Have you ever used Photoshop’s Calculations Tool? It allows you to quickly blend two images together with optional blend modes and opacity. This 10 minute video from PIXimperfect explains how the tool works, and how it can be used to quickly convert a color image to black and white.
Dutch photographer Robin de Puy recently shot a series of beautiful portraits with unusual camera "equipment." Instead of using a typical lens made of metal (or plastic) and glass, she shot the photos using a single drop of water as her lens.
Can’t get enough of yourself? Here’s a 10-minute video from Peter McKinnon in which he shows how to create clones of yourself in photos using Photoshop and in videos using Premiere Pro.
Adjusting colors of specific elements in a photograph can be used to bring harmony to an image or to add creative flair. Here’s a 5-minute video that shows how to match colors in Photoshop.
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.
Eye Stocker published this simple 5-minute Photoshop video tutorial that shows how you can color grade any photo using only solid color adjustment layers and the Blend If feature.
Along with normal how-to articles and essays, I’ve always liked reading and writing very technical, nitty-gritty articles about photography—sometimes, articles on topics that rarely come up while actually taking pictures.
My latest photo series, Pyramids In The Sky, was inspired when my wife and I visited the Mayan Ruins of Chacchoben while on a cruise in 2015. I have always been intrigued by ancient civilizations and how they were able to build these massive structures, seeing the pyramids in person was an inspiring experience.
Natural Rotations is a photo series by Surrey, England-based photographer Simon Painter. Each of the images was created by spinning the camera while an exposure is in progress.
We're all familiar with the fuzzy circles that bokeh creates usually behind our main subject, but this lesson is about creating bokeh in front of the subject. And that is what Mark Wallace is about to show us in the 6-minute video above. This episode of Adorama TV is about getting a kind of outdoor feel and adding depth to your indoor portraits.
I recently rediscovered an old photography technique that allows you to add surreal color to photos that show movement in the frame. The technique seems to be new in the digital domain, but the technique itself has been known since the early era of digital photography.
There are unfortunately times when technology just lets us down. It’s not always because it inevitably breaks either: sometimes it is simply because every piece of gear has its strengths and weaknesses, and flash triggers are no exception.
Google scientists are brewing technology that could one day help you to "enhance!" photos with sharper results than current software on the market. Called RAISR, the system uses machine learning for intelligent upscaling.
Here's a 2-minute video in which cinematographer Matthew Rosen explains how he pulled focus at high speed for detergent ad.
If you take a look at photographer Charlie Kitchen's latest work, the images appear to be landscape photos with 3D shapes added in digitally. But appearances can be deceiving: each photo was created entirely in-camera without any help from Photoshop. The secret? Stencils.
Hey streettogs, if you want to learn some practical tips and techniques when shooting on the streets, check out the video above, or read more to see all 15 tips.
Light painting has been a basic technique in my photography ever since I learned how to really play with it. I started by just doing the usual of writing names and doing swirls but then I learned how to use it for my professional work.
The Milky Way is the name of the spiral galaxy in which our solar system is located. It is our home in space. The Earth orbits the Sun in the Solar System, and the Solar System is embedded within this vast galaxy of stars.
GoPro just released this 4-minute video tutorial titled "Creating Fire Rain: A Steel Wool Experiment." It's a look at how you can create raindrops of light by burning and spinning steel wool, a technique that has gotten a lot of attention (both good and bad) over the past few years.
My name is Adam van Alderwerelt, and I'm an amateur photographer living in Maui, Hawaii. Out here, there's only one location on the whole island that gets a permit from the local government to use aerial fireworks. Otherwise, it's completely illegal.
The photo above of a wild genet is a single 73-second exposure that took many hours, tons of patience, and a bit of technology to capture. In this post, I'll share how I combined wildlife photography with light painting.
Want to learn an advanced yet easy technique for reducing noise more intelligently in Photoshop? Blake Rudis of f64 Academy made this fantastic 8-minute tutorial on how you can target shadows for noise reduction using Photoshop's "Blend If" feature.
