howto

How to Create a Basic Home YouTube Studio for Less Than $100

If you've been thinking of trying your hand at vlogging or starting a YouTube channel, it might surprise you to learn that you can create a nice-looking "YouTube Studio" setup at home for less that $100. In this video, Boston-based videographer Kellan Reck takes you step-by-step through the whole process.

Testing Every New Feature Adobe Just Added to Photoshop and Lightroom

Earlier this week, Adobe released major updates for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Camera RAW, with new and improved features across the board. But if the announcement was a bit overwhelming, don't worry: Colin Smith at PhotoshopCAFE has put together a demo of every new feature that Adobe just added to these products.

A Beginner’s Guide to Mastering the Pen Tool in Photoshop

Los Angeles-based automotive photographer Dave Cox (AKA @ShootingDave) has put together a useful beginner's guide that will help you master what he's calling "the sexiest tool" in Photoshop: the Pen Tool. "Sexy" might sound like a stretch, but Dave has a point. The Pen Tool can make detailed masking a breeze... if you know how to use it.

5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Landscape Photography

Landscape photographer and YouTuber Mads Peter Iversen is back with a short list of helpful tips that can help you break the mold and improve your landscape photography. These tips will be particularly helpful for beginners who feel their work is already growing stale.

Calculating the Distance of Wildlife in a Telephoto Shot

While enjoying a calm and misty morning at the pier in Malibu, California, I spotted dolphins. After observing them for a while, I noticed that their swimming was synchronized. There was a natural explanation for their circling: a feast had begun, quickly attracting sea lions, pelicans, and seagulls.

How to Set Up a Basic Photo Studio at Home Using Only One Light

Filipino portrait and wedding photographer Jiggie Alejandrino recently released a great beginner's guide to creating a basic photography studio at home. In the video, he shows you how you can set yourself up to take beautiful portraits using just one light, a 5-in-1 reflector, and not much else.

How to Capture Creative, High-Quality Pinhole Photography in Your Backyard

Fine art photographer Martin Henson has published a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at his pinhole photography process that highlights the results you can get when you use a high-quality camera, you get creative, and you know what the heck you're doing. The result is a masterclass in capturing high-quality pinhole photography that actually qualifies as fine art.

How I Shoot Insect Macro Photography in My Home Studio

Insects and other animals have fascinated me since I was a small child. I remember well how I used to pick them up and simply stare at them in wonder for hours. The concept of photographing insects indoors had been on my mind for years, even when photography and playing with light was a hobby, and long before I considered photography a profession and way of life.

Capture Creative Splash Photography with this Simple DIY ‘Catapult’

Matt Huber over at YouTube channel The Garage Learning has put together a fun and creative walkthrough that takes a different approach to splash photography. Instead of manually throwing water onto his subject, he designed a simple 'DIY catapult' that does the job much better than he can.

How to ‘Magically’ Remove Glare from Glasses in Photoshop

Unmesh Dinda over at PIXimperfect has released another exceptional photo editing tutorial that you'll want to bookmark if you shoot portraits. In this video, he shows you a detailed step-by-step method for removing glare from glasses in Photoshop—something all of us have probably had to do at one point or another.

How to Use Your Phone as a Tiny LED Panel for Light Painting and Portraits

Here's a simple, maybe even obvious, run-and-gun lighting tip for beginners from the YouTube Channel Run N Gun. If you find yourself using your smartphone for portrait lighting in a pinch, don't turn it around and use the flashlight—download an app or solid color image instead, and use your phone's display as a small LED panel.

Using a Drone to Create Stop-Motion Animations in the Sky

Before we jump into this blog post if you haven’t already read how I do drone light paintings horizontally in the sky be sure to check this out here. If you have done that already (or don’t wanna read something else) get ready to have your socks knocked off because we are flipping them into vertical space and animating our light paintings all with stop motion.

Adobe Launches New Video Series of 60-Second Lightroom Tutorials

If you're looking to hone your Lightroom CC and Lightroom Mobile skills, Adobe has launched a new series of bite-sized video tutorials that you might be interested in. The series is called "In a Lightroom Minute," and it's made up of 60-second (give or take) tutorials that cover a wide variety of topics.

