw Capture One in the mix one of these days, but for now all of my postproduction work is done using Adobe software. This brief tutorial goes over one of the lesser-known tools that exists both in Lightroom and Photoshop, the Dehaze tool.
Commercial Conceptual Photographer and Digital Artist Adrian Sommeling is one of the names that every retoucher and creative photographer should know. He has one of the most incredible portfolios out there with work that you simply can only wonder how the heck it was done. Well, to learn more about how he creates his stunning digital art, he’s started to push out short videos with explanations on every step. In this article, discover how he shot his son, himself, and an Aston Martin before compositing them onto an Iceland landscape.
Humidity, sunlight, water, and most of all, time, are just some of the culprits in the damage most printed photographs will endure. However these memories of loved ones do not need to be thrown away or thought to be unrepairable. A few layers in the digital world can bring it back for your clients.
After every trip I go on, I always end up with a favorite image. Maybe it’s the one with the best story, or the one that was the hardest to get, or the one with the nicest person I met on the journey. In 2014 I headed to Bolivia to shoot a wedding, and a few weeks later found myself wandering around on an island in Lake Titicaca. And there, my favorite image of the trip was born.
If you've ever been swiping through Instagram and noticed that certain black and white images had a particularly dramatic, vintage, or even sharp look to it, chances are there was a bit more going on than simply selecting a basic filter. In this in-depth video walkthrough, Sean Tucker shows several techniques he uses to really pull the most out of Instagram images in black and white.
Luminosity masks are a fantastic way to make precise selections based on luminance values (hence the name). As with all things Photoshop, there are multiple ways to achieve the same result. I find using channel selections to be the easiest way to manually create my masks. I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir, but for those yet to join in on the singing, I hope you find this information useful as you continue to build your editing tool set.
White balancing video footage is crucial to make it consistent between sequences of edits you are putting together. However, adjusting it by hand using color wheels can be quite cumbersome especially for those who don’t see colors all that well. Using DaVinci Resolve 14 beta you can, however, make this adjustment incredibly fast and easily. Let’s see how with Dave Andrade from The Post Color Blog.
Depending who your friends are, you either love or hate Lightroom preset systems like VSCO Film, Mastin Labs, or the ever-so aged RAD Labs. The argument on one side of the fence is that everything becomes cookie cutter and lacks unique emotion. The other group of people say that it brings consistency and speed to an otherwise long-winded project. I’m primarily a wedding photographer so I understand both sides of this very reasonable argument. I’ve always hated trying to understand preset systems. I mean, since when is a preset supposed to be harder to get right than doing it all yourself?
Color grading is a critical tool involved in the production of a truly impressive image. Through the use of grading a photographer can completely shift the impression a given photograph leaves on its audience. Learning color grading, however, is quite difficult as it is one of the most ethereal aspects of a post-processing workflow that can vary radically from photographer to photographer. The best method, in my opinion, for learning to master grading is by learning as much theory and as many techniques as possible so that you can leverage that knowledge to create the workflow that works for you.
