Here’s a helpful tutorial by Tutvid that teaches how to give your photographs dramatic colors using only Adobe Camera Raw. If you’ve started shooting RAW but haven’t played around too much with ACR, this video is also a great primer for becoming familiar with the different panels and sliders.
(via Fotografia)
Vignetting is often viewed as a bad thing when discussing lens quality, but it’s sometimes desirable to add artificial vignetting to a photograph to draw attention to the center of the image, separating the subject from the background. Here’s a helpful tutorial that shows how you can add vignetting using a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop.
(via Fstoppers)
Ever wonder how those flawless car photographs you see in magazines are made? This neat behind-the-scenes photo shows the process from photography through post-production in less than two minutes.
(via Fstoppers)
There’s plenty of tutorials out there teaching you how to fake the “Lomo effect” using Photoshop, but most of them don’t provide very realistic results. This “ultimate” tutorial by SLR Lounge attempts to mimic all the distinct characteristics of lomo photos (e.g. cross-processed colors, vignetting, blown highlights, and blurred edges) giving you a level of control over the results that an iPhone app could never do.
(via SLR Lounge via Fstoppers)
Perfect Layers is a new plug-in by OnOne Software that brings layers functionality (e.g. image layers, blend modes, layer masks, etc…) to Lightroom and Aperture. The program is currently in Public Beta right now available as a 30-day free trial, meaning you can download and try and a free preview version for Lightroom.
Perfect Layers (via Scott Kelby)
Update: Wow, that was fast. Looks like the program isn’t in Public Beta anymore. Instead, you can try it for 30 days or pay $500 for the full suite of programs/plugins.
Here’s an awesome post-processing tutorial by photographer Sean Armenta teaching how to clean up skin in a portrait using three Photoshop tools: the Healing Brush, Patch Tool, and Clone Stamp.
(via f stoppers)
Some friends of mine asked me to shoot a quick band photograph of them recently without any preparation or planning. Luckily, the location was pretty nice (we were at a hostel) and the weather was a bit cloudy so there wasn’t harsh sunlight.
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Those epic photographs of stars and galaxies that you see on sites like NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day don’t actually look like that straight out of the camera. Instead, a good deal of post-processing magic goes into each photograph. How much magic? Countless black and white photographs shot with different cameras are carefully weaved together, and color is added to enhance the final image. The video above gives a quick and interesting two minute tour of how they post-processed one particular photo in Photoshop.
(via PhotoWeeklyOnline)
My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn’t much light to work with, and I didn’t bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven’t done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here’s a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used Adobe Camera Raw (comes with Photoshop CS4) with my adjustments, but you’ll have the same settings in Lightroom, Aperture, etc…
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Living in the Southwest United States gives me a great opportunity to capture lighting. Every summer “Monsoon Season” arrives, officially June 15 through Sept 15th, in Arizona. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry humid air north out of Mexico where it meets the hot air of the desert, resulting in powerful thunderstorms nearly everyday. The thunderstorms often produce localized areas of heavy wind, thick blowing dust (Haboobs), rain, and most importantly, lightning. I regularly track the storms on the local Doppler radar feeds and try to guess where the best shooting will take place.
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