The Pros and Cons of Working with an Agent: Advice for Photographers

When you’re very early in your photography career, getting an agent will seem like a mysterious process. Many photographers feel that signing with an agent will offer the key to their fortunes. When they do sign, some photographers will feel they have finally made it.

Concert Photographer Shoots Striking Bokeh Panoramas

In Summer of 2019, while working with Elbow in Manchester, concert photographer Peter Neill had an idea. He decided to try and stitch an epic panorama... with a twist. Instead of using a wide-angle, he would use an 85mm f/1.4 and capture a pano of the stage and the crowd, but with a shallow depth of field and bokeh.

How to Rebuild Lightroom Previews to Optimize Speed, Space, and Integrity

Over time, Lightroom may become slow to render thumbnails and scroll through images. Rebuilding all previews may significantly improve performance. It may also significantly reduce the size of your Lightroom catalog. Rebuilding previews also serves as a file integrity check. So what are you waiting for?

Lightroom Tip: How to ‘Stack’ as Many Spot Removal Points as You Want

The spot removal tool in Lightroom is a fast and simple method to touch up a photo and cleanup imperfections. While not as accurate or full-featured as the various touchup tools in Photoshop, sometimes you only need a simple and fast way to perform a touchup directly from Lightroom.

How to Make a Portable DIY Camera Battery Charging Board

The filmmakers over at Threefold have created a DIY battery charging board with a very useful twist: it's portable. And in the video above, they break down exactly how you can build your own version to suit your on-the-go creative needs.

How to Clean Your Camera Lenses (and How NOT to)

The comic (or is it sadistic...) minds over at DPReview TV have put together a lens cleaning guide that somehow manages to be three things at once: informative, comical, and extremely painful to watch.

How to Edit Portraits in Affinity Photo

Portrait and headshot photographer Ivan Weiss recently created a helpful tutorial that walks you through his entire portrait editing process in the popular Adobe alternative Affinity Photo. If you've been wanting to give Affinity a shot, this is a phenomenal resource.

10 Tips for Taking Better Photos of Your Dog

If you’re lucky enough to have a wonderful dog around while you're stuck in lockdown, this is the perfect opportunity to hone your pet photography skills and try to get some beautiful portraits of your furry friend.

How I Shoot Solargraphs with a Digital Camera

Solargraphies (pinhole images on photographic paper that capture months of the sun arching across the horizon) were a thing starting sometime in the 2000s. When this caught on broadly in the early 2010s, it got a lot of people excited for film again.

A Beginner’s Guide to Focus for Landscape Photography

Landscape photographer and educator Mads Peter Iversen has put together a helpful focus 'primer' for the aspiring landscape photographers out there. In the video, he goes over auto and manual focus technique, his personal workflow, and a few basic tips and tricks that work well for him.

A Beginner’s Guide to Focus Stacking

Focus stacking is a fun and easy technique you can do right at home with nothing more than your camera, lens, and editing software. In fact, the Fujifilm X-T2, X-T3, and X-T4 series of cameras—and many others—contain a "focus bracketing" feature that lets you do this automatically.

Three Creative Photo Techniques to Help You Embrace Imperfection

This period isn’t easy for anyone. Professional photographers are struggling with the implications of being on lockdown and suddenly having to stop all work from one day to the next. Hobbyist photographers may be in a similar situation with jobs, children and household duties all being juggled in an unprecedented dance that is completely new and unknown.

Capturing Newborn Portraits with a Smartphone: Tips for New Parents

Recently we’ve had to close our doors to portraits because of COVID-19, and it’s been heartbreaking. The most heartbreaking thing is having to say no to clients who want newborn portraits. Babies change so quickly, so I wanted to put together some tips on how to capture your newborn portraits with your iPhone (or Android phone) so you don’t miss out on those photos.

How to Use a Waveform Monitor for Better, Faster Photo Editing

Thanks to everyone who read my previous article on my process as a TV show set photographer, and all of you who got in touch with questions and comments. People had a range of questions, especially about how I use a waveform monitor, so I'll make this a fairly wide-ranging post to try and answer everything.

Beginner’s Guide to the ‘Best’ Camera Settings for Landscape Photography

The two most commonly asked questions in photography are probably: "what gear do you use?" and "what settings do you use?" In this video, landscape photographer Mads Peter Iversen answers that second question by diving into his typical workflow and explaining when and why to use certain settings when shooting landscapes.