Exposure may be the most common problem in photography. Whether your image is underexposed (too dark), overexposed (too bright), or just washed out in a hazy low-contrast fog, improper exposure can ruin an otherwise good shot. Even though many basic photo-editing programs provide “Brightness&r

I an earlier blog post I introduced Pixel Bender a new extension for Photoshop CS4 and CS5 from Adobe Labs. In this post I’ll show you a filter which lets you create a Droste effect with an image. The filter is free to download and once it is installed you can apply it from inside Pixel Bende

A Guest Post by Rob Dweck. It’s been said that there are no shortcuts to greatness. I’m inclined to believe that, but I also believe that there are shortcuts you can take when processing your photographs that yield great results. The shortcuts I’m referring to are actions and plug-

Lens distortion is a potential problem for any photographer without access to a tilt shift lens, and not all of us have the ability or desire to dump a couple grand on one. There’s a lot of things that two grand could go towards besides a niche lens like a tilt shift. If you’re an archi

A Guest post by Phil Steele from SteeleTraining.com The Curves Eyedropper technique provides a fast way to simultaneously correct color and fix exposure problems in your photo all at once. That’s a lot of benefit for just a few clicks. Here’s how it works. 1. Open a photo that you think

Introduction and Overview Vintage fades and washes seem to have recently become quite popular. Perhaps since the modern DSLR has enabled everyone to shoot such high quality/high definition images, there is more of a desire to reach towards the past with these vintage effects. Regardless of the reas

Being a tourist would be more fun if there weren’t thousands of other tourists getting between you and the shot you want to capture. When you are visiting a popular location and if you have difficulty getting a photo that is free of people, take two (or more) photos making sure that somewhere

Continuing with my ‘tool’ secrets posts, here are 8 secrets of the Photoshop Zoom Tool. 1. Quick toolbar shortcuts The Zoom tool can be selected by pressing the letter Z – it’s an easy and handy shortcut to remember because it saves you from having to click the Zoom tool to

In this post Laura Charon from Beyond Megapixels shares a process for adding a Neutral Density Gradient Filter to an image using PHotoshop CS3. A key piece of equipment in a photographer’s gear is a neutral density gradient filter. This is a filter that affixes to the camera’s lens. One

  Before discovering pre-made templates for Photoshop, I spent hours on end creating new blank layers and painstakingly lining up images to create collages. At some point, I fell across The Album Cafe, a company whose mission it is to provide photographers with beautiful, imaginative and easy-

In a recent post I showed you how to create a kaleidoscope using Photoshop. As one of the techniques for using a kaleidoscope, I suggested you could create a repeating pattern from it. One reader posed the question as to how a repeating pattern could be created given that there were spaces around th

Many of the images that you take particularly cityscapes, like most portraits, can do with some spot fixing. I’ve been traveling through Europe a lot lately and because it’s considered almost de rigeur to smoke there, many of the photos that I have are littered with cigarette butts and

Sometimes a photo need two opposing fixes applied to different areas of the image. This poses a dilemma – if you fix one area you’ll make the other areas far worse than they started out being and vice versa. The solution is to apply both fixes but to do this on different layers and to b

Some time ago I wrote a post on batch resizing images in Photoshop and another on resizing in Lightroom. One of our readers wrote to me recently explaining that he is using Photoshop Elements and that the resize feature in Photoshop does not work in Photoshop Elements. He is correct, but there is a

Photoshop gives us tools we can use to create effects which previously could only be obtained in the darkroom using images which were captured specially. One such process is the Orton effect named after photographer Michael Orton. This process results in a somewhat surreal image which has a slightly

Photoshop has a great tool for creating patterns which – on the face of it – is of little use to the average photographer. That is, until you begin to explore its creative possibilities and one of these is creating an overlay of lines on your image, much as you might see on a photo captu

Like most things in Photoshop, there are probably a half dozen ways to simulate a sepia tone image. What probably comes to mind when you hear sepia is most likely “old-time” photographs. But why is that so? Well, sepia toning was used for a few reasons, artistic and more prosaic. True se

In previous posts I have introduced the basics of sharpening in Photoshop and I also looked at a way to spot sharpen an image in Photoshop Elements using faux layer masks. In this post I want to show you the benefits of using high pass sharpening in Photoshop as an alternative to using the Unsharp m

You may have seen it mentioned before to avoid mixed light sources. Very often people aren’t completely sure what that means or realize just how much havoc it can wreck on your photos. Today, let’s look at how to fix multiple problems in a single photo all at once including correcting fo

In this tutorial one of our senior members from our forums Jeff Masamori over at Flickr) shares a simple photoshop technique for enhancing contrast. This is probably the most useful little adjustment I’ve come across (in Photoshop) just playing around a few years ago. It has served me well, a