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Why Photos of the Eiffel Tower at Night are Illegal

You can almost never find videos or photos of the Eiffel Tower at night on stock sites. Why is this? Because the Eiffel Tower is copyrighted when those lights are twinkling in the night sky. This 4-minute video from Half as Interesting explains why.

How to Customize the Bokeh in Photos Using a Laser Printer

If you're into photography, chances are that you've seen the tutorials where you are supposed to cut hearts out of paper to get heart-shaped bokeh. I recently decided to try to do this myself. But I soon realized that my scissor skills aren't anywhere near good enough to make nice looking heart shapes... let alone anything more advanced.

How to Master Photoshop’s Pen Tool in Just 30 Minutes

Mastery of the pen tool enables complex vector shapes and selections that can be used for masking or extracting elements from an image. There is a bit of a learning curve to the tool, but this 30-minute video from Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect will teach you everything from the fundamentals to real-world use.

10 Tips and Tricks for the Liquify Tool in Photoshop

Photoshop’s Liquify Tool is a very powerful tool for retouching images, especially photos of people. Learning all of the features of the tool is important to make sure your edits don’t look unnatural. This 25-minute video from tutvid will help you master Liquify, as Nathanial Dodson explores 10 tips, tricks, and features.

How to Contact and Book a Model for a Photo Shoot

Whether you've been shooting for five minutes or five years, there will likely come a time when you'll have to book a shoot with another person. Maybe it will be a friend or coworker and maybe it will be a full-time professional model.

Here’s a Free Photoshop Course in 33 Videos

Want to learn Photoshop from the very beginning? Here's a beginner's guide by TastyTuts will let you jump-start your post production skills. It's a series of 33 videos that will help you know everything you need to handle the popular editing software "like a pro".

The Top 10 Things I Wish I Had Known as a Beginner Photographer

Oh the road to becoming the best photographer you can be, you come across loads of useful information... and some not-so-useful information. Sometimes, it's hard to separate what you need to retain and what you don't. This 22-minute video is a list of things that I should have paid more attention to when I was first starting.

Learn the Science of Deep Focus and Hyperfocal Distance

Hyperfocal distance is a tool often used by certain genres of photography to render an entire scene in focus. It allows you to capture the foreground through to the background, keeping the whole image sharp. But how does it work? This 12-minute video by Filmmaker IQ looks at the science behind hyperfocal distance.

How the Rolling Shutter Effect Works

Rolling shutter is the answer to why concrete bends, propellors break up, and trees turn to jelly when you're filming them while either you, or the object, is moving quickly in front of certain cameras.

Learn to Use Photoshop’s Pen Tool in Just 5 Minutes

The pen tool is one of Photoshop's incredibly effective tools. But it can also be difficult to understand and master, at least from the outset, and always seems to do something just really... weird. This short video tutorial promises to make you a pen tool master in just 5 minutes.

How to Give Portraits a Dreamy Glow in Photoshop

Hollywood photos and still frames often look fairly dreamy with a bit of a glow to the subject in the image. In this tutorial by the guys at Photoshop Cafe, you can learn a number of ways to do this to your own portraits.

Improve Your Astrophotography Focus With a Bahtinov Mask

Finding razor-sharp focus when shooting astrophotography can be hard – stars appear as point light sources, and there are no detailed surfaces to aid the eye in achieving focus. The Bahtinov Mask is a widely used tool that cleverly uses diffraction as a focusing aid.

Why Exercise Makes You a Better Photographer

I was nervous and excited. I had just left my 9 to 5 cubicle career and jumped head-first into full-time photography. Over the next 2 months, I would be traveling all over the world with a friend in order to build my portfolio. At this point, though, my sedentary lifestyle had caught up to me and I was about 25lbs overweight.

14 Hidden Lightroom Shortcuts That Use the Alt/Option Key

Did you know that there are lots of hidden Lightroom shortcuts? Some of the app’s most useful shortcuts are tucked away in places you might never look. As a result you may be unaware of them until someone points them out to you. Here are 14 you might want to know.

How to Colorize and Bring Life Back to Old Family Photos in Photoshop

Watching old family photographs fading away in treasured photo albums is a sad reality. However, bringing the digital age to these old film photographs can deliver them back to life. Colorizing old black and white photos can immediately transform an aged, washed-out capture into an image full of realism.

Here’s a Checklist for Learning How to Retouch Photos Like a Pro

If you are a photographer or fledgling retoucher opening Photoshop for the first time, it is a daunting experience, to say the least. There is a wealth of knowledge, free and purchasable online, but how do you know what to search for if you don’t know what you don’t know?

How to Prep Your Photos for Print in Photoshop

If you have never printed your own work before, you might not know that some careful preparation is needed to make sure the colors in your print match what you see on your screen. This 20-minute video from photographer Michael Woloszynowicz will teach you how to print your images with confidence.

A Closer Look at the Dolly Zoom

The "dolly zoom," also known as the "Hitchcock zoom" or "Vertigo effect," is a filmmaking technique that involves changing a zoom lens' angle of view while moving the camera toward or away from a subject to keep their relative size in the frame the same. Here's a 4-minute video by Now You See It that explains this technique and how (and why) it's used.

The Giant ‘How To’ Guide to Car Photography

My name is Amy Shore, and I'm a UK-based photographer who mainly shoots car and motorbike related subjects. A few days ago, I asked all of my social media platforms what questions they wanted answered to do with car photography, whether it was about what settings I use or how to start a business. In this post, I’m going to answer questions that got asked with as much info and honesty as I can.