shadows

Pixelmator Photo has released what it calls a "major" update, headlined by all-new Clarity and Texture adjustments that it says allows photographers to improve the appearance of fine details using a texture-aware algorithm.

Creating an evenly lit background can be trickier than one would think, but is a skill that every photographer should master. But with the right equipment and knowledge, it gets much easier to capture a pure white, black, or colored gradient background in-camera without the need for heavy Photoshop cleanup in post.

What is a photograph? There are many different ways to answer this simple question, but in basic abstract terms through the lens of lighting, every photograph is a combination of highlights and shadows. The only reason we see depth and dimension is in fact shadow. Understanding shadows is crucial in growing as a photographer.

Portrait photographer and YouTuber Manny Ortiz recently set out to compare the new Canon EOS R5 against his go-to workhorse, the Sony a7R III. But in addition to doing a general side-by-side usability comparison, he was looking at one thing in particular: dynamic range.

There is an observation about stand up comedians that once they reach a certain level of fame their material becomes less about "grounded" observations and criticisms and instead becoming more about airplane food and hotel rooms.

This short 2-minute video from photographer Svitlana Vronska demonstrates some clever lighting tricks you can use to add some creative flair to your images with an otherwise uninteresting backdrop.

Composition can make or break a photograph. Here's a 7-minute video by photographer Peter McKinnon in which he runs through three tips to help you improve the composition of your photographs.

Photographer Burton Rast has just completed a new project titled, The Shapes of San Francisco. He spent 100 days exploring SF and shooting one photo per day of the city's most popular and photographed sights, but "in a unique way." Each photo focuses on shapes.

For his personal project Above The Street, Below The Sky, photographer Andreas Kamoutsis spent over two years watching and photographing the birds flying above the busy streets of big cities in Greece. The series is a minimalist, black-and-white study of shadows and shapes.

Google-owned image editing app Snapseed is a go-to for many photographers when they want (or have) to edit photos on their smartphone. And starting today, those people have a new, highly-requested editing tool at their disposal: Curves.

BMW's headquarters are an iconic landmark in Munich, Germany -- the uniquely designed complex was deemed a protected historic building in 1999. Munich-based photographer Skander Khlif visited the tower and shot a series that studies the light, shadows, lines, and silhouettes.

Here's a really neat trick you'll want to add to your photo editing tool chest. When you're wanting to add a specific texture to some background, you can simply use flour and the "Multiply" blending mode to create any texture you like.

Peter Jamus is a traveling photographer whose portfolio is loaded with striking black-and-white portraits. Often surreal, the images explore light and shadows, lines and shapes, and the form of the human body.

As photographers, we're already intimately familiar with the importance of lighting and posture, but just how much of a difference can the proper pose and lighting make? This video by BuzzFeedBlue, titled "How to Fake a Before and After Photo," answers that question by showing the shift in real-time.

Hovering somwhere between 205 and 255 miles above Earth is the International Space Station, currently housing six intrepid explorers that are hurtling through space at roughly 4.8 miles per second.

And one of those individuals is Alexander Gerst, a geophysicist who spends a great deal of his time on the ISS holding a camera and putting it to use taking pictures of our planet.

There are many options for recovering shadow detail in post, but if you still haven't settled on one or you want a technique that will give you more control, then we have a great tutorial for you.

When it comes to nailing the white-balance in a photo, it's rarely an easy task, especially with portraits. It becomes even more arduous when you're trying to stylize the image a certain way, since you might not want the same tones and color balance in your skin tones as you do in the rest of your image.

This tutorial by the folks at Phlearn shows you how to get past those challenges and achieve the results you want in every part of your photo without having to sacrifice elsewhere.

Want to see some beautiful street photographs that make use of light and shadows? Look no further than the project "Man on Earth" by London-based photographer Rupert Vandervell. Each image in the series shows a single person's figure framed by the shadows and features of a big city.

To view photographer Romain Laurent's Shadows project properly, he recommends that you first properly calibrate your screen. The photos are all dominated by blackness.

You see, they were all captured during the major blackout in New York City caused by Hurricane Sandy in late 2012. When the power went out in the city's financial district, Laurent pulled out his camera in order to do a photographic study of light and shadows in the eerily dark areas of the city.

In December 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City featured an interactive art installation by Philip Worthington called "Shadow Monsters". The exhibit was created using a computer, a camera, two projectors, a light box, and some clever software. When visitors stepped in front of the light box, their shadows were magically transformed into creatures that were brought to life through sound and animation.

Photographer Joseph O. Holmes saw the unique exhibition as a photo project opportunity. However, instead of photographing the resulting monsters, he decided to turn the camera on the participants themselves, capturing their monster-making activities as a series of silhouettes.

For his ongoing project I’m Not There, Barcelona-based photographer Pol Úbeda Hervàs creates composite photographs from multiple exposures that blend his shoes with his shadows and reflections.

Polish photographer Boguslaw Strempel has a fantastic series of landscape photographs of mountains and valleys found in Poland and the Czech Republic. Strempel visits his photo spots early in the morning, when a blank of fog is hanging over the treetops. As the sun rises, the trees cast long shadows across the valley, turning the scene into a magical display of sunbeams.

American photographer Ray K. Metzker has had a long and distinguished career in photography, and is well known for his cityscape and landscape images. Many of his street photographs exhibit what Henri Cartier-Bresson refers to as the "Decisive Moment" -- that moment in which all the subjects and details in a scene come together just perfectly in your viewfinder.

Earlier this year, we shared the photos of Tim Noble and Sue Webster, London-based artists who are well known for creating amazing shadows using piles of carefully arranged objects. Perhaps inspired by their work, photographer Julian Wolkenstein shot a clever series of photographs a couple of years ago that show three people contorting their bodies in various ways to create intricate shadows on the wall behind them. The project is titled, Nova.

If you went outdoors to observe the solar eclipse yesterday, you might have noticed that the shadows cast by trees had suddenly become quite strange. The tiny gaps between leaves act as pinhole lenses, projecting crescent shaped images of the eclipsed sun onto the world below.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are a London-based artist duo that creates amazing shadow art installations using carefully arranged objects. They use everything from trash to metal cans shot with BB pellets, arranged to cast shadows of people and skylines on the wall when a light is shined from a certain direction.

Adam Dachis over at Lifehacker offers a simple method for correcting underexposed photo with any image editor that supports …

Reflections is a series of photographs by New York-based fine art photographer Ira Fox. Shot through the reflections seen in puddles on their ground, they show shadows of passers-by as they cross paths with Fox on a rainy day.

During a 2001 launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, NASA photographer Pat McCracken captured this amazing photograph of the …

In this video, UK photography instructor Damien Lovegrove demonstrates how you can add …

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, photographer Alexey Titarenko observed how St. Petersburg streets that used to be lively and filled with joyful people had suddenly turned dark and gloomy, with people confused, malnourished, and worn out. He decided to capture this change by shooting the streets at slow shutter speeds, turning the downtrodden crowds into shadowy figures. He titled the resulting project "City of Shadows".

When the sunlight is right, you can shoot a photograph of a couple holding hands while they form a …

Here's a mind-bending video in which someone created the famous checker shadow illusion in real life. The optical illusion takes advantage of the way our brains process lighting and shadows.

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view. [#]

Interesting huh? Our eyes aren't very good as a light meters, since they're easily deceived by context.

Here's a creative idea that we love - cut out giant letters, gather up some friends, and spell out words with shadows! Justin Swindle, a student at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, created the above image by cutting the sides off the biggest cardboard moving box he could get his hands on. He then traded the letters freehand and cut them out using a razor.