How to Add Drama and Style to Your Image in Adobe Photoshop

There's little worse in photography than getting home, loading your shots onto your computer, and seeing that they don't have the impact you were hoping for. In this video, Aaron Nace of PHLEARN walks you through a workflow that might help with that.

There is a lot of truth in the statement, "get it right in camera." This can, however, be misunderstood by beginners and intermediates who take it to mean that they need to always get shots exactly how they want, in-camera. This is often not possible and depending on your genre, that can be frustrating.

When it comes to outdoors editorial portraiture, for example, which is one of my favorite shoots to conduct, you are often stuck with the conditions you get. You can use artificial lighting to turn the scene into something a little more enticing, but the sky and ambient light are set in stone. It's times like these where there is no shame in leaning on Adobe Photoshop to get the result you wanted. I have had to shoot an image that is set in a storm, in England. Where I live, you will be waiting for months and months to get even a mild rumble, so we had to improvise. The style and the drama of the image were achieved in post-production and that was simply my only recourse.

What is your favorite way to add some drama to an image?

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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