Photography doesn’t always have to be serious, sometimes it is nice to do something just for fun. Making a landscape look like it is a little planet is one of those things. There aren’t any uses for it, and you wouldn’t spend your photography career doing this. It is, however,

Emmet with background bokeh from small LED lights. As the holidays are over, I couldn’t resist taking a classic bokeh shot before putting away the lights and decorations for another year. In this article I’ll show you how you can create this effect in-camera in your own living room. Plus

There may be times when you want to play around with some elements in your images. Perhaps you want to change a color to a more suitable one in post-processing. One of the tools you can use in Photoshop is the Channel Mixer. It is a simple process that allows you to change the color of any element i

Sunflares can make an otherwise dull image, look pretty dramatic. It’s very tricky to get good images of a sunflare in-camera, especially when using natural light only, as the contrast between the light and dark parts of the image is often too great that no amount of Active-D lighting can fix.

Much of the power of Photoshop comes from its use of layers, which can best be thought of as transparency over your image. Layers have lots of benefits, like the fact that you can work on your image without affecting the pixels in the underlying image. But perhaps the most powerful aspect

There are tools in Photoshop that I use more than others, and some not at all. The Patch tool is one of my favourites. It is so easy to use and with each version of Photoshop, it has gotten even better. The Patch Tool is located under the fly out menu of the Spot Healing Brush. What exactly is 

In a recent article called: Getting Started with Layer Masks in Photoshop – a Beginners Tutorial, I showed you the basics of layer masks and why they are such powerful tools. Layer masks are essentially what gives Photoshop layers much of their power. They allow you to tell

This article isn’t about how to magically transform your images using Photoshop. The real magic of Photoshop is trying to convince the viewer that no effects were added at all, and that the image was captured in camera. Photoshop can add that little extra to your imagery. Conversely, it c

There is one thing in photography that seems to be universally loved – reflections. They aren’t always easy to get, especially if water is involved. The wind only has to be blowing slightly to create ripples in the water, and you will lose the chance of a reflection. Take the following i

We all have those moments in our photographic careers where things just don’t pan out exactly how we imagined them. Our image is almost exactly as we imagined it to be, but perhaps there are some spots, blemishes, marks or distractions that just don’t fit in the frame. In most

I am a huge fan of color. I love bold colors to create a mood in my images, and often use the meaning behind colors to reinforce the message I want to convey. Sometimes though, you want to get rid of the colors to draw the viewer’s attention to your compositional lines, to textures, or to make

Creating a film noir look with a displacement map in Photoshop. What is a Displacement Map? If you are new to Photoshop, the mere mention of displacement maps can be daunting. The purpose of this article is to give you an introduction to them; guide you in easy-to-follow steps on how to generate sim

Photoshop can be extremely intimidating to learn, but once you start to get a grasp on some of the tools it has to offer, you’ll wonder how you ever processed photographs without it. If there’s one area of Photoshop that is both extremely confusing, and yet, extremely powerful when harne

This is a fun twist on portraiture that can often tell a bit more of a story about your subject, by allowing them to reveal two or more sides to their personality. It’s an old photography trick used in the days of the darkroom, and now with modern technology can be done in minutes with a few s

For those who follow trends you’ll know there is a move to “metallic” hair colors for both men and women, and this is especially evident in fashion photography. From this, to this in 3 steps using Photoshop Whether you want to add extra pizzazz to a fashion shot, jazz up a promotio

Using a Curves Adjustment Layer with the Blend Mode set to Screen to correct exposure in Photoshop. In general, where images are too dark, this is referred to as underexposed. Conversely, images that are too light are overexposed. Photos taken on sunny days are prone to being overexposed. An animate

In the world of photography, editing and retouching are just as important as the imagery itself. Every image that you see published has been through its fair share of post-processing before it is seen by the public. If photographers didn’t retouch their images, it would be like a painter prese

Adding texture to photographs was happening long before the invention of Photoshop and other editing programs. In the days of the darkroom, we would scratch negatives with pins, sand paper them, stain the photographic paper with fixer before exposing, layer two negatives on top of each other in the

Landscape scene in south of France using split-tone effect in ACR So why would you bother with black and white imagery when we live in a world full of color? There are many reasons why, but a simple answer is that a black and white image can be quite powerful. A close up of a man’s or woman&rs

Turning Day into Night using Color Lookup and easy-to-do moon in Photoshop. As the theme for this month is on landscape photography, I thought I would share three fun ways to add features to your landscape images that already come embedded in Photoshop as presets. Let’s take a look at the firs