Tutorials

Whether you are a beginning photographer or a seasoned professional, there are always new things to learn and more areas to improve in. PetaPixel regularly publishes in-depth tutorials on a wide range of subjects, from Photoshop tips and post-processing techniques to ideas on building your own cameras and do-it-yourself equipment.

How to Leverage Lightroom’s New Masking Tools in Your Workflow

Unless you’ve just emerged from a nuclear fallout bunker, you’ve likely already heard about Lightroom’s impressive new masking tools that Adobe announced at their annual Adobe Max conference. In fact, PetaPixel’s Ryan Mense wrote a wonderful hands-on article covering the expanse of these new masking tools.

Where Did Live Photos Go in iOS 15?

For years, Apple's iPhone Live Photos has offered the coolest camera trick. With one click and no tripod, I could easily transform a body of water into a long exposure like dreamy shot, with long flowing water.

A Bright Idea for Subject Placement in Portrait Photos

With careful composition and editing techniques, you can take your portrait game to the next level. In this video, I'll show how you can level up your portraits with this one simple tip.

How to Capture In-Action Portraits with a Wide-Angle Lens

One of my favorite engagement photography techniques is getting up close to the subjects with a wide-angle lens. The resulting images feel alive and immersive. In this article and video, I'll be demonstrating the difference a wide-angle and a telephoto lens can make when capturing action.

Composing Photographs Across a Double Page Spread

If I can afford to, I always try to spend time in shops where I know there is a good selection of photo books. The books offer me inspiration for my photographs as well as the way I present my own work in printed publications.

How to Create a Small World Photo in Photoshop

Want to create a "small world" or "tiny planet" image in which a landscape photo (often a panorama) is turned into what looks like a miniature planet? Here's an easy-to-follow 2-minute tutorial that will teach you how to make one in Photoshop.

How to Use Color Gels for Outdoor Portraits

You don’t often see photographers using gels outdoors in natural light, but why? I think one of the core reasons you don't see too many natural light gel shots, is that you need a lot of power and control from your lights to make color gels visible in daylight.

How to Create the ‘Ring of Fire’ Effect for a Couples Portrait

You’ve likely already heard of the “Ring of Fire” photography technique. This is a visual trick popularized by famous wedding and portrait photographer, Sam Hurd. The Ring of Fire is created by using a piece of copper tubing to reflect light coming into the camera.

How to Use Twitter as a Photographer: Here’s Some Expert Advice

Social media is a vital part of how a business promotes itself, and having a wide variety of social media tools at your disposal is important. While you can link all your social media accounts together to create one post appearing on all of them, this strategy ignores unique opportunities each platform offers to its audience.

How to Fix a Badly Lit Portrait in Adobe Lightroom

Don’t toss a photo just because the lighting isn’t the best. You may be able to bring it back alive in post-production. As photographers, we face countless different scenarios and it's nearly impossible to get the perfect shot 100% of the time.

How to Make a DIY Photo Enlarger from an Afghan Box Camera

I previously shared how I converted my Afghan Box Camera into a slide projector. The principle of the slide projector involves putting a light source at the back whose light passes through some condenser lens. The light then goes through the slide, passes through the projector lens, and is projected at a larger size on the projector screen.

How to Do Street Photography with a Smartphone

Street photography might be one of the easiest genres of photography to slide into — it’s just you, a camera, and more or less walking around documenting humankind with an artistic flare — yet it can be quite difficult to progress beyond snapshot-looking images. This article will explore tips for improving your street photography using nothing more than a smartphone.

13 Tips for Shooting Sharp Landscape Photos with a Telephoto Lens

Landscape photography is often associated, or even equated, with the use of wide-angle lenses, however, this can lead to formulaic compositions. Telephoto lenses may seem like the province of wildlife photography, but alternating with them brings new creative opportunities for landscape photography.

5 Ways to Use the Lightroom’s Brush Tool in 2022

Even though the Brush tool is not a new tool in Adobe Lightroom, you may be surprised by all the ways it can be used and all the advantages you can gain by using a brush. This is part of my daily workflow and I hope it will become part of yours!