I finally have a chance to write a few thoughts down on the new Nikon D500. Were you (like me) one of the thousands of Nikon photographers who waited seven years for the successor to the D300s?
Back in February 2016, skier Nicolas Vuignier captured the worlds imagination with a video shot using his "Centriphone," a plastic glider that lets you swing a camera around your head and have the lens constantly pointed toward you. For their latest music video, Indie pop duo Matt & Kim created their own centriphone... using a wooden coat hanger and some fishing wire.
"HoloPainting" is a newly invented technique that combines light painting, stop motion, and hyperlapse to create animated, 3D holograms consisting of pure light.
Here's a simple tutorial video in which nature photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery shows his technique for getting tack-sharp images with a telephoto lens on a tripod while having "nearly as much flexibility and movement as hand-holding the lens."
In late 2014, I was given a few pieces of piping -- what you might call trash, but which I call the "ring of fire." It ended up being an incredibly useful tool in my photography. I quickly decided to add it to my (now literal) bag of tricks along with Prisming, Lens Chimping, my Broken Freelens, and Anamorphics.
The Dutch Angle (or Dutch Tilt) is a technique that involves tilting your camera to one side, resulting in a frame that isn't level. Jacob T. Swinney of Fandor created this 3-minute compilation video showing the technique being used in a large number of movies.
In this post, I'll be sharing how I shoot light painting photos using a 4-foot fluorescent tube protector. The technique is quite simple and can lead to very interesting results.
Lens flare was once considered a problem in filmmaking and something that should be prevented with well designed lenses and special coatings, but now it's something that's embraced and seemingly in every movie that hits the silver screen. How and why did this change happen?
This is a set of notes on composition, loosely based on ideas of composition from the Victorian era. There's quite a bit more, and yet quite a bit less, to the Victorian ideas.
Have you ever cursed your camera for missing that special moment in the streets? Do you ever struggle to get the subject quickly in focus before the fleeting moment is lost forever in the aether? Well then why not try manual focus?
"Slit-scan photography," as it's known these days, has a long history. It is related to focal plane shutter distortion in the film era and to the rolling shutter effect in the digital age.
Want to remove noise in a high ISO photo while preserving the details and textures in your shot? Here's a simple photography and Photoshop technique that lets you easily do that.
This is the cheapest yet most effective photography hack I can think of. Step one: get disc reflector. Step two: cut lens-sized hole in said reflector. Step three: profit.
In 35mm photography, a "portrait lens" is usually considered to be a fast lens with a focal length of around 80-135mm. This allows you to achieve a shallow depth of field and a pleasant perspective that doesn't distort your subject's facial features. But that doesn't mean you should rule out wide angle lenses completely when shooting portraits.
In the 4-minute video above, Rishi Sanyal of DPReview explains why he prefers wide-angle lenses for portraiture.
Photoshop and Lightroom both have built-in tools for dealing with chromatic aberration (AKA color fringing), but in some cases the features don't work as well as you'd hope. In the 8-minute video tutorial above, photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery shares a quick and easy trick he uses in Photoshop to manually remove fringing from his shots.
Matrix-style "bullet time" is usually created using an array of cameras placed all around a subject. Swiss professional skier Nicolas Vuignier has been testing a new technique that only uses a single camera: he swings his iPhone 6 camera around using a long rope.
Vuignier calls his iPhone experiment the "Centriphone." The video above contains some awesome shots he made using it while speeding down snow-covered mountain slopes.
Before the introduction of color film, Many photographers experimented with ways to record color images using black and white mediums. One of the more famous examples comes from Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and his photos of Russia from the early 1900s.
Photographer Geoff Tompkinson has been working on a new time-lapse technique that he calls the "HyperZoom." By matching up shots from camera zooms and pans, Tompkinson takes us on seamless journeys through locations that look like one long continuous shot.
His new video above is a HyperZoom video that explores Hallstatt, Upper Austria, a beautiful historic town that's listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.