Black and white photography: Basic processing
If you shoot RAW, you have the advantage of greater latitude when it comes to editing your shots. This is because of the higher bit-depth of 12-14 bit images (depending on your sensor) that your camera captures. This provides a higher dynamic range for you to work with. It is commonly known that with RAW shooting, you get up to 2 stops of exposure details to retrieve back, though this is rarely ever the case and depends to a huge extent on a number of conditions, namely: your camera exposure settings at the time of shooting, the scene in question, and your sensor. In reality, you can generally get away with retaining something between a half to one stop of...
Read MorePhotoshop tutorial: Newborn photo editing
I received a question from Anh Alvey who wanted to learn more about newborn photo editing techniques to aid her in softening and smoothing baby skin and tones in her work. To be honest I don’t do much editing and airbrushing in my portrait photography, because I like to present people as naturally as possible. That said, I do apply a little editing here and there to cover up for obvious imperfections that might detract from the quality of the photo. So anyway, I’ve downloaded this newborn photo from dreamstime so I can illustrate the steps involved in newborn photo editing (and portrait photo editing in general). I hope this post answers your question...
Read MoreAperture levels adjustment tool video tutorial
This post came as an answer to a question that Thomas Schlein has sent in. Thomas has a vintage photo effect Photoshop tutorial and he wants to translate it into Aperture, as that’s his main photo-editing platform. Thomas’s tutorial uses the Photoshop levels adjustment tool, and he’s asking how to set his levels adjustments accordingly in Aperture. Thank you very much for sending in your question Thomas! That’s an interesting question, and to answer it I’ve posted 2 videos I found on YouTube explaining basic and advanced image editing with Aperture levels adjustment tool. I gotta say that I’m not really experienced with...
Read MoreSuper easy cool Photoshop Retro photo effect
Anyone who regularly reads my blog probably already knows how I’m crazy about anything Retro or vintage looking. Since I don’t really shoot much landscape, I downloaded this photo by Jetfoto from dreamstime.com and honestly just started to play with it. I was going for some kind of cool retro effect, and something just came before me and voila! I got my self a super easy yet super cool effect, and I thought I’d share that with you… hope you like it! BTW, you can all download the PSD file at the end of the post. So as I’ve mentioned, I started out with this landscape. First thing you notice is how it’s faded. So I ...
Read More50 Free Photoshop actions for amazing photo effects
Photoshop actions can be a tremendous time-saver for those folks who usually follow a specific style or a few in their photo editing workflow. Instead of doing the same number of steps over and over again every time you wanna post process a photo, you can just do all of that within a few seconds with the click of one button. But Photoshop actions are not only good in that area. These actions have hugely expanded lately as a great way for photographers and designers alike, to share their favorite photo effects with the world. Some even create sets of actions and offer them to their visitors for a price. Of course, in this open-source community, not everything...
Read MoreFresh new beautiful & useful free textures to add flair to your photos
Texture photography can be a stand-alone genre of photography for people who like to capture detail and abstract images. It is also a broadly used approach for many photographers and digital artists around the world as an asset to create an interesting effect, enhanced look, or aesthetic feel to their work. Today I’ve put up a collection of the finest fresh new free textures, for you to refer to and use in your work. Here’s also a Photoshop Texture Layering Video Tutorial I’ve posted a while back, teaching you how to use and incorporate textures in Adobe Photoshop to enhance your photographs and images, and create pleasing effects. Last but not least,...
Read MorePhotoshop tutorial: Unsharp mask filter explained!
The main sharpening tool in Adobe Photoshop is the unsharp mask, that is found under filter » sharpen » unsharp mask. You might be wondering why would the most important image sharpening tool in Photoshop be called Unsharp Mask? That just doesn’t make any sense, does it?! Well, it doesn’t. The unsharp mask was named after a known darkroom technique. Truth of the matter is, Photoshop doesn’t really know how to sharpen an image. It can’t really break down details of an image in order to know what to sharpen and what not to. Yes, that came as a shock to me as well when I first learnt this! So what the unsharp mask filter does ...
Read MorePhotoshop tutorial: 3 key layer blend modes
So today I wanna talk to you about Photoshop layer blend modes. 3 modes in particular: Screen, Overlay and Multiply blend modes. A layer’s blend mode controls how pixels in the image are affected by that layer lying on top of them. It’s helpful to think in terms of the following colors when visualizing a blending mode’s effect: The base color is the original color in the image. The blend color is the color of the blended layer. The result color is the color resulting from the blend. Multiply blend mode looks at the color information in each channel, and multiplies the base color by the blend color. The result color is always a darker...
Read MoreFresh new beautiful & useful free textures to add flair to your photos
Texture photography can be a stand-alone genre of photography for people who like to capture detail and abstract images. It is also a broadly used approach for many photographers and digital artists around the world as an asset to create an interesting effect, enhanced look, or aesthetic feel to their work. Today I’ve put up a collection of the finest fresh new free textures, for you to refer to and use in your work. Here’s also a Photoshop Texture Layering Video Tutorial I’ve posted a while back, teaching you how to use and incorporate textures in Adobe Photoshop to enhance your photographs and images, and create pleasing effects. Last but not least,...
Read MoreProfessional photo airbrushing in Photoshop by Cameron Rad: Photo retouching video tutorial
Photo airbrushing and retouching is quite a popular thing in the fashion and beauty industry. You see models in magazines with perfect skin, sharp eyes, evenly toned faces, no blemishes or lines and you think to yourself is that for real? Well for the most part, no it’s not. It’s always the right touch of makeup, coupled with photo editing and appropriate lighting that yield this new born, baby skin result that you see out there and today I’ve chosen this video that Cameron Rad has posted on his YouTube channel to show you exactly how to create that effect on your own. It’s a really useful, highly professional video that I recommend for...
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