Photographing Glowing Mushrooms in Singapore

Singapore is home to a number of bioluminescent fungi. Out of over 148,000 known species of fungi across the world, over 70 of them are known to exhibit bioluminescence.

An Advanced 7-Step Way to Edit B&W Photos in Lightroom

Black and white images can tell entirely different stories than color. By removing all of the colors, the tones carry the weight of the story. There’s a lot of gray area (pun intended) when it comes to black and white images as there’s no right or wrong way to take them. In this article and video, I’ll be walking through a new way to edit black and white images in Adobe Lightroom.

Local Adjustments in Lightroom for Midtone Control

In most images, midtones carry much of the important information. This is not true for all images, but those are the exceptions. In this article, I will present an approach to control midtone information from color to tonal structure.

How to Level Up Your Portraits Using Simple Props

An easy and effective way to increase production value to your images is by adding simple props. Not only do they add additional visual interest, but they can also add story to the scene. Today, I’ll be starting with a basic “walk-up” shot and working step by step to make changes until we get to our final portraits using props.

How to Do Top Back Lighting in Product Photography

I'm photographer Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens, and in this article and 10-minute video, we’re going to talk about my favorite lighting when it comes to lighting any kind of product: top back light.

How to Choose the Best Lenses for Infrared Photography

Not all lenses perform well with infrared. A fantastic lens for normal visible light photography may be terrible for infrared (aka “IR”) photography. Choosing the right lens can be tricky.

How to Use the Luminosity Mask in Lightroom Classic

The Luminosity Mask is a really great tool to use when it comes to retouching landscape, cityscape as well as portrait. It gives you more freedom when you use different tools in Lightroom and you will see it is awesome!

The Split LUT Technique in Photoshop to Get Separate Controls

I'm Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE.com. In this 4-minute video and article, I'll share a new Photoshop technique I came up with that gives you separate control over strength, color, and luminosity in LUTS. I call this the Split LUT technique.

Photographer Shares Tips For Water Droplet Collision Shots

Photographing water droplet collisions can be tricky given that your subject vanishes in the blink of an eye. The process of setting up and revising a successful shoot strategy isn't easy, but one photographer has shared his best tips and techniques to help with that.

How to Make a Simple DIY Background for Food Photography

I have made many DIY backgrounds for my photography. Honestly, too many. It gets really addictive. If you have been thinking of creating some for yourself or how you can improve your photography collection for very little money, these tips on creating your own DIY background are going to be super helpful.

A DIY Way to Fix Loose Rubber Rings on Camera Lenses

After purchasing Takumar 55mm f/1.8 lens years ago, I started building my collection of vintage lenses, and because I don’t like spending a lot of money on them, I became a frequent visitor of thrift stores, flea markets, and online auction sites.

How to Leverage Hard Light in Summer-Themed Drink Photography

We all love soft light because it adds that dreaminess to food and drink photos that will always be great. However, recently I have been seeing more people use hard light in their food and drink photography.

5 Tips to Improve Your Event Photography

Event photography is an art form, and it takes a while to achieve what you’re looking for. Not only does shooting an event require you to be constantly on the move, but it’s also necessary to know how to fully use each setting on your camera.

8 Tips for Shooting Street Portraits of Strangers

An often overlooked aspect of street photography is creating street portraits. It is a wonderful way to connect with people, to learn about an area, to hear stories, and to create interesting photographs.

How to Try Deep Space Astrophotography Without Spending a Fortune

Are you a photographer who would love to give deep space imaging a try – but you’re not quite ready to spend thousands of dollars (or more) to build your own astrophotography rig? With remote astrophotography, you can create astonishing images without the high startup costs.

How to Build Your Web Presence as a Photographer

Years ago, simply having a good website was enough for a photographer. Updating your site once every year was okay, and it basically existed as a digital version of your print portfolio. It was not the primary way that potential clients evaluated you. Today, it’s a vastly different landscape.

You Only Need These 6 Pieces of Gear to Make Money in Photography

I'm photographer Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens. In this 6.5-minute video and article, we’re going to look at the six pieces of equipment that you need to make money in photography. That’s all you need, six pieces of equipment.